week ending Oct 5

The Fed Is Offering $100 Billion a Day in Emergency Loans to Unnamed Banks and Congress Is Not Curious Enough to Hold a Hearing --The Federal Reserve Bank of New York first initiated its emergency overnight loans to Wall Street this year on Tuesday, September 17, starting off at the rate of $75 billion daily. It then increased its loans by adding, in addition to the $75 billion daily, 14-day term loans in the amount of $30 billion to be offered three times this past week. But after the demand for the first 14-day loan was more than double the $30 billion offered, the New York Fed boosted the next term loans to $60 billion and increased its overnight loans to $100 billion. What will next week bring? When Wall Street can get super cheap loans from the Fed in the tens of billions of dollars with no questions asked by Congress, it will continue upping its demands until the Fed is once again secretly shelling out trillions of dollars while Congress willfully remains in the dark – in other words, a replay of the 2007-2010 financial crisis.The New York Fed is only allowed to engage in these repo transactions with its 24 primary dealers. That list of 24 primary dealers includes the securities units of big U.S. banks like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, but it also includes the U.S. based securities units of troubled foreign banks like Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and Societe Generale (SocGen).Because the New York Fed is not announcing which banks are drawing down the bulk of its loans, neither Congress nor the American people know if the money is flowing to U.S. banks or foreign bank subsidiaries in the U.S. Propping up troubled foreign banks is not what most Americans want their central bank to be doing. If the New York Fed is secretly funneling money to a unit of Deutsche Bank to prop it up, the American people need to know about it and Congress needs to be asking questions. The Fed already got away with this during the last financial crisis, secretly funneling $77 billion to Deutsche from the Term Auction Facility (TAF), $1 billion from the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) and a whopping $277 billion to Deutsche Bank from the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) for a grand total of $354 billion in secret funding that Congress never approved or even knew about.

The Repo Loan Crisis, Dead Bankers, and Deutsche Bank: Timeline of Events - Last week, as the Fed was carrying out hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency loan operations on Wall Street for the second week in a row – the first such operations since the financial crisis – Deutsche Bank’s headquarters office in Frankfurt, Germany was being raided by police for the second time in less than a year. That’s not the sort of thing that inspires confidence among depositors to keep their money in your bank.Deutsche Bank has been a constant headache for the U.S. financial system because it is heavily intertwined via derivatives with the big banks on Wall Street, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. It has become the dark cloud on the horizon in the same way Citigroup cast a negative pall in the early days of the financial crisis of 2008. (It’s not a good omen that Citigroup’s stock eventually went to 99 cents and the bank received the largest taxpayer and Federal Reserve bailout in U.S. history. The Fed alone secretly pumped $2.5 trillion in revolving loans into Citigroup from December 2007 to the middle of 2010.)The latest raid at Deutsche Bank occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, September 24 and 25, and was related to the $220 billion money laundering probe of Danske Bank, Denmark’s largest lender. Deutsche Bank served as correspondent bank to Danske’s Estonia branch where the laundering is alleged to have occurred. On Wednesday, as the raid was proceeding, the body of Aivar Rehe who previously ran the Estonia business of Danske Bank, was discovered by police in Estonia. Rehe had been questioned by prosecutors and was considered a key witness in the probe. His death is being called an apparent suicide by European media.On the day the police raid started at Deutsche Bank, Tuesday, September 24, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York offered $30 billion in 14-day emergency term loans and had demand for more than twice that amount. That led the New York Fed to increase its subsequent 14-day term loans from $30 billion to $60 billion later in the week. The Fed’s overnight repo loans that were offered every day last week were also increased from $75 billion per day to $100 billion per day.As the timeline below illustrates, Deutsche Bank has been in a slow motion collapse as a result of its serial crime charges while international regulators have failed to address the fact that it is a counterparty to $49 trillion notional (face amount) in derivatives according to its 2018 annual report and thus presents systemic risk throughout the global financial system. Wall Street On Parade believes that the repo crisis on Wall Street may, at least in part, relate to big Wall Street banks backing away from lending to Deutsche Bank. You can read the timeline below and make up your own mind.

The Fed is injecting hundreds of billions into markets — and it's a practice that could become the new normal  -- After injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into financial markets in recent weeks, the Federal Reserve could soon take steps toward a more permanent solution to stave off trouble in money markets.  The Fed has conducted special operations several times throughout September in an attempt to keep interest rates in the intended range, the first time it had taken such actions since the financial crisis a decade ago. Short-term rates shot up as high as 10% early this month, threatening to disrupt the bond market and the overall lending system. In an interview with the New York Times published Sunday, New York Fed President John Williams said the central bank could consider the implementation of an ongoing facility for overnight repurchase agreements, or repos, to avoid such risks in the future. "We are seeing that liquidity doesn't move around as easily in these situations, which means that if we want interest rates to stay kind of on their own in a narrow range, that we have to make sure we have that amount of reserves to support that," Williams said. A shortage in the amount of cash banks had on hand for short-term funding needs began to dry up in early September after businesses had to pay quarterly tax bills at the same time that the Treasury issued billions in new bonds.  "As we think about permanent solutions, the big issues, I think, are: what is the right level of reserves," he said.   The central bank said this month it would offer a series of daily and 14-day term repos for an aggregate amount of at least $30 billion each. It also announced daily repos for an aggregate amount of at least $75 billion each until October 10.

Repo Rate Soars As Fed Accepts $63.5 Billion In Collateral On Last Day Of Q3 - With quarter-end funding needs supposedly squared away thanks to last week's three 2-week term-repo operations, moments ago the NY Fed announced that in the final overnight repo operation of the quarter, dealers submitted $63.5BN in collateral ($49.75BN in TSYs, $13.75BN in MBS)...... in what was the third consecutive undersubscribed overnight repo operation, yet which saw substantially more participation than Friday's $22.7BN. Yet those going off by the detail in today's repo operation may have a slightly more rosy take on the funding situation because according to ICAP, the overnight general collateral repo rate surged almost 1%, from 1.85% on Friday to as high as 2.8% on Monday, as quarter-end funding dynamics added to pressure on borrowing costs amid an already tense environment for money markets. The rate on G/C overnight repo opened at 2.70%/2.50% according to Bloomberg, and at 2.80% according to Reuters, on the final day of September, which while that’s below the heady levels reached close to two weeks ago, is well above where repo ended last week (around 1.85%) and also above the 1.75%-to-2% target range that the U.S. central bank currently has for the fed funds rate.What is most notable is that despite a barrage of overnight and term repo operations, repo rates remain elevated, with the overnight approaching 3.0%, while the term repo was last around 2.6% according to Curvature Securities' Scott Skyrm. To be sure, this overnight GC repo is well below the 10% it jumped to on Sept. 17, however it does take into account the Fed's deployment of a series of overnight and term repo operations to help keep the fed funds rate within its target range. The Fed will continue conducting overnight repo operations through at least Oct. 10, with many traders expecting funding needs to ease to end into the new quarter. As famously observed on Dec 31, 2018, overnight rates tends to move sharply higher at the end of the quarter as dealers "window-dress" their balance sheets and curtail activity in the financing markets. Adding to the upward pressure is an influx of additional collateral, with settlements on Monday of more than $100 billion in new Treasury coupon-bearing securities, according to Bloomberg.

Fed Preps a Second Intervention as 'Repo Crisis' Spooks U.S. Markets  - Federal Reserve officials jumped into U.S. money markets to inject $53 billion Tuesday morning, and announced late last night that they would be back Wednesday morning to pump in $75 billion more. The intervention comes after borrowing rates for banks skyrocketed to 10 percent—four times its normal rate—forcing the New York Federal Reserve to attempt to get the interest rate under control. The move is the first of its kind since the 2008 global financial crisis and are aimed at easing stress in money markets caused by institutions not having enough cash on hand to absorb the record number of Treasury bonds being offered to cover for the U.S. budget deficit, Bloomberg News reports. “The underlying problem is that there isn’t enough liquidity in the system to satisfy the demand and the job of the central bank is to provide such liquidity,” Roberto Perli, a former Fed economist, told Bloomberg.

NY Fed Starts New Quarter With Unexpectedly High $55BN Repo Operation --Many expected the funding shortage sweeping across the US financial community to be mostly a function of one-time mid-September items coupled with traditional quarter-end liquidity: it explained why in addition to three term repos, on the last day of the quarter, the Fed conducted an overnight repo which saw a surprisingly high, $63.5BN uptake on Monday.Well, it's now the new quarter... and contrary to clearly erroneous conventional wisdom, the funding shortage still persists. Moments ago the NY Fed reported that in the first overnight repo operation of the quarter, one which saw the maximum allotted size shrink from $100 billion to $75 billion, dealers submitted a surprisingly high $54.85BN in collateral, all of which was accepted by the Fed.Specifically, dealers tendered $50BN in TSYs and $4.75BN in MBS, as well as a $100MM in Agencies, to boost their liquidity. The continued demand for reserves, even with $139BN in liquidity locked up in 2-week term repo which expire in the second week of October, suggests that the funding shortage is anything but a calendar event, and confirms that there is an acute reserve shortage, one which the Fed will have to address, most likely by resuming POMO operations to the tune of roughly $20BN per month... which for all the QE denialists, will be the same size as QE1.

Fed Takes $42BN In Second October Repo As Funding Pressures Ease - One day after the Fed raised eyebrows when it accepted $55BN in collateral in its first repo operation after the notorious quarter-end liquidity crunch, an amount that was just higher than the first repo op the Fed concluded in mid-September after a 10+ year hiatus ($53.2BN) and which some saw as too high for a new month with $139BN still locked up in 2-week term repos, moments ago the Fed concluded the second overnight repo operation for October, one which confirmed that the recent repo turmoil appears to again be easing, as $42.05BN in collateral was submitted (and accepted) in the $75BN operation, a $13BN decline from the $54.85BN repoed yesterday. The composition of the repo showed that while Treasury collateral declined from $50BN to $35BN, MBS actually increased modestly from $4.75BN to $7.05BN, with no Agency use again.

NY Fed Announces Extension Of Overnight Repos Until Nov 4, Will Offer 8 More Term Repos --Anyone who expected that the easing of the quarter-end funding squeeze in the repo market would mean the Fed would gradually fade its interventions in the repo market, was disappointed on Friday afternoon when the NY Fed announced it would extend the duration of overnight repo operations (with a total size of $75BN) for at least another month, while also offer no less than eight 2-week term repo operations until November 4, 2019, which confirms that the funding unlocked via term repo is no longer merely a part of the quarter-end arsenal but an integral part of the Fed's overall "temporary" open market operations... which are starting to look quite permanent.This is the statement published moments ago by the NY Fed: In accordance with the most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) directive, the Open Market Trading Desk (the Desk) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will conduct a series of overnight and term repurchase agreement (repo) operations to help maintain the federal funds rate within the target range.Effective the week of October 7, the Desk will offer term repos through the end of October as indicated in the schedule below. The Desk will continue to offer daily overnight repos for an aggregate amount of at least $75 billion each through Monday, November 4, 2019.Securities eligible as collateral include Treasury, agency debt, and agency mortgage-backed securities. Awarded amounts may be less than the amount offered, depending on the total quantity of eligible propositions submitted. Additional details about the operations will be released each afternoon for the following day’s operation(s) on the Repurchase Agreement Operational Details webpage. The operation schedule and parameters are subject to change if market conditions warrant or should the FOMC alter its guidance to the Desk. 

QE By Any Other Name - The short-term repo funding turmoil that cropped up in mid-September continues to be discussed at length. The Federal Reserve quickly addressed soaring overnight funding costs through a special repo financing facility not used since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). The re-introduction of repo facilities has, thus far, resolved the matter. It remains interesting that so many articles are being written about the problem, including our own. The on-going concern stems from the fact that the world’s most powerful central bank briefly lost control over the one rate they must control. What seems clear is the Fed measures to calm funding markets, although superficially effective, may not address a bigger underlying set of issues that could reappear. The on-going media attention to such a banal and technical topic could be indicative of deeper problems. People who understand both the complexities and importance of these matters, frankly, are still wringing their hands. The Fed has applied a tourniquet and gauze to a serious wound, but permanent medical attention is still desperately needed.  The Fed is in a difficult position. As discussed in Who Could Have Known – What the Repo Fiasco Entails, they are using temporary tools that require daily and increasingly larger efforts to assuage the problem. Taking more drastic and permanent steps would result in an aggressive easing of monetary policy at a time when the U.S. economy is relatively strong and stable, and such policy is not warranted in our opinion. Such measures could incite the most underrated of all threats, inflationary pressures.  The Fed is hamstrung by an economy that has enjoyed low interest rates and stimulative fiscal policy and is the strongest in the developed world. By all appearances, the U.S. is also running at full employment. At the same time, they have a hostile President sniping at them to ease policy dramatically and the Federal Reserve board itself has rarely seen internal dissension of the kind recently observed. The current fundamental and political environment is challenging, to be kind.  Two main alternatives to resolve the funding issue are:

• More aggressive interest rate cuts to steepen the yield curve and relieve the banks of the negative carry in holding Treasury notes and bonds
• Re-initiating quantitative easing (QE) by having the Fed buy Treasury and mortgage-backed securities from primary dealers to re-liquefy the system

Others are putting forth their perspectives on the matter, but the only real “permanent” solution is the second option, re-expanding the Fed balance sheet through QE. The Fed is painted into a financial corner since there is no fundamental justification (remember “we are data-dependent”) for such an action. Further, Powell, when asked, said they would not take monetary policy actions to address the short-term temporary spike in funding. Whether Powell likes it or not, not taking such an action might force the need to take that very same action, and it may come too late.

 How the Federal Reserve could fix the repo market - The Federal Reserve is facing urgent calls to find a permanent fix to short-term funding strains that unsettled markets last month, and avoid another bout of volatility at the end of the year when the demand for cash is expected to rise again. Traders were shocked in September when the typically staid market for repurchase agreements — where banks and investors borrow money in exchange for Treasuries and other high-quality collateral — went haywire. The “repo” rate jumped as high as 10 per cent, prompting accusations that the Fed had lost control of short-term interest rates.  A series of cash injections by the central bank brought the rate back down, but policymakers and investors are pushing for a longer-term answer to the market’s problems.  Market participants have coalesced around one answer: asset purchases. When the Fed buys Treasuries from the market, it simultaneously credits banks’ reserve accounts to pay for them, increasing the amount of cash in the financial system. But opinions remain divided on how much debt the central bank should buy and at what maturities. There is, at least, general agreement that something fundamental needs to be done. At the worst of the market stress, a series of daily $75bn cash injections morphed into $100bn overnight operations and three two-week loans, with banks’ appetite for funding initially outpacing what was on offer from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.   The ad hoc intervention eased funding constraints, but the sheer scale of the New York Fed’s operations — with roughly $200bn of cash on loan for the final day of September — emphasized to the market the need for a more lasting solution. Fed chairman Jay Powell nodded to this idea at a press conference last month, saying the central bank will “over time provide a sufficient supply of reserves so that frequent operations are not required”, in keeping with the “ample reserves” policy it adopted in January.   But some analysts think the Fed — which is also exploring the role played by regulation in the repo market’s problems — will have to make more substantial purchases.  Kelcie Gerson, a rates strategist at investment bank Morgan Stanley, said the Fed would need to buy $315bn of shorter-dated Treasury bills between November and May to increase reserves to a level high enough for funding markets to operate normally.  Former Fed officials Joseph Gagnon and Brian Sack, now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and hedge fund DE Shaw respectively, believe the Fed should snap up $250bn worth of Treasuries over the next six months.  Meanwhile, Priya Misra at TD Securities calls for $300bn worth of outright purchases of varying maturities over the course of 2020, and roughly $215bn to replace the run-off of maturing mortgage-backed securities previously held on the Fed’s balance sheet.

Trump targets ‘pathetic’ Federal Reserve after worst manufacturing reading in a decade -  President Donald Trump again attacked the Federal Reserve on Tuesday afterthe weakest U.S. manufacturing reading in 10 years.In a tweet, the president wrote Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the central bank “have allowed the Dollar to get so strong, especially relative to ALL other currencies, that our manufacturers are being negatively affected.” He argued the Fed has set interest rates “too high.”  “They are their own worst enemies, they don’t have a clue,” he wrote. “Pathetic!” As his trade war with China rages on, Trump has repeatedly blamed the Fed’s interest rate policy for concerns about a slowing U.S. economy. He has contended the central bank has not moved quickly enough to ease monetary policy — though the Fed has cut its benchmark funds rate twice this year.His tweet comes after the Institute for Supply Management manufacturing reading fell to 47.8 in September, down from 49.1 in August. A reading below 50 shows a manufacturing contraction.   The poor economic data contributed to major U.S. stock indexes sliding on Tuesday.The dollar index, which measures the U.S. currency against a basket of global currencies, has climbed more than 3% this year and sits near its highest level since mid-2017. A stronger dollar relative to global currencies is generally expected to reduce exports and increase imports. While exchange rates may have contributed to the drag on manufacturing in September, trade also did, according to ISM.“Global trade remains the most significant issue as demonstrated by the contraction in new export orders that began in July 2019. Overall, sentiment this month remains cautious regarding near-term growth,” said Timothy Fiore, chair of the ISM Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.  Trump has repeatedly downplayed any concerns about a looming American recession. He has also contended his trade conflict with the second largest economy in the world will not harm businesses or consumers — despite indications that it has already started to hurt some companies.

As Dollar Reaches Record High, Trump Slams Clueless, Pathetic Fed -On the heels of dismal manufacturing data, and soaring dollar strength vs global fiat currencies, President Trump has lashed out at who he feels is responsible... "As I predicted, Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve have allowed the Dollar to get so strong, especially relative to ALL other currencies, that our manufacturers are being negatively affected. Fed Rate too high. They are their own worst enemies, they don’t have a clue. Pathetic!"Indeed, with the broad dollar index at an all-time record high...  While correlation is not causation, Trump may have a point... Fed rate cut odds have bounced a little... Don't forget, however, that dollar's strength is as much indicative of global fiat weakness and against real 'money', the dollar has been dumping...

John Williams on monetary policy and the current economic outlook --James Hamilton - I moderated a discussion this morning with John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in which John shared his perspectives on monetary policy and the current economic outlook. You can watch on Youtube (conversation begins at 44 minutes in). John Williams: The Economic Outlook and Monetary Policy - PRIMARY - YouTube

Meanwhile, in the Macroeconomy -- Menzie Chinn -- Business cycle indicators mixed, nowcasts overall sideways, manufacturing down.

• Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (blue), industrial production (red), personal income excluding transfers in Ch.2012$ (green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2012$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2012$ (pink bold), all log normalized to 2019M01=0.  Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, Macroeconomic Advisers (9/26 release), and author’s calculations.
• Figure 2: Real GDP growth, actual (dark blue bold), forecast of NY Fed Nowcast 9/27 (tan), Atlanta Fed GDPNow 9/27 (pink triangle), Macroeconomic Advisers 9/27 (teal square), Merrill Lynch 9/27 (blue +), q/q SAAR. Source: BEA, Macro Advisers, NY Fed, Atlanta Fed.
• Figure 3: Manufacturing employment (blue), aggregate hours of production and nonsupervisory workers (teal) and production (red), in logs 2019M02=0. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve via FRED, and author’s calculations.

Why The U.S. Yield Curve Reliably Predicts U.S. Recessions - The U.S. Treasury yield curve, depicted by maturities on a horizontal axis and corresponding interest rates (yields) on a vertical axis, is normally upward sloping, with yields on bonds (10-year maturity and beyond) and notes (intermediate term) lying above yields on bills (short term). Infrequently – but importantly, for economic and investment forecasting – the yield curve becomes inverted, with long-term bond yields lying below short-term bill yields.  Over the past half century in the U.S., yield-curve inversions have been important because they’ve reliably predicted all seven U.S. recessions, beginning roughly a year in advance (see table). Those recessions, of course, have been closely associated with bear markets in stocks and bull markets in bonds. It matters a lot – or it should, for those who care about portfolios. The yield curve’s forecasting record since 1968 has been perfect: not only has each inversion been followed by a recession, but no recession has occurred in the absence of a prior yield-curve inversion. There’s even a strong correlation between the initial duration and depth of the curve inversion and the subsequent length and depth of the recession. Having conducted substantial research and issued scores of reports in recent decades on the yield curve’s meaning and forecasting power, I’ve found that the curve is best measured as the spread between the 10-year Treasury bond yield and the 3-month Treasury bill rate – what I call the “yield-curve spread” (YCS). A negative YCS depicts inversion.  Many analysts discount or dismiss the yield curve’s forecasting power, whether because they adopt measures over shorter time periods, or in pre-1968 periods, or use less relevant yields (like the 2-year yield). Inferior models invalidate not the yield curve’s predictive power but these modelers’ methods.The figure below depicts the U.S. bond yield, bill yield, and yield-curve spread since 1968. Notice that negative spreads preceded all recessions. Observe also that it hasn’t mattered whether yields generally have been high or low, nor whether the yield curve’s inversion has resulted mainly from short-term (bill) yields rising above long-term (bond) yields (due mainly to Fed rate hiking) or instead (and less frequently) from bond yields falling below bill yields.

Economist Stiglitz sees ‘significant slowdown’, not crisis - Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the global economy is entering a severe slowdown, but told AFP in an interview he did not see it hurtling towards crisis. "I would say that I don't see a crisis," the US economist said in Paris. "What I see is a significant slowdown," he said. "In the process of this significant slowdown, there will be bankruptcies." He said that slowdown deprived corporate managers of a cushion to soften the consequences of their errors. "When you are slowing down and you mismanage, you go bankrupt." This made people nervous, "but the particular situation for a global crisis requires much more disruption than that", he said. Joseph Stiglitz said some developing countries like Argentina might be swept into dire straits "but I don't think it is likely that Europe and America will." The 2001 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences said he was concerned about rate cuts by US and eurozone central banks and a revival of liquidity injections into the economy. "I think the benefit that they get out of this is very little," he said. "They are clearly losing ammunition in case the situation gets worse." Stiglitz said the three main economies - China, the euro zone and the US - were all having problems. "China has been having a hard time going from a manufactured export led growth to a more domestically driven growth," he said. Germany is under pressure to stimulate its own economy as well as its euro zone partners, while the US "has a problem called Trump", said Stiglitz. "It's not just a trade war. He has introduced a new degree of political uncertainty, a new level of chaos" that has reduced growth. "Those three together mean slow economic growth," said Stiglitz. "The trade war just makes it all worse."

Q3 GDP Forecasts: Just Under 2%  From Merrill Lynch:  These data edged down 3Q GDP tracking by a tenth to 1.7% qoq saar. [Oct 3 estimate]   From Goldman Sachs: We also lowered our Q3 GDP tracking estimate by one tenth to +1.9% (qoq ar). [Oct 3 estimate]   From the NY Fed Nowcasting Report: The New York Fed Staff Nowcast stands at 2.0% for 2019:Q3 and 1.3% for 2019:Q4. [Oct 4 estimate].   And from the Altanta Fed: GDPNow: The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the third quarter of 2019 is 1.8 percent on October 4, unchanged from October 1. [Oct 4 estimate]CR Note: These estimates suggest real GDP growth will be just under 2.0% annualized in Q3.

US Gross National Debt Jumps by $1.2 Trillion in Fiscal 2019, to $22.7 Trillion, Hits 106.5% of GDP | Wolf Street - The US gross national debt jumped by $110 billion on the last two business days of Fiscal Year 2019, and by a breath-taking $1.2 trillion during the entire fiscal year, after having already jumped by $1.27 trillion in Fiscal 2018, the Treasury Department reported today. This ballooned the US gross national debt to a vertigo-inducing $22.72 trillion.These beautiful trillions whipping by are a joy to behold: so much action in so little time. The flat spots in the chart below are the results of the debt-ceiling charade in Congress. When the debt ceiling is lifted, the debt spikes back to trend, and nothing changed:During Fiscal 2019, the gross national debt increased by 5.6% and now amounts to 106.5% of current-dollar GDP, up from 105.4% at the end of Fiscal 2018.The thing to remember here is that this isn’t the Great Recession or the Financial Crisis, when over 10 million people lost their jobs and credit froze up and companies went bankrupt and tax revenues plunged while outlays soared to pay for unemployment insurance and the like. This isn’t even the Collapse of Everything, but the longest expansion of the economy in US history.Over the last four quarters, the US economy as measured by nominal GDP (not adjusted for inflation) grew by 4.0%. Over the same period, the US gross national debt grew by 5.6% (not adjusted for inflation).In dollar terms, it looks even funnier: The economy as measured by nominal GDP over the past four quarters grew by $830 billion. The Gross National Debt grew by $1.2 trillion. For the first 11 months of Fiscal 2019 through August, the latest data available from the Treasury Department:

• Tax receipts increased by 3.4%, less than the growth of the economy (4.0%), thanks to the tax cuts.
• Outlays soared by 7.0%, far outpacing economic growth (4.0%), as no one in Congress or in the White House even pays lip service anymore to the idea of budgetary discipline during good times.

With tax receipts growing more slowly than the economy, and outlays soaring 7.0%, it’s hard to have a recession, when you think about it. You’re buying the continued expansion, but you’re paying a very high price for that extra stretch, because some day, that expansion will end, and then what remains is the debt. And that debt will then really blow out because, as they always do during a recession, receipts will plunge and outlays will spiral higher. The thing is, I get to write these articles once a year, every year, and have been for years, because it’s the same fiasco every year, all over again, only now it’s a little bigger.

North Korea And US To Resume Nuclear Talks Saturday -  North Korea and the U.S. will resume working-level talks on Oct. 5, North Korea's state news agency KCNA reported Tuesday, reviving the possibility that denuclearization talks have restarted after a failed February summit between both countries in Vietnam, reported The Wall Street Journal. KCNA said both countries would have a preliminary meeting on Friday, followed by working-level talks on Saturday, citing a statement from Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui. "The delegates of the DPRK side are ready to enter into the DPRK-U.S. working-level negotiations," Choe said in the statement. "It is my expectation that the working-level negotiations would accelerate the positive development of the DPRK-U.S. relations." Choe's statement made no mention of an exact location or time for the planned weekend talks.  Denuclearization discussions between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of North Korea, failed to materialize any progress at a summit in Vietnam in February. Trump met with Kim in June at the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas; the meet and greet didn't immediately revive talks between both countries until now.

Trump's Close-Call Diplomacy with Iran's President - ON the evening of Tuesday, September 24th, the President of France,Emmanuel Macron, went to see his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, at the Millennium Hilton Hotel, across the street from the U.N. headquarters, in New York. The hotel is one of only three places that the Iranian leader could go in the city, because of U.S. sanctions. Macron intended to set up a three-way telephone conversation with Rouhani and President Trump. A team of technicians arrived to set up a secure line, in a meeting room on Rouhani’s floor, for the call at 9:30 p.m. The telephone conversation was supposed to cap twenty-four hours of frenetic diplomacy—including personal appeals to Rouhani by the British, Japanese, and Pakistani Prime Ministers and the German Chancellor—after months of quiet French diplomacy. Earlier in the day, Macron, alongside the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had urged Rouhani to talk with Trump. Their exchange was caught on video. “If he leaves the country without meeting President Trump, honestly, this is a lost opportunity,” Macron directed an interpreter to tell Rouhani, amid a scrum of diplomats and photographers. “Because he will not come back in a few months and President Trump will not go to Tehran.” Rouhani threw his head back and laughed. “So they have to meet now!” Macron insisted. Johnson chimed in, as cameras flashed, “You need to be on the side of the swimming pool—and jump at the same time.” Macron’s mission in New York was to secure a verbal agreement from Trump and Rouhani on a four-point plan to jump-start diplomacy—and to avoid another Middle East war. Tensions have escalated since Trump reimposed sanctions this past November which were designed to cut off Iran’s oil exports. This summer, Iran and the U.S. shot down each other’s drones; Trump called off U.S. military retaliation in the operation’s final minutes. Iran also threatened to cut off oil from other Persian Gulf countries if its main source of revenue were blocked. This month, Washington blamed Tehran for an attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities that temporarily severed five per cent of global oil supplies. Macron hoped that the telephone conversation would lay the groundwork for the first meeting between an American President and an Iranian President since Tehran’s 1979 revolution. Macron’s four-point plan covers Trump’s demand for an expansion of the central terms and issues in the 2015 nuclear deal. Iran would pledge new talks on permanent restrictions on its nuclear program. The plan also addresses Iran’s demand that the United States lift the sanctions that were reimposed last year. And Tehran would be able to resume oil exports, which have plummeted from 3.2 million barrels per day in 2016 to below half a million barrels this summer. More broadly, the plan also incorporates regional flash points; Iran would help end the five-year war in Yemen and make pledges on security and freedom of navigation throughout the Persian Gulf.Trump has repeatedly signalled an interest in meeting Iranian leaders. During the previous two U.N. General Assembly meetings, in 2017 and 2018, he has conveyed secret messages, through the French, asking to meet Rouhani. In July, Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican and Trump golf partner, hand-carried an invitation to Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, to visit the White House—that very week. In late August, during the G-7 summit in Biarritz, Trump asked Macron to set up a meeting with Zarif, who was holding talks nearby with French officials. At the U.N. last week, Trump expressed his interest to reporters. “They’re here, we’re here, but we have not agreed to that yet,” he said. “But they would like to negotiate. And it would certainly make sense.”

Congress Greenlights Sale Of F-35 Fleet To Poland; Warsaw Officials Seek Lower Price- Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak celebrated in a public statement on Friday Congressional approval of the sale of 32 new F-35 fighter jets to Poland. “The US Congress has approved selling 32 new fifth-generation F-35 jets to Poland,” Blaszczak wrote on Twitter.“This is one of the last steps prior to signing the contract, but this is not the end of our work yet. We will be conducting negotiations firmly in order to secure the best price,” the minister added. The initial contract is worth $6.5 billion, however Poland has said it will begin negotiations to bring the price tag significantly lower, perhaps closer to what Belgium recently paid for the same number of F-35s — just over $4 billion.The package includes 33 Pratt & Whitney F135 afterburning turbofans, as well as advanced communications, navigation, and logistics systems.The deal, which has brought the scrutiny and condemnation of Moscow, comes amid a massive $48.5 billion Polish defense overhaul to greatly modernize the east European nation's defenses, which currently is heavily stocked with ageing Soviet-era Su-22 and MiG-29 fighters.

U.S. Interests in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria - Chas W. Freeman, Jr -  I have been asked to join my fellow panelists in speaking about U.S. interests in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. For some reason, our government has never been able to articulate these interests, but, judging by the fiscal priority Americans have assigned to these three countries in this century, they must be immense – almost transcendent.  Since we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, we have spent more than $5 trillion and incurred liabilities for veterans’ disabilities and medical expenses of at least another trillion dollars, for a total of something over $6 trillion for military efforts alone.This is money we didn’t spend on sustaining, still less improving, our own human and physical infrastructure or current and future well-being.  We borrowed almost all of it.  Estimates of the costs of servicing the resulting debt run to an additional $8 trillion over the next few decades.[1]  Future generations of Americans will suffer from our failure to invest in education, scientific research, and transportation.  On top of that, we have put them in hock for at least $14 trillion in war debt.  Who says foreign policy is irrelevant to ordinary Americans? At the moment, it seems unlikely our descendants will feel they got their money’s worth.  We have lost or are losing all our so-called “forever wars.”  Nor are the people of West Asia and North Africa likely to remember our interventions favorably.  Since we began them in 2001, well over one million individuals in West Asia have died violent deaths.  Many times more than that have died as a result of sanctions, lost access to medical care, starvation, and other indirect effects of the battering of infrastructure, civil wars, and societal collapse our invasions have inflicted on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria and their neighbors. Future historians will struggle to explain how an originally limited post-9/11 punitive raid into Afghanistan morphed without debate into a failed effort to pacify and transform the country.  Our intervention began on October 7, 2001.  By December 17, when the battle of Tora Bora ended, we had accomplished our dual objectives of killing, capturing, or dispersing the al Qaeda architects of “9/11” and thrashing the Taliban to teach them that they could not afford to give safe haven to the enemies of the United States.  We were well placed then to cut the deal we now belatedly seek to make, demanding that the governing authorities in Afghanistan deny their territory to terrorists with global reach as the price of our departure, and promising to return if they don’t.  Instead, carried away with our own brilliance in dislodging the Islamic Emirate from Kabul and the ninety percent of the rest of the country it then controlled, we nonchalantly moved the goal posts and committed ourselves to bringing Afghans the blessings of E PLURIBUS UNUM, liberty, and gender equality, whether they wanted these sacraments or not.  Why?  What interests of the United States – as opposed to ideological ambitions – justified this experiment in armed evangelism?

  What If The World Treated The U.S. Like a Rogue State? - Under Trump, America is in the business of actively creating or deepening threats to the world: capsizing the climate; pardoning U.S. soldiers and military contractors convicted of war crimes; supplying arms to Saudi Arabia, so that the kingdom can bombard Yemen. For a while, it looked as if Trump might attack North Korea; it’s still possible that he will start a war with Iran. In recently leaked memos, Kim Darroch, the former British ambassador to the U.S., worried that Trump would wreck world trade. Along the way, his administration has trashed so many diplomatic rules and norms that the entire edifice of postwar multilateralism is at risk. ^{( 1 )} A low point was Mike Pompeo’s speech last December in Brussels, when he attacked the European Union, the UN, and every other kind of multilateralism that the U.S. once championed. “There was a stunned silence after the speech,” said Anthony Gardner, a former American ambassador to the EU, “and then he left right away without taking questions.”Two years ago, Mary Robinson, a former UN special envoy on climate change, called the U.S. “a rogue state” for quitting the Paris accord. It’s common now for foreign policy professionals from America’s traditional allies to murmur brokenly about the “rules-based order,” as if they were standing at the bedside of a dear, dying friend. Everyone on the front lines of foreign policy has stories to tell of chaos and breakdown. In one minor but telling exemplar of the genre, UN officials were shocked last summer when the U.S. abruptly decided to stop contributing $300 million—less than 0.6 percent of its foreign aid spend—to the Relief and Works Agency’s budget for Palestinian refugees. The agency began its work in 1949, to assist Palestinians who’d newly been rendered homeless; with successive generations, its beneficiaries have swelled to around 5.4 million, many of whom still live in or near refugee camps. “The U.S never had a problem with that number, until last year,” one UN official told me. “Then they made the argument that the funding should be pegged to the original number of some 800,000 refugees.” The U.S. refused to budge, despite multiple meetings, including one in mid-August that lasted 15 hours—so long that, after the building’s cafes shut at 5:30 p.m., delegates had to leave the premises altogether to find food. These gatherings rarely conclude without some sort of consensus, or at least some ambiguous language to project unanimity, the official said. But in this case, even that wasn’t an option; America’s dissent had to be recorded in a footnote before the meeting could move on.  There are so many “egregious examples” of this kind, Wendy Sherman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs during the Obama administration, told me. “To the point that our allies, European leaders, are looking elsewhere for solidarity.”

Treasury’s Weak Denial Acts as Confirmation: US Weighs Crackdown on Capital Flows to Chinese Companies, Stocks & Bonds, Listed in the US or China - Wolf Richter: The US Treasury Department’s denial on Saturday focused on only one item, omitted to deny the other crucial items, and made the denial even soggier by ending it with “…at this time.” With this statement, sent to Bloomberg on Saturday, the Treasury was reacting to revelations by Bloomberg on Friday:“The administration is not contemplating blocking Chinese companies from listing shares on U.S. stock exchanges at this time.”According to sources, a group led by Peter Navarro, Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, is pushing a multifaceted and broad crackdown on capital flows from US investors to Chinese companies.The National Security Council and the Treasury are part of the discussions. The National Economic Council has been chairing meetings on the issue and is working on an analysis of the potential impact of any limits on these capital flows.According to Bloomberg’s sources, action is not imminent, but the officials are discussing options and repercussions, and “even more dovish advisers have rallied behind some of their suggestions.”The benefits and risks of a financial decoupling from China — including how it could even be done and what impact it might have on American investors — was discussed last week at a dinner hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Attendants included White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow; Number 2 on the National Security Council Matt Pottinger; and members of Congress. The measures that the Trump Administration is contemplating are running roughly in parallel with efforts by Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio and others in Congress who have already put forward legislation to that effect. The Trump Administration is discussing its plans with Rubio and is considering backing his legislation. Among the Items Contemplated by the Trump Administration:

• Delisting Chinese companies from US stock exchanges. Most of these companies trade as American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) in the US that do not convey ownership in the company in China, but only in some kind of off-shore entity. This includes Alibaba. The dollars involved are big. According to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, cited by Bloomberg, the combined market capitalization of ADRs of 156 Chinese companies traded in the US was $1.2 trillion as of late February. This includes at least 11 state-owned companies. Alibaba alone accounts for $432 billion of this, as of Friday.
• Curtailing Americans’ exposure to Chinese companies via US government pension funds. These are retirement funds administered by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board. “According to several people involved in the discussions,” there is new momentum among lawmakers on this issue as these funds are facing a deadline next year to plow billions of their beneficiaries’ dollars into Chinese companies.
• Imposing limits on Chinese companies included in stock indices managed by US firms.There are many funds that track these indices. Americans that buy these funds, indirectly own shares of the hundreds of Chinese companies that have been included in these indices. These may be companies listed in China or in the US. It includes Chinese bonds that have filtered into bond funds sold to Americans.

What Can We See From The Sudden Escalation Of The Sino–US Trade War- The back-and-forth tussle between the United States and China in the Sino–U.S. trade war has taken a new turn, with Beijing’s sudden offensive aimed at the American economy and causing a political fiasco for Trump that could affect next year’s U.S. presidential elections. For the first time in history, a world economic power has taken the method of attacking the economy of another world power in order to alter the short-term domestic political prospects of that country. There is no longer any doubt that China and the United States are not engaged in a trade war, but in economic warfare.  And the goal is beyond the economic scope, pointing directly at the position at seat in the Oval office. According to Duowei News, an overseas Chinese-language media with ties to Beijing, the Chinese Ministry of Finance announced Aug. 23 that it would impose tariffs on $75 billion worth of U.S. imports, to be implemented starting Sept. 1 and Dec. 15 respectively, and would resume import tariffs on U.S. auto parts that had been previously paused last December. Subsequently, starting in September, additional tariffs on U.S. soybeans would reach 30 percent, tariffs on seafood, fruit, and meat will rise to 35 percent; starting mid-December, U.S. grain and vehicles will also incur additional tariffs of 35 percent, which is the first time that Beijing has gone after American crude oil.  From the above reports from the CCP’s mouthpieces, it’s clear that this time it is Beijing that has taken the initiative in adding tariffs on U.S. goods, and it is Trump who is on the defense. The CCP’s overseas media also admitted that in this sequence, Trump is counterattacking; in other words, Beijing is the aggressor. However, some overseas media reversed the chronological order of the events, thus misleading the audience into believing that the United States first added tariffs, and that the CCP reacted out of necessity. Therefore, it is crucial that the facts are clarified, but more importantly, since it is the Party that made the first move, it is necessary to analyze its motives and goals in depth. Moreover, the CCP’s move has caused a reversal in Sino–U.S. relations of the past decades, making an in-depth analysis of the origin and background of the event even more relevant.In combating the United States, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has gone public with a strategy of “creating an enemy for itself”; on the strategic scene, it has escalated to economic confrontation. Beijing’s initiative to increase tariffs seems to be a tactical response, but its purpose is very clear. Since China abandoned its sincerity in Sino–U.S. negotiations, this tactic carries the clear connotation of challenge. The U.S. economy is now the main target.

Putin: China Ready To Buy As Much Soybeans, Wheat As Russia Can Produce Amid US Trade War - There were a number of interesting comments made by President Putin today regarding Russia's increasingly cozy relations with longtime rival China at the Valdai Discussion Club at Sochi on Thursday. “We are now helping our Chinese partners to create a missile-warning system, a missile-attack warning system,” Putin announced.  While slamming the recent US exit from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) as harming global stability, he added, “This is a very serious thing that will dramatically increase China’s defense capability, because only the U.S. and Russia have such a system now.”  Immediately after his comments, which further come on the heels China's elaborate military hardware-laden 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, Foreign Policy noted what's become increasingly apparent as both Beijing and Moscow find themselves in the US administration's cross hairs — with the latter grappling with the uncertain effects of Trump's trade war, and the former under various sanctions:  Though still in trial production, it's expected that China will be among the first nations to acquire Russia's S-500 anti-air missile system. Putin also made reference to deepening economic cooperation with Beijing, going so far as to claim China stands ready to buy as much soybeans and wheat as Russia can produce. Of course, there's no way Russia could even come close to filling the gap left by China's latest tariffs imposed on soybeans coming from the United States, which Putin acknowledged.

The New US-Japan Trade Agreement -- Lost in the shuffle this past week was one piece of good news for Trump: a tentative trade deal with Japan that he and Japan’s PM Shinzō Abe signed in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting.  While it is largely a favorable deal, it does not do too much and leaves the most difficult issue to be resolved by later negotiation, namely regarding the auto industry.  Trade restrictions are lowered on a variety of agricultural goods, including pork, beef, wheat, corn, and some fruits the US exports (but not soybeans), and on a few Japan exports including green tea, persimmons, and soy sauce.In the industrial area, restrictions are lowered on machine tools from Japan and some scattered others.  Restrictions are also lowered on digital products going both  ways.  I do not know how much this will increase trade flows overall each way.This is good news especially for many farmers, a main concern of Trump’s although not soybean farmers, with, if anything, they possibly suffering from the lowering of barriers on soy sauce from Japan, which will hit Kikkoman in southern Wisconsin.Of course autos are a very large item involving trade between the two countries, and there is no change on that one. The final irony, of course, is that most of this, especially in the agricultural area, was part of the TPP that the US withdrew from.  So basically this resembles the USMCA NAFTA replacement largely and simply putting in place the changes with other nations that would have happened anyway if the US had not withdrawn from the TPP. In short, it is undoing Trump’s own handiwork from early in his administration, although that point is not being emphasized.

US To Slap Tariffs On European Airplanes, Cheese, Wine, Scotch And Coffee In the aftermath of today's surprising WTO decision, in which the global trade mediator sided with the US in finding some $7.5BN in European Airbus subsidies illegal, moments ago the US Trade Rep confirmed that the US will waste no time in retaliating to what - for years - were illegal trade practices.According to the USTR office, the US will impose a total of $7.5 billion in retaliatory tariffs on EU imports starting October 18, with 10% tariffs on large commercial aircraft, and 25% on agricultural and other industrial goods.  In addition to single-malt tariffs on airplanes, Irish and Scotch whiskeys and wine, other items covered by the tariffs include:

• Edam, Gouda, Reggiano, Cheddar, Swiss, Stilton, Emmentaler and Pecorino cheese
• Olives
• Pork sausages
• Cherries
• Pears
• Prune juice
• Mandarins
• Coffee
• Clams, Mussels, Cockles
• Sweet biscuits
• Tweezers, Pliers, Screwdrivers

And with that, instead of easing, the global trade war just sprung another major front, one which will see the EU retaliate in kind and impose tariffs on billions in US imports to the EU, guaranteeing that consumer prices in both the US and Europe will spike just as the world is entering a global recession, making further rate cuts by the Fed that much more complicated. The full list of imports subject to tariffs is below (pdf link).

 New US tariffs escalate trade war with Europe - The Trump Administration announced on October 2 that it would impose $7.5 billion in punitive tariffs on European Union exports to America, based on a World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling against EU subsidies to Airbus. After Washington imposed $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese exports and a 25 percent tariff on EU steel last year, to which China and the EU replied with billions in retaliatory tariffs, this new move sets the world’s major economies on a course to all-out trade war. Trump called it a “big win for the United States.” US officials, who are also preparing sanctions on EU auto exports, said they would impose a 10 percent tariff on Airbus aircraft and 25 percent tariffs on various EU agricultural and industrial goods. US aircraft manufacturer Boeing had called for a 100 percent tariff on Airbus planes, apparently trying to lock Airbus out of the US markets. EU officials, who have brought a similar WTO suit against US subsidies for Boeing and are waiting for a ruling authorizing tariffs against US products, threatened to retaliate. EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström declared, “Our readiness to find a fair settlement remains unchanged. But if the US decides to impose WTO-authorised countermeasures, it will be pushing the EU into a situation where we will have no other option than do the same.” Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are acting with staggering recklessness. After the 2008 Wall Street crash, the dominant factions of the ruling class still recognized that trade war policies in the last great capitalist economic collapse, the Great Depression of the 1930s, had disastrous economic and military consequences. The Davos Economic Forum noted, “Protectionist policies helped precipitate the collapse of international trade in the 1930s, and this trade shrinkage was a plausible seed of World War II.” A decade later, however, both sides are stoking the same economic rivalries—even though, twice in the 20th century, these exploded into world war between US and European capitalism. The potential dangers in terms of job losses and economic dislocation are incalculable. In today’s world of transnational production, the imposition of tariff barriers on international trade not only threatens to eliminate millions of jobs involved in assembling finished aircraft, cars or other manufactured products that are then exported across national borders. It also threatens to wreak havoc across the supply chain of each manufacturing corporation, whose activities depend on rapidly and cheaply assembling products from parts made around the world.

 U.S. announces asylum deal with Honduras, could send migrants to one of world’s most violent nations - The Trump administration announced a migration deal Wednesday that will give U.S. immigration authorities the ability to send asylum seekers from the border to Honduras, one of the most violent and unstable nations in the world.Department of Homeland Security officials reached the accord with the government of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is embroiled in allegations of government corruption and charges that he and others have been operating the nation as a criminal enterprise — Hernández has been named as a co-conspirator in a major U.S. drug trafficking case.The deal paves the way for the United States to take asylum seekers from the U.S. border and ship them to a nation with one of the highest murder rates in the world, a country with gang wars that have fueled waves of mass migration and multiple “caravans” to the United States that became a major irritant to President Trump. More than 250,000 Hondurans have crossed the U.S. border during the past 11 months alone, many filing protection claims that have added to the soaring number of asylum cases clogging U.S. courts. That DHS would enter into such an accord with the Honduran government a month after its president was named by U.S. prosecutors as a co-conspirator in a drug case is a sign of the Trump administration’s eagerness to armor the U.S. immigration system against a new surge of Central Americans.

Trump lowers cap on refugees to record low of 18,000 - The US State Department announced Thursday that President Donald Trump has decided to reduce the limit on the admission of refugees in the fiscal year beginning October 1 to 18,000, a record low since the modern refugee program began in 1980. This represents a reduction of almost a half from the already minimal current limit of 30,000, itself a mere fraction of the 110,000 limit set by Obama in 2016, his final year in office. Trump has slashed the refugee cap for three straight years since taking office in January of 2017. Obama, who oversaw more immigrant deportations than all previous presidents, raised the limit on legal refugees in part to drum up votes from Hispanics for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Trump is gutting the program in order to mobilize his far-right anti-immigrant supporters by further expanding his war on refugees beyond so-called “illegals” to those admitted to the US legally. Virtually all of the 18,000 slots have already been allocated. Administration officials told reporters it is reserving 4,000 positions for Iraqis who worked with the US military, 5,000 for people suffering religious persecution and 1,500 for people from Central America. The remaining 7,500 openings are reserved for those seeking family reunification who have been cleared for resettlement in the US. This latest move tightens the virtual ban on people fleeing poverty, violence and persecution around the world, largely the result of US imperialist wars, CIA coups and Washington’s promotion of dictatorial regimes. Until Trump took office, the US was the leading destination in the world for refugees. Last year it admitted fewer refugees than Canada. More than 100,000 refugees are currently on a referral list for possible resettlement in the US. Also on Thursday, Trump issued an executive order to allow states and localities to opt out of the refugee program and refuse to accept people permitted to resettle in the US. The same day, Matthew Albence, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), held a White House press conference at which he denounced states and localities that limit or bar officials from helping ICE detain and deport immigrants. He particularly attacked jurisdictions that refuse to allow ICE to arrest immigrants inside state prisons and local jails. Threatening so-called “sanctuary” cities and states, Albence said, “You may be the first we’re calling out, but you won’t be the last.”

Border Crisis: Arizona Desert Crossing Has Claimed Thousands of Lives  - In his wildest dreams, Donald Trump could not build a wall more effective than the Sonoran Desert — 100,000 square miles of rugged mountain ranges and wide, bone-dry valleys straddling the Mexico border from southeastern California to eastern Arizona. Summer temperatures can exceed 120 degrees, and surface heat on the rocky floor soars a third higher. Committed to reaching the U.S. at any cost — and fearful of the increasingly hostile U.S. authorities at the border — migrants who have given up on the asylum process are detouring into this remote, scarcely policed stretch of desert, gambling their lives on a journey through hellfire. Nearly 9,000 people are believed to have perished crossing here since the 1990s, but the number is likely much higher than that, as only a fraction of the dead are found due to the vastness of the terrain and scant government resources for search-and-rescue operations. It’s a microcosm of migration at its most brutal extreme, and the ranks of the missing continue to multiply.Despite all the risks of crossing, the hopefuls keep coming. More than 144,000 undocumented immigrants were encountered by Border Patrol officers along the Southwest frontier in May, the largest monthly total in 13 years and the third month in a row that more than 100,000 were taken into custody at the border. Alone or with family in tow, they took flight north as a last-ditch effort to escape dire poverty, climate-crisis-driven drought, and a plague of criminal gangs that have made life back home unbearable. While intensified anti-migrant measures by the Trump administration and the Mexican government have since led to a drop in arrivals, the flow has not been stopped. Local volunteers have long tried to ease migrants’ passage by leaving bottles of water, food, and medical aid in the so-called Ajo corridor, a zone running north from the border astride state highway 85 through the small, unincorporated town of Ajo, 40 miles north of Mexico, where migrant deaths and disappearances have been a grim fact of life for decades, instilling a strong humanitarian ethos in the community. But federal authorities are even cracking down on that lifeline, arresting volunteers on charges of littering, trespassing, and human smuggling. Human-rights advocates say the Trump administration is “criminalizing solidarity” while enforcing harsh policies that compel migrants to risk their lives in the desert. “They don’t do a damn thing to help these [migrants],” says Gerardo Campos of the San Diego-based volunteer aid group Aguilas del Desierto. “This is legalized genocide, and the Trump administration wants this to happen.”

Democrats exclude Trump’s fascist anti-immigrant policies from impeachment inquiry - According to a New York Times report posted Tuesday night, President Donald Trump in March called for a fascistic pogrom against immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border. “Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate,” the Times wrote. “He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh… later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down.” On Wednesday, the Times reported that the Department of Homeland Security will forcibly collect DNA samples from all detained immigrants for compilation in a national database, including children and asylum applicants. That such Hitlerian proposals are discussed in the Oval Office by the president and his chief advisers—down to the details of cost—testifies to the depraved character of the entire American political establishment and shows that Trump’s immigration policies are calculated to abuse and terrorize immigrant workers. Trump is the malignant product of a political system poisoned by decades of war, financial speculation and attacks on democratic rights. A country whose Declaration of Independence attacked the king of England for “obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners” and “refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither” is now led by would-be despots whose proposals for torturing asylum seekers would shock the conscience of people living in the Dark Ages. Yet the Democratic Party has launched an impeachment inquiry not over Trump’s fascist policies, but over his subordination of the global interests of US imperialism to his own personal and political needs. The Democrats are basing their impeachment drive on a single phone call in which Trump, having withheld some $400 million in military aid to the far-right government of Ukraine, an ally against Russia, sought to use the release of the funds as leverage to force the Ukrainian president to investigate the corruption of Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son.

Justice Department Weighs Collecting DNA From Migrants in Custody —The Justice Department is planning to require collection of DNA from immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and others in immigration detention for use in a national criminal database. Senior administration officials said Wednesday a proposed rule requiring the Department of Homeland Security to collect DNA from migrants taken into custody could be published in coming days. A pending report on the government surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page may shed light on a vital question: Has the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court become a tool used by government to abuse the rights of both guilty and innocent in the name of national security?  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was enacted in 1978 as a post-Watergate reform to give American citizens under national security surveillance some of the protections afforded suspects in criminal investigations. The FISA court, also called the FISC, considers orders for surveillance in a manner that emulates the issuing of warrants. But critics call the court a rubber-stamp body, pointing to its history of approving about 98% of the roughly 1,600 to 1,700 applications it receives each year. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz informed congressional leaders by letter last month that he had completed a draft of his report on the Page order, which was approved in 2016 and renewed three times in 2017. With its release expected this month once redactions are completed, the report is expected at the very least to cite weaknesses in the applications. “I can report categorically that the inspector general has found that all four FISA warrants were illegal,” Joe diGenova, a former U.S. attorney and vocal Republican, said recently in an interview with Washington radio station WMAL. “They were based on false information supplied to the FISA Court." A highly redacted copy of the first application for FISA surveillance orders on Page made public last year appears to show multiple irregularities. That October 2016 application gave great weight to information in the “Steele dossier” – a collection of memos alleging ties between the Trump campaign and Russia -- without clearly indicating that it was an opposition research document paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. That application also suggested that the dossier’s claims had been independently verified by referring to a 2016 Yahoo News article that, it did not inform the court, had been based on information leaked from the dossier.

Pharmaceutical Companies Are Luring Mexicans Across the U.S. Border to Donate Blood Plasma - Every week, thousands of Mexicans cross the border into the U.S. on temporary visas to sell their blood plasma to profit-making pharmaceutical companies that lure them with Facebook ads and colorful flyers promising hefty cash rewards.The donors, including some who say the payments are their only income, may take home up to $400 a month if they donate twice a week and earn various incentives, including “buddy bonuses” for recruiting friends or family. Unlike other nations that limit or forbid paid plasma donations at a high frequency out of concern for donor health and quality control, the U.S. allows companies to pay donors and has comparatively loose standards for monitoring their health.Donating plasma too frequently can hurt a donor’s immune system. A donor’s level of the antibody immunoglobulin G should bescreened every four months under guidelines from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But in the U.S., donors are still allowed to give plasma up to 104 times a year, far more than in most other countries. Selling plasma has been banned in Mexico since 1987.  Genesis, a 21-year-old Mexican studying to be a paramedic, who asked that her last name not be used for her protection, said she gives plasma twice a week in El Paso, Texas. She said she often faints, gets migraines and has numbness in her limbs. The more she donates plasma, the weaker she feels. “I have trouble lifting stuff, problems with my muscles.”  Like many Mexicans donors, Genesis comes into the U.S. on temporary visas, which allow non-immigrants to visit family, shop or “engage in commercial transactions, which do not involve gainful employment in the United States.”

Uptick of Canadians hit with 5-year bans at U.S. borders called a ‘troubling trend’ - If you are thinking about driving across a U.S. border any time soon take note — immigration lawyers in British Columbia and Washington State are seeing an increase in travellers being issued five-year bans from U.S. border guards. The bans are the consequence of so-called "expedited removals" which are decided by an immigration officer and don't go before a judge, and are a "troubling trend" according to lawyer Len Saunders because of how arbitrary they can seem. "Until recently, I never would have expected people to get these expedited removals so randomly," said Saunders, who practises immigration law in Blaine, Wash. and has clients who have been banned. "It's very, very indiscriminate how they are doing this." Canadians generally are allowed to stay for up to six months in the U.S. as a tourist but it's up to the traveller to prove they are just visiting and not planning to stay permanently. Saunders said he's seen more scrutiny by border guards recently over things like home ownership, a permanent job and money in the bank, which indicate ties to Canada and a reason to return. "Any Canadian who doesn't have a full time job or are living with their parents and don't have their own residence, under these recent expedited removals that I've been seeing, they could be barred," he said.

NYC Bans Calling Someone An "Illegal Alien", Threatening To Call ICE "When Motivated By Discrimination" -- New York City can now fine residents up to $250,000 if they refer to someone as an “illegal alien” or threaten to call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on someone “when motivated by discrimination.  The NYC Commission on Human Rights announced on Sept. 26 that they had released a new legal enforcement guideline (pdf) that clarifies discrimination based on someone’s immigration status and national origin is illegal in any public accommodations, employment, and housing. According to the guidance, public accommodations include “businesses such as restaurants, fitness clubs, stores, and nightclubs, and other public spaces, like parks, libraries, healthcare providers, and cultural institutions.” Any violations of the law could be fined up to $250,000. “This new legal enforcement guidance will help ensure that no New Yorker is discriminated against based on their immigration status or national origin,” said Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson in a press release on Sept. 26.Under the guidance, phrases such as “illegal alien,” and “go back to your country” used with the intent to “demean, humiliate, or harass” a person is illegal under the law. Moreover, it states that harassing or discriminating a person based on their use of another language or their limited English proficiency is also against the law. In its 29-page directive, the commission lists several examples as to what would constitute a violation of the law, which includes harassing people based on their immigration status or discriminating someone based on their accent.

Mississippi city attorney argues immigrant killed by police had no rights under US Constitution - An attorney for the city of Southaven, Mississippi argued in court documents filed last month that a man who was shot dead by police in a case of mistaken identity did not have any legal rights under the Fourth or the 14th Amendments to the US Constitution because he was an undocumented immigrant and his family therefore had no legal standing to file suit against the city and its police department. Ismael Lopez, a 41-year-old auto mechanic, was shot and killed by Southaven police in July 2017 in his mobile home after authorities mistakenly went to the wrong address. According to an autopsy, Lopez died from a single bullet to the back of his head. A grand jury declined in July 2018 to bring any criminal charges against the two officers involved in the killing. Last June, Lopez’s surviving family filed a civil lawsuit against the city of Southaven, it’s police chief and the officers involved in his death as part of a $20 million wrongful-death lawsuit. On September 4, city attorney Katherine S. Kirby filed a motion seeking to dismiss the suit, arguing essentially that Lopez was not protected by the Constitution because he was an “illegal alien” at the time of his death and his family had no right to sue over the violation of his civil rights. The court filing went on to say that since Lopez had been convicted on a domestic violence charge in the 1990s, and was in the US without proper documentation after two deportations, he did “not have the same rights as legal or resident aliens.” Kirby’s motion added, “If he ever had Fourth Amendment of Fourteenth Amendment civil rights, they were lost by his own conduct and misconduct. Ismael Lopez may have been a person on American soil but he was not one of the ‘We, the People of the United States’ entitled to the civil rights invoked in this lawsuit.”

 “House Democrats’ Drug Price Strategy versus a Cost Strategy” -   The House Democrats just released their drug pricing plan (summary) on the 19th. I read through it rather quickly and I found it to be interesting and having targets which could work. Rather than jump right into this, let’s talk about purchasing a bit and then what I believe would be better.In a purchasing negotiation there are two typical ways used to negotiate a price to your company. The first strategy is to tell a supplier you have done a market study, another supplier can offer a better price, and  all things are equal between him and the other supplier. The supplier has a choice of beating the new price or offering something else of value to the customer which will negate the difference and can not be acquired from the other supplier (whip-sawing a supplier is unethical and many do it).The second strategy requires more work and requires you to understand the cost of materials, the process and its cost, and the overhead involved. It does establish a base in which a buyer can use to negotiate with “all” suppliers. With the former strategy, you are guessing whether you have a good price because you do not know the cost of manufacture. Purchasing has to be a bit more than just a clerk. The House plan intends to negotiate on pricing using other countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom) pricing to measure against for the same drug. The legislation establishes an upper limit for the price as no more than 1.2 times of the volume-weighted average of the price of the six countries reached in their negotiation. Australia, Japan, and United Kingdom use a cost-based method of pricing a drug. Here is a brief explanation of the House plan:

The Fetishization of Employer-Provided Health Care - Democrats continue to entrench their support for a health care system in which class warfare is a pre-existing condition.  -- Earlier this month, at a town hall event for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, a military veteran named John told the senator that he was going to kill himself because the cost of treating his Huntington’s disease had saddled him with $139,000 in medical debt. Should John attempt suicide and survive, he will incur thousands of dollars more in debt.  This is what it means for America to have no national single-payer system. John lost his eligibility for Tricare, the health care program for veterans. “They took it away,” he said. For however many lives are saved by the existence of America’s myriad safety net health care programs—like Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, Tricare, the Indian Health Service—there are many others like John who slip through the cracks, become ineligible, fail to re-enroll, or get kicked off. According to one study from the University of Michigan, 30 percent of Michiganders on Medicaid faced a spell of uninsurance over the course of a year. Many leading Democrats are deathly afraid to take on this cruel, patchwork system in any meaningful way, because they have bought into the idea that it is political suicide to kill private, employer-sponsored insurance, which we are told many people actually like. We are told this even by candidates like Beto O’Rourke, who had previously supported Medicare for All. A survey conducted by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the trade group for the bloodsuckers in America’s health insurance industry, found that 71 percent of people are “satisfied” with their employer-sponsored coverage. (“Satisfied” does not mean the same thing as “happy” or “would be motivated to vote solely on the basis of keeping that plan.”) Only 49 percent of Americans even have employer-sponsored insurance, meaning that, with the most generous definition of “happy,” about 34 percent of America is happy with their private insurance.The reason that this minority and their imagined political priorities have such a stranglehold on the future of all Americans’ healthcare is that this group of people is wealthier, and therefore seen as much more important. Democrats who oppose Medicare for All are conducting class warfare against the poor, on behalf of those whose employers insulate them from the real cost of health care.  According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s (KFF) annual survey of employer health benefits, published Wednesday, the average annual premium for family coverage reached an insane $20,576 this year. As Bloomberg noted, that’s roughly the cost of a new car every year. Employers pay most of that cost—on average, $14,561 to the employee’s $6,015. (Just imagine the effect this has on wages, and try not to cry.) For individual coverage, the employer tends to pay a far larger share: On average, workers with individual plans pay 18 percent of health costs, compared to 30 percent for family plans. The average individual premium is just $1,242 per year.

Trump to issue executive order ‘protecting’ Americans from Democrats’ ‘Medicare for All’ proposals - President Donald Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday making changes to the Medicare program to “protect” Americans from Democratic health-care proposals senior administration officials say would “destroy” coverage for seniors. The executive order, which he is scheduled to discuss at a speech in Florida later Thursday, is intended to bolster Medicare Advantage, private Medicare insurance for seniors that currently covers 22 million people, senior administration officials said on a call with reporters. The plan would also offer more affordable plan options, increase use of telehealth services and bring payments in Medicare fee-for-service program in line with payments for Medicare Advantage, officials said. The plan seeks to expand the range of services that can be offered on private plans and works to lower costs for seniors by pushing for procedures to be done in a hospital. “Medicare for All” isn’t “just impractical but morally wrong,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma said on the call. “I’m deeply concerned about proposals that eviscerate Medicare by indiscriminately stripping private health insurance.”

Trump’s Executive Order is Backdoor Privatization of Medicare - The following is a statement from Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works, on the Medicare executive order Donald Trump is signed today:“Medicare Advantage is a hustle designed to allow for-profit corporations to suck up public dollars. For years, Republicans have shoveled money into Medicare Advantage plans and allowed them to offer benefits that traditional Medicare is forbidden from covering. This is a ploy to push seniors into Medicare Advantage plans instead of traditional Medicare. Medicare Advantage is stealth privatization intended to undermine traditional Medicare, which is an effective, popular government program and therefore loathed by Republican ideologues.Under the Trump Administration, the thumb on the scale has turned into an entire arm. They’ve been flooding seniors’ inboxes with advertisements for Medicare Advantage. What these emails don’t mention is that Medicare Advantage plans often have narrow networks, restricting which doctors and hospitals patients are allowed to use. Worse, a recent government report found tt Medicare Advantage plans improperly deny care “in an attempt to increase their profits.” It’s no surprise that older, seniors are more likely to drop Medicare Advantage plans.Medicare Advantage plans are also a terrible waste of public dollars. They have overcharged Medicare by $30 billion in the past three years alone.Today’s executive order is yet another giveaway to the corporations that run Medicare Advantage plans. Ironically, the Trump Administration is framing the executive order as an attack on Medicare for All. In fact, the massive flaws of Medicare Advantage epitomize the need to get for-profit greed out of health care by improving Medicare and expanding it to cover all Americans. Medicare, like Social Security, works. Republicans want to privatize both of them. We have to stop them and instead, expand both.”

Trump announces plan to further privatize Medicare - At an event originally titled “Saving Medicare from Socialist Destruction,” Trump unleashed a rant against all those who call for even a limited expansion of Medicare as “socialist.” He sought to combine health care demagogy with anti-immigrant bigotry, warning: “Medicare is under threat like never before. I will never allow these politicians to steal your health care and give it away to illegal aliens.” In reality, Trump has called for more than $800 billion in cuts in Medicare funding over a ten-year period as part of his efforts to finance massive increases in military spending and trillion-dollar tax cuts for big business and the wealthy. After the Florida rally, Trump signed an executive order to promote the benefits of Medicare Advantage, under which private insurers are allowed to offer Medicare coverage and make a profit from it. These plans have been encouraged under both Republican and Democratic administrations and generally target healthier and more affluent senior citizens, leaving those sicker and poorer to what is now called “original Medicare.” “Today’s executive order is yet another giveaway to the corporations that run Medicare Advantage plans,” wrote Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works. “Medicare Advantage is a hustle designed to allow for-profit corporations to suck up public dollars,” she said. “These changes would cost the government more while threatening the long-term solvency of Medicare,” wrote Eagan Kemp of Public Citizen. About one-third of all Medicare recipients are now enrolled in Medicare Advantage, and a significant expansion would threaten to leave “original Medicare” patients as a stigmatized, “ghetto” population, with doctors refusing to see them in favor of the more lucrative Medicare Advantage enrollees. The executive order gives private insurers more flexibility to offer supplemental benefits, loosens requirements for seniors to sign up for the Medicare Advantage plans, and allows insurers to pay cash rebates to boost enrollment. It also boosts tele-medicine, which involves potential advances in remote diagnostic (and even clinical) procedures. Under the profit-driven health care system, however, tele-medicine would inevitably be used to cut costs, reducing in-person care at the expense of patients’ health.

Sensing shift, Democratic presidential candidates vow action on gun violence - Nine of the leading candidates gathered in Las Vegas for an all-day forum on gun safety, one day after the city marked two years since it suffered the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, which killed 58 people. The candidates offered details of various policies they have championed, including universal background checks, banning assault-style weapons and requiring gun owners to obtain licenses. But they also urged the hundreds of gathered activists to continue pressing the issue, arguing that their movement already has the power to prevail over the National Rifle Association. “We cannot wait for this hell to be visited upon your community for you to be activated for this fight,” said U.S. Senator Cory Booker, who spoke passionately about witnessing firsthand the everyday scourge of gun violence in his low-income neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. “It is a life-and-death issue for people in communities like mine.” But the specter of the impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine could overshadow policy debates on the campaign trail, while threatening to imperil negotiations between the White House and lawmakers on legislation to expand background checks for firearm purchases. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has ascended to the second spot in public opinion polling behind former Vice President Joe Biden, rejected Trump’s assertion on Wednesday that the Democratic impeachment inquiry is to blame for inaction on gun safety, calling it an “alternative reality.” Democratic U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, who has been one of his party’s leading voices on gun safety since 20 schoolchildren were massacred in 2012 in his home state of Connecticut, has been negotiating with the White House on background checks. In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, he conceded the impeachment inquiry could prove an obstacle but also said Trump may be more inclined to support legislation to demonstrate that the investigation is not “the functional end of his presidency.” 

NRA's Tax Exempt Status in Trouble After Senate Probe -  Senator Ron Wyden revealed an 18-monthinvestigation by the Senate Finance Committee, which determined that the National Rifle Association served as a “foreign asset” for Russia in the run-up to the 2016 election.It’s been public knowledge that the gun-rights advocacy group had connections with two Russian assets, former Moscow official Alexander Torshin and Maria Butina — who is currently serving a sentence for conspiracy to act as a foreign agent for her efforts to infiltrate the NRA and the National Prayer Breakfast in order to influence conservative policy. But the Senate investigation displays a damning level of executive-suite involvement, including former NRA vice-president Pete Brownell’s 2015 trip to Russia, “primarily or solely for the purpose of advancing personal business interests, rather than advancing the NRA’s tax-exempt purpose.”Not only was Brownell — who later became the organization’s president —spending NRA funds for personal business, an email from Maria Butina to two senior NRA staffers reveals that he was in Russia because “many powerful figures in the Kremlin are counting on Torshin to prove his American connections.” The Senate investigation also found evidence of the NRA attempting to obscure payments for the trip. Though he’s currently embroiled in his own monumental scandal of foreign influence, on some level, Trump must be aware of the NRA’s no-good, very-bad-day: He helped make it worse, after all. On Friday, the New York Times reported that NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre met with Trump at the White House, asking the president if he could “stop the games” on gun control. According to the Times, the pair “discussed prospective gun legislation and whether the N.R.A. could provide support for the president as he faces impeachment and a more difficult re-election campaign,” which sounds similar to the quid-pro-quo exchange in Ukraine that got him into the mess of an impeachment inquiry. What separates this Senate investigation from other concerns the NRA is facing — allegations of lavish executive spending as the organization deals with substantial cash-flow problems; multiple crises in leadership — is that it could affect its status as a non-profit. “This was an official trip undertaken so NRA insiders could get rich — a clear violation of the principle that tax-exempt resources should not be used for personal benefit,” Senator Wyden told CNN.

 Ivanka Trump and Google’s CEO Announce a Tech Job Training Initiative - At a roundtable event in Dallas, Tex. Thursday alongside Ivanka Trump,Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced new job training opportunities through a White House initiative.Google will sign the “Pledge to America’s Workers,” a White House initiative that calls on employers to expand education programs for American workers, Pichai said in a statement prior to the event. As part of the commitment, Pichai said the company provide 250,000 training opportunities for Americans in technology skills over five years.Google had previously signed the pledge through its membership in the trade group the Internet Association, but Thursday’s announcement further strengthens that commitment. Google already has a national skills training program called “Grow with Google,” which provides free resources to learn various online skills. In a blog post Thursday, Google announced plans to expand that program to 100 community colleges in the U.S. by 2020.At the roundtable, Trump said the pledge is meant to fill job opportunities with young workers as well as help reskill workers later in their careers.“We need to fundamentally change how we think about learning and education in this country ... and celebrate the many pathways to career success that exist today,” Trump said. Google’s pledge comes as it is facing multiple investigations into its competitive practices. Google has received a request for documents from theHouse Judiciary Committee and also faces a state-led probe from 50 attorneys general and reportedly from the Department of Justice.

Judge dismisses high-tax states' lawsuit against Trump tax deduction limits - A federal judge handed the Trump administration a win Monday, dismissing a lawsuit from states with high taxes. The lawsuit asked U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken to block the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act's limit on how much people can deduct in state and local taxes (SALT). The provision effectively raised the tax burden on citizens of high-tax states. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland brought the suit in July 2018, claiming the tax deduction limit was a way for the Trump administration to stick it to blue states. The judge ruled that the limit did not violate the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not delegated to the federal government in the Constitution are left to the states. "The cap, again like every other feature of the federal Tax Code, is a part of the landscape of federal law within which states make their decisions as to how they will exercise their own sovereign tax powers," Oetken wrote. "Because the States have failed to plausibly allege that the cap, more so than any other major federal initiative, meaningfully constrains this decision-making process, this Court has no basis for concluding that the SALT cap is unconstitutionally coercive," he continued. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act limited the state and local tax deduction at $10,000, which is below the average of what individuals claim in states like New York and Connecticut. Before the cap, the average deduction claimed in California, for example, was $22,000, according to Kevin de Leon, a Democratic member of the California state Senate.

 IRS: Sorry, but It’s Just Easier and Cheaper to Audit the Poor - ProPublica - Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to. The IRS audits the working poor at about the same rate as the wealthiest 1%. Now, in response to questions from a U.S. senator, the IRS has acknowledged that’s true but professes it can’t change anything unless it is given more money.  ProPublica reported the disproportionate audit focuson lower-income families in April. Lawmakers confronted IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig about the emphasis, citing our stories, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Rettig for a plan to fix the imbalance. Rettig readily agreed. Last month, Rettig replied with a report, but it said the IRS has no plan and won’t have one until Congress agrees to restore the funding it slashed from the agency over the past nine years — something lawmakers have shown little inclination to do. On the one hand, the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits — of which there were about 380,000 last year, accounting for 39% of the total the IRS conducted — are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time, either. They are “the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources,” Rettig’s report says.On the other hand, auditing the rich is hard. It takes senior auditors hours upon hours to complete an exam. What’s more, the letter says, “the rate of attrition is significantly higher among these more experienced examiners.” As a result, the budget cuts have hit this part of the IRS particularly hard.For now, the IRS says, while it agrees auditing more wealthy taxpayers would be a good idea, without adequate funding there’s nothing it can do. “Congress must fund and the IRS must hire and train appropriate numbers of [auditors] to have appropriately balanced coverage across all income levels,” the report said. Since 2011, Republicans in Congress have driven cuts to the IRS enforcement budget; it’s more than a quarter lower than its 2010 level, adjusting for inflation.

Analysis Shows Top 1% Gained $21 Trillion in Wealth Since 1989 While Bottom Half Lost $900 Billion - Adding to the mountain of statistical evidence showing the severity of U.S. inequality, an analysis published Friday found that the top one percent of Americans gained $21 trillion in wealth since 1989 while the bottom 50 percent lost $900 billion. Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing think tank People's Policy Project, broke down the Federal Reserve's newly released "Distributive Financial Accounts" data series and found that, overall, "the top one percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets."The growth of wealth inequality over the past 30 years, Bruenig found, is "eye-popping.""Between 1989 and 2018, the top one percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion," Bruenig wrote. "The bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period." "Enormous crisis," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) tweeted in response to Bruenig's analysis. "We have the worst inequality in this country since the 1920s," wrote Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. "Three wealthiest people in America have as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent."

Will a wealth tax be crippled by avoidance schemes?  - Wealth taxes are hot in American politics right now. Polling consistently finds that the idea of taxing the massive fortunes held by our richest citizens is broadly popular on a bipartisan basis. And the two most progressive candidates in the Democratic presidential primary — Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — have dueling proposals to do just that. But critics contend that a wealth tax would be crippled by avoidance schemes the rich would cook up. As an idea, a wealth tax may fire people up. But would it actually work? One of the arguments worth engaging with comes from Larry Summers, who's worked in previous Democratic administrations, and his co-author, Natasha Sarin, who point to the already-existing estate tax, which itself is a form of wealth tax. And revenue for the estate tax chronically comes it at much lower levels than you'd expect if you just ran the raw numbers on the tax rate and the amount of wealth it could hit. Summers and Sarin argue this is due to numerous evasion strategies: "questionable appraisals; valuation discounts for illiquidity and lack of control; establishment of trusts that enable division of assets among family members with substantial founder control; planning devices that give some income to charity while keeping the remainder for the donor and her beneficiaries; tax-advantaged lending schemes" to cite a few examples. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the economists who consulted with Warren and ran her numbers, certainly aren't unaware of this criticism.They point out that the make-up of wealth among the very rich is different than among average citizens: 80 percent of the wealth held by the top 0.1 percent is in stocks, bonds and real estate, which are actually pretty easy to measure and value. Warren has committed to keeping the definitions and language of her tax bill as clean and simple as possible, so as to avoid creating loopholes. She wants to significantly bulk up the resources available to the IRS to police tax avoidance. And Warren wants her wealth tax to apply globally, so as to cut down on efforts by the wealthy to simply move their money overseas. The underlying challenge is that dealing with tax evasion boils down to political will, influence, and discipline. Over time, either your lawmakers allow lobbyists to blow loopholes in the tax code, or they don't; either they continue giving tax authorities the resources and funding they need to crack down on avoidance, or they don't; and so on. Critics of wealth taxes such as Summers are essentially invoking a skepticism that the necessary political will can ever be mustered, while champions of wealth taxes like Warren and Sanders think these proposals can be used to muster the political will where it once was lacking.

The White House reportedly tried to conceal transcripts of Trump's calls with other world leaders, including Russia's Putin and Saudi Arabia's Mohammad bin Salman - The White House reportedly tried to lock down the transcripts of President Donald Trump's calls with other world leaders, including Russia's Putin and Saudi Arabia's Mohammad bin Salman, according to reports from CNN and The New York Times.The Times, citing current and former officials, said that the call transcripts were stored in a computer system that is typically used for highly classified materials.The process began over a year ago because details from some earlier conversations between Trump and world leaders, including Australia's president, had leaked, the Times reported. The calls, with leaders that Trump has maintained controversial relationship with, sometimes took place during politically sensitive times, according to both outlets, with Trump's conversation with Bin Salman addressing the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi a Saudi consulate.Both outlets said there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by Trump during the call. Bin Salman denies any direct involvement in the killing but experts say it is "inconceivable" that it took place without his knowledge, and Trump has come under fire for maintaining his relationship with the crown prince since.Trump is currently facing heavy criticism over a call with Ukraine's president, which promoted Democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry against him and sparked accusations of a cover up by the White House.An intelligence community whistleblower claimed that White House officials tried to "lock down" records of the call, especially the transcript. The whistleblower claimed that White House lawyers directed officials to remove the electronic transcript from its usual electronic system, and move it to a system reserved for particularly sensitive, classified information.

Read the full declassified whistleblower complaint (cloud pdf document)

Democrats subpoena Pompeo for Ukraine documents - The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Friday subpoenaed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for documents relating to the Trump administration's dealings with Ukraine, indicating Democrats are wasting no time diving into the formal impeachment inquiry they launched this week.The subpoena notice, drafted in consultation with the Intelligence and Oversight and Reform committees, accuses Pompeo of refusing to turn over requested information to Congress amid the Democrats’ nascent investigation into Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky."Your continued refusal to provide the requested documents not only prevents our Committees from fully investigating these matters, but impairs Congress' ability to fulfill its Constitutional responsibilities to protect our national security and the integrity of our democracy," wrote Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), head of Foreign Affairs; Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the Intelligence panel; and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who leads the Committee on Oversight and Reform.The subpoena letter explicitly cited the Democrats’ newly launched impeachment inquiry into Trump, suggesting that party leaders will lean heavily on impeachment as a legal justification for obtaining disputed documents. A failure to produce them, they warned Pompeo, would be evidence of obstruction.They gave a deadline of one week for the documents. “Pursuant to the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry, we are hereby transmitting a subpoena that compels you to produce the documents set forth in the accompanying schedule by October 4, 2019,” the trio of chairmen wrote. The lawmakers also notified Pompeo in a separate letter that they had scheduled depositions for five State Department officials between Wednesday and Oct. 10.

Around 300 former national security officials and ex-White House staff sign open letter accusing Trump of 'unconscionable abuse of power' over Ukraine call -- About 300 former national security officials, diplomats, and ex-White House staff have signed a letter saying President Donald Trump appears to have committed "an unconscionable abuse of power" in a call with the leader of Ukraine and applauding the launch of impeachment proceedings against him.The statement is signed by former intelligence officers, ambassadors, secretaries of state, major generals, chiefs of staff, and advisers from the US's leading defense and security bodies including the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the State Department.It was organized by National Security Action, an activist group thatopposes what it calls Trump's "reckless leadership."The statement said the many signatories had "long been concerned with President Trump's actions and their implications for our safety and security."It noted that some had spoken out against Trump before while others were publicly doing so for the first time in the letter. The document said new revelations that Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden — a 2020 election rival — meant Trump "appears to have leveraged the authority and resources of the highest office in the land to invite foreign interference into our democratic processes." It added: "That would constitute an unconscionable abuse of power."

Quid Pro Nope: Ukraine Reportedly Had No Idea About Trump Withholding $400 Million Until Month After Call --A key element of the impeachment push against President Trump is the assertion that he withheld nearly $400 million in US military aid to Ukraine before 'pressuring' President Volodomyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.  While Trump says he stalled the aid to investigate whether the new administration was just as corrupt as the last one, Democrats and their MSM lapdogs have been making the case that the aid and the request to investigate Biden are linked.  Not true, according to the New York Times' Kenneth Vogel in a Wednesday tweet that went virtually unnoticed (but not by the WSJ's indefatigable Kim Strassel).  Responding to a tweet by MSNBC's Rick Tyler in which he questions why the $400 million wasn't "the top priority of the call," Vogel explains: "The Ukrainians weren't made aware that the assistance was being delayed/reviewed until more than one month after the call." To recap - in 2018, former Vice President Joe Biden openly bragged about getting Ukraine's top prosecutor, Victor Shokin, fired by threatening to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees. According to Shokin, "I was forced out because I was leading a wide-range corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine, and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was a member of the board of directors."Then, Ukrainian actor Volodymyr Zelensky won the country's 2019 election, assuming office on May 20 - and promising to fight corruption. On July 25, Trump and Zelensky conducted a phone call at the center of a CIA operative's 'whistleblower' complaint based on second and third-hand information, alleging that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate the Bidens in a quid pro quo arrangement. Under pressure, Trump released both a transcript of the call which revealed no such thing.  According to Trump, his administration withheld the nearly $400 million in aid ($250 million in Pentagon aid and $141 million in State Department funds for an actual total of $391 million) while they reviewed the programs. In May, the Pentagon officially certified that it had seen enough anti-corruption progress in Ukraine  to justify releasing the Congressionally approved aid, according to the Associated Press.

McConnell: ‘I would have no choice but to take it up’ if House votes to impeach Trump -- The Senate would have to take up impeachment of President Donald Trump if the House effectively votes to charge the president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday. “I would have no choice but to take it up,” the Kentucky Republican told CNBC. “How long you are on it is a different matter, but I would have no choice but to take it up based on a Senate rule on impeachment.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday announced the start of an impeachment inquiry into Trump amid scrutiny over whether he tried to influence the 2020 election by urging Ukraine’s president to investigate the family of Joe Biden, the former vice president and one of his chief rivals for the presidency. The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation could lead to a full chamber vote to impeach the president. If the House impeaches, the Republican-held Senate would then hold a trial on whether to convict Trump and remove him from office. Despite the current lack of support for the inquiry among Senate Republicans, McConnell said the chamber by rule would have no choice but to follow through with the process. The Senate as currently composed is unlikely to remove the president from the White House. It would need a two-thirds majority vote to do so. Last week, House Democratic support for starting an impeachment inquiry swelled as more information surfaced about the president’s interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. A whistleblower complaint made public last week raises concerns that Trump abused his power to influence the 2020 election and that the White House tried to cover up a call between Trump and Zelensky. At least 226 House members — all Democrats except for one independent — now favor some kind of action on impeachment, according to an NBC News tally.. The chamber would need 218 votes for a simple majority to impeach Trump.

Trump demands to meet whistleblower, warns of 'Big Consequences”  President Trump on Sunday evening called for the outing of a whistleblower and railed against other individuals, including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), at the center of a growing scandal involving his phone call with Ukraine's president, warning there could be "Big Consequences." "Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser, especially when this accuser, the so-called 'Whistleblower,' represented a perfect conversation with a foreign leader in a totally inaccurate and fraudulent way. Then Schiff made up what I actually said by lying to Congress," Trump said in a series of tweets. "His lies were made in perhaps the most blatant and sinister manner ever seen in the great Chamber," he continued before adding that he wants Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, "questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason." "In addition," he added, "I want to meet not only my accuser, who presented SECOND & THIRD HAND INFORMATION, but also the person who illegally gave this information, which was largely incorrect, to the 'Whistleblower.' Was this person SPYING on the U.S. President? Big Consequences!" The tweets come after revelations regarding a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky led to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) initiating a formal impeachment inquiry last week. Details of the phone call first emerged after reports that a whistleblower had raised concerns about it to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A readout of the call, which was released last week, showed Trump asking Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. The fallout from those reports led to a flood of new calls on Capitol Hill for an impeachment inquiry. Following Pelosi's announcement to formally launch impeachment proceedings, the White House released not only the readout of the call but also the whistleblower's complaint and the intelligence community's inspector general's report. Little is still known about the whistleblower, who, according to the complaint, was not a direct witness to the conversation but was told about it by White House colleagues. The New York Times reported the person is a CIA officer who is currently working at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. 

Trump talks of 'civil war' if he is impeached - Donald Trump has raised the spectre of divisions akin to a civil war in the US in the event that he is impeached, in a series of incendiary posts on Twitter. The president appeared to approvingly quote Robert Jeffress, a pastor and Fox News contributor, in a stream of late-night tweets. “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal,” Mr Jeffress said, in words then quoted by Mr Trump. The president tweeted and reposted several defences of his behaviour on Sunday night and lashed out at the Democratic Party. He also demanded to meet the whistleblower at the heart of a scandal that has triggered a formal impeachment inquiry in Congress, and warned of “big consequences” for those involved. The president said he wanted to question Adam Schiff, the chair of the intelligence committee, on charges of fraud and treason.

GOP congressman blasts Trump ‘Civil War’ tweet over impeachment as ‘beyond repugnant’ - Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger blasted President Donald Trump’s weekend tweet warning of a “Civil War like fracture” if Trump were to face impeachment charges by the House of Representatives. Kinzinger, a former Air Force veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, said in a tweet the president’s words were “beyond repugnant.” Kinzinger currently represents Illinois’ 16th District, which Trump won with 55% of the vote in 2016. Kinzinger has served since 2010 and ran unopposed in 2016. Trump’s tweet was a summary of comments made on Fox News by evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress, an ardent supporter of the president’s who has made inflammatory remarks in the past about Muslims, Catholics, gays and Mormons. “The congressman believes impeachment is a serious matter, and should not be taken lightly. His tweet in response to the president speaks for itself,” Kinzinger’s office said in a statement.

New York Times faces backlash after revealing details about whistleblower - The New York Times is facing criticism over its decision to publish revealing details about the whistleblower whose explosive complaint, which raised concerns about Donald Trump’s conversation with the Ukrainian president and the White House’s apparent attempts to cover it up, was made public on Thursday.  Readers, including those who work with or within the intelligence community, national security experts and advocates for whistleblower protection, expressed concern that the decision compromised the individual’s safety. The newspaper reported the whistleblower’s employer as the CIA and details on their expertise, citing three unnamed people familiar with the individual’s identity. Since the article’s publication online on Thursday, the newspaper has added the context that the White House already knew where the whistleblower was employed. Identifying information published in the paper “recklessly narrows that universe of suspected whistleblowers to a very few people”, said Jesselyn Radack, the director of national security and human rights at the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program. “This has a very chilling effect on anyone who is even thinking of blowing the whistle and thinking of doing so through the proper channels.  The individual is especially at risk given that Trump lashed out at those who informed the whistleblower, comparing them to spies, and alluded to retaliation. In audio obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Trump can be heard asking: “Who’s the person that gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days, when we were smart, right? The spies and treason? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Trump asks if Adam Schiff should face ‘arrest for treason’ as impeachment probe gathers steam --President Donald Trump on Monday suggested that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff could face “arrest for treason” over his recent statement about Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president. “Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people,” Trump tweeted. “It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?” he added. Neither the White House nor a spokesman for Schiff, D-Calif., immediately responded to CNBC’s request for comment on the president’s tweet. The fiery tweet accusing Schiff — a leading voice on the House’s impeachment inquiry into Trump — of “illegally” misrepresenting him came days after the president said at a private staff event that “we used to handle” spies and treason “a little differently than we do now.”

Trump Allies Predict an Impeachment Spiral – in 1974, Republicans Barry Goldwater and John Rhodes informed Richard Nixon that his support had eroded in the Senate and that he was facing all but certain conviction and removal from office, triggering the 37th president’s resignation. It’s unlikely that Donald Trump will ever face such a moment; the same Republican party that eventually turned on Nixon has protected Trump at every turn. But that doesn’t mean the impeachment inquiry Nancy Pelosi and Democrats launched Tuesday isn’t cause for alarm in the White House. The push, in response to the president’s attempts to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, is unlikely to result in his removal from office. But, as Politico reported Wednesday, allies and aides privately fear that it will derail his agenda, weaken his position, and completely dominate his attention as he heads into a tough reelection battle in 2020.  Both current and former administration aides told the outlet that impeachment proceedings are likely to monopolize Trump’s focus, sinking anything he’d hoped to accomplish in the fall. “It would mean USMCA probably doesn’t get done,” a former official told Politico. “It would declare war on whatever legislative agenda they still have.” For a president already so desperate to get something done that he’s reportedly told staffers not to worry if they broke the law in the process of carrying out his signature campaign promise, a standstill doesn’t bode well. His base, like him, may be whipped into a frenzy over impeachment proceedings, but a failure to follow through on basic promises could imperil his standing with swing voters—especially if the economy takes a nosedive. There’s also the president’s fragile ego to contend with. According to Axios, Trump is well aware that “from the perspective of history it’s not good to be just the fourth American president to face impeachment.” Per friends who’ve spoken to him, he “hates that this is now part of his eternal narrative.”

Pompeo Blasts Democrats' Subpoeana- Won't Be Bullied Or Intimidated In Impeachment Probe - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has vowed to stop Democrats from 'bullying' State Department officials as they hand out subpoenas in their impeachment probe.In a letter responding to a House subpoena demanding that he testify for Congress's impeachment investigation, Pompeo says that the requested time-frame given for employees to provide vast amounts of documents simply "isn't feasible." Those who have received subpoenas also need time to find and retain counsel to prepare for depositions, Pompeo said, adding that making depositions in the time frames offered won't be possible."...your letter provides a woefully inadequate opportunity for the Department and the requested witnesses to prepare. These individuals have retained, or may be retaining, private counsel, as is their constitutional right, and in the course of the Department's discussions with these individuals, several have indicated that they need more time both to retain and to consult with private counsel. In addition, State Department counsel must consult with these officials and their counsel, once retained, regarding the Department's legitimate interests in safeguarding potentially privileged and classified information." Pompeo begins the letter by accusing Rep. Eliot Engel, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, of attempting to "bully, and treat improperly the distinguished professionals of the Department of State, including several career Foreign Service Officers, whom the Committee is now targeting." Pompeo vows to prevent any attempts to "intimidate, bully and treat improperly" any current or former State Department employees who get caught up in the investigation.Finally, Pompeo said the subpoenas sent to five Department officials (including Pompeo himself) include requests for each individual to reproduce a "vast amount of documents." However, "these requests appear to duplicate the subpoena that was previously served on the Secretary of State. The requested records constitute the property of the Department of State and are subject to restrictions on the unauthorized disclosure of classified information and various Executive Branch privileges." Read the full letter below:

U.S. House impeachment probe intensifies as Trump rages about inquiry (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives’ impeachment probe into President Donald Trump intensified on Monday, as Trump raged about the inquiry and news reports suggested he had used additional diplomatic channels to go after his adversaries. Three House committees said a subpoena for documents had been sent to Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The former New York mayor had said on television he asked the government of Ukraine to “target” former Vice President Joe Biden, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to run against Trump in the 2020 election. Giuliani said in a tweet the subpoena raised legal issues including attorney-client privilege. “It will be given appropriate consideration,” he added. The Democratic-led House initiated an impeachment inquiry against Trump last week after a whistleblower report raised concerns that Trump tried to leverage nearly $400 million in U.S. aid in exchange for investigating Biden from Ukraine’s leader in July. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took part in the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which the matter was discussed, the Wall Street Journal reported, something likely to draw the attention of House investigators. The New York Times reported that Trump had sought the help of another world leader, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, with a U.S. Justice Department probe into the origins of what became Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Pompeo Admits He Listened In On Trump's Ukraine Call - Mike Pompeo has confirmed he was listening in on the phone call between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president that sparked impeachment proceedings against Trump. Last week, the secretary of state gave a very evasive answer when asked about the Ukraine call on ABC News. His presence on the call was first reported Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal. Speaking at a press conference in Rome on Wednesday, Pompeo admitted: “I was on the phone call.” He added: “The phone call was in the context of, now I guess I’ve been secretary of state for coming on a year and a half, I know precisely what the American policy is with respect to Ukraine. It’s been remarkably consistent and we will continue to try to drive those set of outcomes.” He went on to say the phone call was about “helping Ukrainians to get graft out and corruption outside of their government.”

House Democrats subpoena Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in impeachment probe - The House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani for documents as part of its impeachment inquiry into the president.In a letter to Giuliani dated Monday, the heads of three House committees asked for information related to the president’s and his lawyer’s efforts to get Ukraine’s government to investigate the Biden family.Three Democratic-led panels — the Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees — are demanding that Giuliani produce all text messages, phone records and other communications related to the “scheme” he is accused of perpetrating “in order to determine the full extent of this effort by the President and his Administration to press Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 presidential election.”They wrote that the House Democrats’ probe “includes an investigation of credible allegations that [Giuliani] acted as an agent of the President in a scheme to advance his personal political interests by abusing the power of the Office of the President.” Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and Eliot Engel, D-N.Y. — who lead the Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees, respectively — asked him to produce documents by Oct. 15.Spokespeople for Giuliani and the White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment. Giuliani has suggested he may not comply with committee requests. On Sunday, he told ABC that he “wouldn’t cooperate” with Schiff as long as he leads the panel. The subpoena adds to the heightened scrutiny of both administration officials and outside Trump confidants after the House decided last week to move forward with impeachment proceedings. On Friday, the Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for documents. The heads of the Appropriations and Budget committees also asked Friday for records related to the Office of Management and Budget’s involvement in the Trump administration deciding to hold back nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

Armed Militias Are Taking Trump's Civil War Tweets Seriously - Over the weekend, the president sent a tweet that seemed to warn of civil war if he were to be impeached and removed from office: It might seem tempting to dismiss this language as of a piece with President Trump’s typical Twitter rhetoric. But it is worth paying particular attention to this tweet—because among the people who read it were militia groups enthusiastic about exactly what Trump portended. And while no violence has yet resulted from the president’s tweet, it would be foolish to underestimate the power of Trump’s comments to call rogue militias to action, particularly if there is an impeachment and he continues to use this rhetoric to fan the flames. In the days after his civil war tweet, he went on to use similarly incendiary language, referring to impeachment proceedings as a “COUP.” Consider the Oath Keepers group, a far-right armed militia. Calling on its 24,000 Twitter followers to read the president’s whole tweet thread, the Oath Keepers account posted: Before this tweet, the Oath Keepers account tweeted that, under the U.S. Constitution, “the militia (that’s us) can be called forth ‘to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.’ ... “All he has to do is call us up. We WILL answer the call.” Other Oath Keeper tweets also hint at violence: One states that “their favorite rifle is the AR 15.” According to the Oath Keepers’s webpage, the organization is “a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, police, and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to ‘defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’” while declaring that they “will not obey unconstitutional orders.”  The Anti-Defamation League, by contrast, describes the group as “an anti-government right-wing fringe organization” whose members have appeared “as self-appointed armed guards” at various places around the country, in defiance of what they deem to be unconstitutional government action. Last month, the group sought “security volunteers” from their membership and “other capable patriots” to escort Trump supporters attending a New Mexico rally “to protect them from potential leftist violence.” And last year, the Oath Keepers announced its “Spartan Training Group program,” with the goal of “form[ing] training groups in as many states as possible” to create “a pool of trained, organized volunteers who will be able to serve as the local militia under the command of a patriotic governor loyal to the Constitution, or if called upon by President Trump to serve the nation” (emphasis in original). The Oath Keepers are far from the only militia group that vocally supports deploying potential force in aid of the president..

Civil War On --  Kunstler -- Someone in Impeachmentville is not paying attention. Of course, diverting the rubes is exactly the point of the latest CIA operation to negate the 2016 election. Has nobody noticed that there is treaty between Ukraine and the USA, signed at Kiev in 1998 and ratified by the US Senate in 2000. It’s an agreement on “Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters.” Here, read the cover letter for yourself: […]  What part of the following do Nancy Pelosi and the news media not understand? The Treaty is self-executing. It provides for a broad range of cooperation in criminal matters. Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state… ([etc].  How does this not permit Mr. Trump asking the president of Ukraine for “assistance” in criminal matters arising out of “collusion with Russia,” as specified within the scope of Robert Mueller’s special prosecutor activities? For instance, the matter of CrowdStrike. The cybersecurity firm was co-founded by Russian ex-pat Dmitri Alperovitch, who also happens to be a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, an anti-Russian think tank funded by Ukrainian billionaire, Viktor Pinchuk, who donated at least $25 million to the Clinton Foundation before the 2016 election. Crowdstrike was the company that “examined” the supposedly hacked DNC servers, while somebody in the Obama administration prevented the FBI from ever seeing them. Does this sound a little like part of the origin story of RussiaGate? Is that not exactly the potential criminal matter that the current attorney general, Mr. Barr, is officially investigating?

Freedom Rider: The Phony Ukraine Scandal - Black Agenda Report --Trump’s clumsy and stupid attempts to link Joe Biden and son to corruption in Ukraine has given Democrats a chance to revive their discredited Russiagate crusade. The blatant interference in the affairs of Ukraine is just one of the Barack Obama era scandals that the corporate media chose to cover up. In 2014 the United States culminated a decades long project to realize a so-called color revolution in Ukraine. Along with partner NGOs they assisted far right forces in overthrowing that country’s elected president. Ukraine is a failed state with an ongoing civil war because of this effort to pry it away from Russian influence and include it in NATO, the European Union and any other U.S./European axis configuration. Ukraine is in the news again but for all the wrong reasons. The same people who covered up the deadly power grab are now making hay out of Donald Trump’s foolishness. Trump is nothing if not consistent. He is a vindictive, thin skinned, dim witted bully who always sees himself as the aggrieved party. His sense of victimization prevented him from appreciating that he defeated the charges of Russian collusion meant to continue the anti-Russian foreign policy consensus. On July 24 Russiagate lost much of its political potency when Robert Mueller’s disastrous testimony proved that the narrative was a fraud. Instead of letting sleeping dogs lie he asked a foreign head of state to investigate another presidential candidate. Joe Biden is a walking disaster on his own. He is nearly as stupid and graceless as Trump but the Democratic Party is desperate to win with a neoliberal candidate who will please rich party donors and Wall Street. Biden’s disastrous debate performances and dubious activities should disqualify him but the Democrats are sticking with him for now. If he ended up winning the nomination the Republicans could have easily raised the issue of his son’s business dealings and his own foolishness in publicly bragging about his role in dismissing a Ukrainian prosecutor. Instead Trump snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with an act that was at the very least inappropriate and possibly illegal.

The Ukraine Scandal Might Be a Bad Gambit for Democrats Aaron Mate, By asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to assist with an investigation into Joe Biden, President Donald Trump clearly engaged in unethical conduct. After all, Biden could be Trump’s opponent in 2020. Regardless of whether or not the Biden family has had unsavory dealings in Ukraine, Trump should not enroll another country’s leader to find out. The whistle-blower’s concern that Trump attempted to “abuse his office for personal gain” is worthy of investigation. But whether this rises to the level of impeachment is a separate question. Impeachment is a political—not a legal—issue, and so the answer is based not only on the merits of the case but also on the consequences of pursuing it. Democratic leaders and media pundits are convinced that Trump extorted Ukraine by delaying military aid to compel an investigation into Biden. Their theory may prove correct, but the available evidence does not, as of now, make for a strong case. Trump had held up military aid to Ukraine by the time of his call with Zelensky, but if the public transcript is accurate, it did not come up during their conversation. According to The New York Times, Zelensky’s government did not learn that the military aid was frozen until more than one month later. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who met with Zelensky in early September, said that the Ukrainian president “did not make any connection between the aid that had been cut off and the requests that he was getting from [Trump attorney Rudy] Giuliani.” It will be difficult to prove extortion if Trump’s purported target was unaware.It is also unclear from the transcript what exactly Trump wants Zelensky to do. The president’s rambling leaves room for ambiguity. On the Biden front, Trump tells Zelensky that “whatever you can do with the Attorney General [William Barr] would be great” and also asks him to “look into it.” But Barr says that he and Trump never spoke about investigating Biden or contacting Ukraine; Zelensky says that he did not feel any pressure to investigate Biden; and “look into it” can be interpreted in ways ranging from damning to benign. Moreover, Trump’s foremost concern—and the object of the “favor” he asks Zelensky—is not Biden, but securing the Ukrainian president’s assistance with Barr’s review of the origins of the Russia investigation. Although he may be incoherent, Trump is within his rights to ask for Ukraine’s cooperation. As Lev Golinkin noted in The Nation, Ukrainian officials meddled in the 2016 election, with the explicit aim of hurting Trump’s candidacy, by leaking damaging information about Paul Manafort.

 Hunter Biden made $850,000 on board of Ukraine gas company - The son of Vice President Joe Biden, a lawyer-lobbyist with no known expertise in the production, transport, or distribution of natural gas, or in the complex financial operations of such a business, was placed on the board of the largest gas company in Ukraine in April 2014 and remained there until spring of this year, netting some $850,000 in payments. The Hunter Biden-Ukraine connection has become the trigger for the opening of impeachment proceedings against President Trump, but the connection itself is worth examining in its own right. The younger Biden’s career sheds light on the decay of American democracy and the vast social gulf that has opened up between the ruling elite and the vast majority of the population, struggling to survive from paycheck to paycheck, and, as a recent survey found, unable to afford paying an unexpected bill of $400. Hunter Biden, now aged 49, is the former vice president’s younger son, and the sole survivor among his children. Naomi, then a year old, was killed in the 1972 car crash that also took the life of Biden’s first wife. Beau Biden, the older son by one year, died of brain cancer in 2015. The younger Biden has always been the black sheep of the family, even according to various sympathetic accounts, most of them appearing in publications—The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post—favorable to the Democrats. The New Yorker piece, at more than 10,000 words by far the longest, published in July, was obviously planted by the Biden campaign for the purpose of venting all the bad news about Hunter Biden as a preemptive measure against anticipated stink bombs from the Trump campaign. It was prepared through lengthy interviews by reporter Adam Entous with Hunter Biden. And it delivers a lot of bad news about a career devoted apparently to influence-peddling and drug abuse, both on a scale that matches or exceeds that of any dubious relative of any previous president, at least until Donald Trump.

From 2014: R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings --Yves here. This 2014 post by our house Sherlock Holmes of international scammers, Richard Smith, is a classic example of Naked Capitalism not simply being onto a story early, but even more than five years later, demonstrably providing depth and detail you won’t find anywhere else.Richard did a deep dive into the dodgy appointment of Hunter Biden and then Secretary of State John Kerry’s long-standing bundler, Devon Archer, to the board of Burisma Holdings. Richard quickly got past the noteworthy fact that Biden Jr. was being paid quite a lot for no relevant expertise and no investment in the company…so what was he being paid for, exactly? Oh, and Richard also describes how Hunter’s and his uncle James Biden’s past financial rides were with con artists.But the real puzzlement is that from everything that can be inferred, Burisma is either tiny or just a shell company. So who is behind these big director payoffs payouts? Richard found some bread crumbs that pointed to Burisma being owned by Privat Group, a conglomerate controlled by the Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. We’ll turn the mike over to Mark Ames: Kolomoyskiy is the Berezovsky of current Ukrainian oligarchs. The dirtiest of the bunch, absolutely loathed by the IMF/creditor crowd especially for his theft of billions through the collapse of Privat Bank a few years ago. Yet Kolomoyskiy also was one of the main funders of the Maidan revolution and of many of the neo-Nazi paramilitary death squads (and yes, he’s Jewish and Israeli–just business, Fredo). Kolomoyskiy had to flee Ukraine to Switzerland for a couple of years in a classic intra-oligarch war with Poroshenko, IMF and others. He backed [recently elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky’s rise to power, and returned to Ukraine soon as Zelensky won. None of this will make for an easy narrative about Biden Jr. except to show what a dirty cesspool he’s profiting off amid all that mass poverty in Ukraine, of and what a shitshow his dad helped make of that cursed country.

Ukraine must investigate Joe Biden's son, says ex-Ukrainian PM (Reuters) - Ukraine must investigate the activities of U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son to establish whether his role in a Ukrainian gas company complied with the country’s laws, Mykola Azarov, Ukraine’s former prime minister, said in an interview. Former U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden makes a statement during an event in Wilmington, Delaware, U.S., September 24, 2019. REUTERS/Bastiaan Slabbers Azarov did not specify to which Ukrainian laws he was referring. Hunter Biden’s role in the company, Burisma Holdings Limited, is in focus after the White House released a memo showing U.S. President Donald Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a July phone call to get prosecutors to look into his activities. Zelenskiy agreed. “It’s a fact (his directorship and fees) and not made up. It should be investigated so that the ‘i’s can be dotted and the ‘t’s crossed,” Azarov told Reuters. A spokesperson for Joe Biden’s campaign declined to comment on Azarov’s investigation call and none of Hunter Biden’s critics have provided any evidence that he broke Ukrainian law. Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau said on Friday it was investigating activity at Burisma between 2010-2012, but that it was not looking into changes to its board in 2014, when Hunter Biden joined.

Trump reiterates call for Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, says China should investigate too -  President Donald Trump on Thursday said that China should look into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, on the eve of restarted trade talks between the two economic superpowers. Trump, speaking outside the White House before departing for Florida, mentioned China after reiterating his call for Ukraine to launch a probe into Biden and his son — a request he made in a prior phone call with Ukraine’s president that helped launch an impeachment inquiry. “If they were honest about it, they would start a major investigation into the Bidens,” Trump said when asked what he wanted Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to do about the former veep and his son.“They should investigate the Bidens,” Trump said. “Likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.”Trump pulled China into the brewing controversy just one week before a Chinese delegation was set to arrive in Washington to resume protracted trade negotiations. Administration officials have for many months signaled optimism about reaching a sweeping deal with China that addresses issues including trade deficits and intellectual property theft, and Trump told the U.N. General Assembly last week that he will not accept a “bad deal with China.The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s inquiry about whether the U.S.  has asked China to look into the Bidens. House Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, last week announced a formal impeachment inquiry based on a whistleblower complaint raising alarms about Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky. In that call, Trump asked if Ukraine could “look into” unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing against Biden and his son. “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great,” Trump said, according to a memorandum of the call released last week. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it, It sounds horrible to me.”

Sen. Susan Collins: Trump Asking China to Probe Biden Was ‘Big Mistake’ -- Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said Saturday it was “completely inappropriate” for President Trump to publicly urge the Chinese government to investigate his political rival. “I thought the president made a big mistake by asking China to get involved in investigating a political opponent,” Collins told the Bangor Daily News. The Maine senator joined Mitt Romney and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) in breaking rank with the rest of the GOP to criticize Trump’s public comment that China “should start an investigation” into former vice president Joe Biden and his son. Collins predicted that the House will pass articles of impeachment against Trump over allegations he dangled crucial security aid to Ukraine’s president to try and force that country to pursue an investigation into Biden, a frontrunner for the 2020 election. “Should the articles of impeachment come to the Senate — and right now I’m going to guess that they will — I will be acting as a juror as I did in the Clinton impeachment trial,” Collins said. 

Here We Go- Ukraine Reviews Probe Into Corrupt Biden-Linked Gas Company - After a week of non-stop "bombshell" leaks about the Democrats' impeachment probe into President Trump, which is supposedly trying to determine whether Trump pressured the newly elected Ukrainian President to push for investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden and their ties to a domestic gas company, the media is now being forced to confront another uncomfortable reality: That Ukrainian prosecutors appear to be finally moving ahead with a review of an investigation into a Biden-linked gas company, even after the alleged "quid pro quo" had been taken off the table.   Barely 12 hours after President Trump "recommended" that Ukraine and China start looking into the Bidens, WSJ reports that Ukraine’s general prosecutor’s office is reviewing investigations into a gas company that once paid Hunter Biden $50,000 a month to sit on its board.  Though Democrats have continued to insist that it's Trump, not Biden, who is truly guilty of corruption, the vice president doesn't sound too comfortable with all of this new scrutiny. During an appearance in Nevada last night, Biden insisted that Trump won't "destroy me" or "my family," and accused the president of using "dirty tricks".If prosecutors decide to reopen the probe, that would be the clearest sign yet that the Bidens might get caught up in an investigation - vindicating President Trump's efforts.The investigations, which were closed in 2016, weren't focused on Hunter Biden specifically.Instead, investigators were looking into "tax irregularities" at Burisma Group, the private gas company in Ukraine that had hired Hunter to sit on its board. Investigators were also reportedly looking into allegations of money-laundering and illegal-enrichment tied to the company's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.

The Self-Set Impeachment Trap - A note about the coming and much-cheered impeachment of Donald Trump. Of course impeachment was always the right thing to do. But having waited so long to do it, and having chosen Joe Biden’s integrity as the hill to die on, the decision to impeach Donald Trump now may be a trap for Democrats — in fact, several of them.If so, they did it to themselves. Let me explain. First, impeachment is without doubt the right thing for Congress to do — or would have been when cause was first given for doing it. Impeachment is the correct and only constitutional tool the Founders gave the government for removing a president guilty of the kinds of official sins Donald Trump has been decried for since his inauguration. They could have impeached Donald Trump in any year of his presidency for any number of harms. Instead they didn’t, saying as late as August 2019 in Nancy Pelosi’s words, “The public isn’t there on impeachment.”In other words, the rightness of impeachment was never a consideration for Democratic Party leaders. Pelosi’s statement that “the public isn’t there” signals with no confusion that impeaching Donald Trump is viewed by Party leaders as a political choice and not a constitutional duty. It says that Party leaders see impeachment as a bare calculation in which the benefit to the Party — electoral victory — must be served before the benefit to the nation — of drawing a line in the sand saying, “No president should ever do this again” — is even considered.If Democrats are this naked and open about saying that the act of impeachment, even of Donald Trump, is justified only if there’s a political benefit, why should the nation not say the same of them, that all they seek is a political benefit, just as nakedly and openly?Of course Republicans will say that. But what will the larger nation think? What have Democratic leaders led them to think?(Nancy Pelosi now asserts, of course, that her turnaround is principled, a result of Trump’s “betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.” But Ryan Grim of The Intercept offers plenty of evidence that part of what changed was the mood and politics of her House caucus and not her views on Congress’s constitutional duty.) So that’s trap one, that the Party’s turnaround on impeachment both ismerely political and will be seen as political, since a principled position would have been acted on years ago. The nation needed better than that from Democratic leaders, needed them to act from a stronger, more defensible position. The nation didn’t get what it needed, and both Democrats and the nation may soon pay a price for their failure.

Rick Perry's role in Ukraine under scrutiny - Congressional Democrats want to know more about Rick Perry's travels to Ukraine and conversations with officials there, signaling that the mild-mannered energy secretary won't escape the intense of heat of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. In a memo released Wednesday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) said he plans to issue a subpoena for White House documents by the end of the week centered on Trump's requests to the Ukrainian government to open an investigation into one of his chief political rivals, former vice president Joe Biden. Among the records his committee is seeking are any related to Perry's attendance of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's inauguration on May 20 as well as a White House meeting Perry attended three days later. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, similarly sent a letter to Perry on Tuesday asking him what instructions Trump gave him when the Cabinet official flew to Ukraine in May, as well as who asked Perry to go there in the first place. And three House committees on Monday issued a sweeping subpoena to Trump's personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in part seeking documents related to Perry. The multiple congressional inquiries have put a spotlight on Perry, who has distinguished himself during his time in the job for avoiding controversy. Though the energy secretary is not accused of wrongdoing and has not been directly subpoenaed, Perry and his Energy Department spent Wednesday reassuring congressional Democrats they will cooperate with the impeachment probe.. “Regardless of subject, the Department is always willing to work with Congress in response to requests that follow proper procedures,” Energy Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes wrote by email. On Wednesday, Perry declined to say to reporters whether he was on the July phone call. He joked that he was asked to fill in for Pence in Ukraine in May because he is “just such a darn good Cabinet member.” As energy secretary, Perry has regularly traveled to Eastern Europe to promote the sale of U.S.-produced natural gas and coal. “I've had the opportunity to go into so many different countries to represent the United States, our energy opportunities,” Perry said Wednesday. “Ukraine is one of those.” 

Trump Claims Energy Secretary Rick Perry Is Behind Ukraine Call at Heart of Impeachment Inquiry: Report - President Trump has reportedly tried to pin the explosive Ukraine call at the center of an impeachment inquiry on Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Citing three sources said to have been on a conference call between Trump and House Republicans on Friday, Axios reports that the president claimed Perry had asked him to make the July phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that sparked a whistleblower complaint. Trump reportedly claimed that he did not even want to call Zelensky, but said Perry had wanted him to inquire about a liquified natural gas plant. Trump is currently facing an impeachment inquiry for allegedly using that phone call to pressure Zelensky to pursue an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden and his son's ties to a major Ukrainian gas company. Trump’s new claim is contradicted by text messages released earlier this week between top U.S. diplomats and Andrey Yermak, an aide to Zelensky, which suggest Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was a primary advocate for arranging the call.

Mike Pence Took Part in Ukraine Pressure Campaign: WaPo -  In a meeting last month, Vice President Mike Pence told the Ukrainian president that the U.S. would withhold military aid until the country took a stance against corruption, The Washington Post reports. During the Sept. 1 meeting in Warsaw, Pence reportedly did not mention the corruption allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky likely thought the “corruption” Pence was talking about was a reference to the corruption investigations into the Bidens that President Trump pushed on Zelensky during a July 25 call, the Postreports. Trump also reportedly told Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration in May. Sources close to Pence told the Post the vice president was unaware of Trump’s efforts to push for the probes into Biden and his son, and denied the vice president knew he was carrying a coded message to the Sept. 1 meeting. “The president consistently raised concerns about corruption and the lack of burden sharing by European partners, so having run on an anti-corruption campaign, Zelensky was receptive to those messages,” Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, said. “The vice president, as your reporting says, reported back to the president after the meeting and the aid was released.” 

‘Coded racist rhetoric’? CNN under fire for crediting group of white congresswomen with Trump impeachment inquiry CNN has found new heroes of the unraveling Trump impeachment saga – a group of white congresswomen with security backgrounds – and got its woke image tarnished for forgetting Maxine Waters, Al Green and AOC’s “squad.” The story focuses on a group of “moderate” freshman congresswomen — Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan), Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pennsylvania), Mikie Sherrill (D-New Jersey) and Elaine Luria (D-Virginia) — who all changed their minds and decided to back the House impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump last week. All of them have served either in the military or in the CIA. CNN said their decision to back the inquiry “changed history,” prompting outrage from critics who noticed that the piece makes some not-so-thinly-veiled jabs at the more vocal ‘squad’ of four anti-Trump freshmen – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachussetts) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). “None of us is ever going to get in a Twitter war with anyone else,” Slotkin told CNN, while Spanberger said none of the moderate group wants to be “the loudest voice in the room” but would rather be “the most effective.” That bit about being effective got CNN accused of employing “coded racist rhetoric” against the 'squad' by giving the impression that they were loud and ineffective by comparison.

Pelosi's Impeachment Trap -- America’s Democrats have made a serious mistake by launching impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. They are replaying the Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, a futile exercise that damaged Republicans, enhanced Clinton’s power, and caused institutional damage as well. The common factor of the two impeachments is that it was clear from the start that the US Senate would never convict, which requires a two-thirds majority. The 45 Senate Democrats were not happy that Clinton perjured himself before a grand jury, obstructed justice, and conducted an extramarital sexual affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. But they did not believe that this behavior was grounds for removal from office. The behavior was not sufficiently egregious to overcome their political loyalty to a president who remained popular with voters. Republicans leading the impeachment knew that few if any Senate Democrats would vote to convict (in fact, none did). But Republicans hoped to embarrass the Democrats and damage Clinton, believing that they would pick up some seats in the November 1998 election by launching impeachment proceedings before then. They were wrong. Clinton’s popularity rose after the impeachment proceedings ended. Most Americans believed that impeachment was a mistake. Many people worried that the Clinton impeachment would damage the presidency, but its main impact on presidential power was the opposite. Republicans eventually agreed with Democrats that responsibility for the debacle lay with Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel whose investigations of Clinton’s real-estate dealings years earlier eventually led him to Lewinsky. The two parties allowed the independent counsel statute to lapse, freeing the presidency from a powerful form of oversight, much to Trump’s benefit a generation later. Today, Senate Republicans may well be privately concerned about Trump’s behavior. But there is no indication that even one would vote in favor of removal. While Trump is nowhere near as popular as Clinton was, he retains the loyalty of his base, who dominate the Republican primaries, and, unlike Clinton, he enjoys majority support in the Senate. Indeed, the extraordinary enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters – their indifference to his many other scandals – almost guarantees that any additional information that might materialize during the impeachment hearings will not influence Republican senators. 

Do You Have a Lisance for that Minky? -  Kunstler -  Sometimes, if you open up a big enough gate and stand in the void, the gate will swing back and slap you on the ass — which is where serial bungler and arch-schlemiel Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) finds himself at the end of an exhausting week’s dissembling in the WhistleGate matter. Long about now, his reluctant partner in the latest impeachment gambit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, must feel date-raped just a little bit as every unraveling thread in the story leads back to another exposed deception by Schiff, the Inspector Clouseau of impeachment politics.Maybe reading an alt-reality version of the Trump-Zelensky phone transcript wasn’t such a hot idea after all, since he read into the record evidence of his own bad faith. What was at issue, of course, were the President’s words, and in substituting something demonstrably other than that, and placing it on the record, Rep. Schiff set up a prima facie case for dismissal of his own case against Mr. Trump. Any way you slice the stunt, it smells like malfeasance.Then there is the alleged “Whistleblower.” The identity of this shadowy figure can’t be concealed indefinitely. The Whistleblower may not even exist, and if he or she does, the classification of whistleblower may not apply to the actions taken by him/her and his/her managers. He/she has been officially described as a CIA agent detailed for some time in the White House during the Obama years, who may have been rotated back into the Trump White House on the pretext of some special expertise, say Ukrainian affairs. That suggests his/her origin as a John Brennan tool. That is, the former CIA chief now nervously awaiting the legal disposition of his intrigues in the RussiaGate matter. WhistleGate may be Mr. Brennan’s last desperate ploy to ward off prosecution, a gate too far.  The first casualty of WhistleGate is the Democratic party’s front-runner in the 2020 presidential contest, Joe Biden, who may now spend his retirement years doing Chinese fire drills in the federal courts for influence peddling in connection with his bag-man son, R. Hunter Biden. I suspect the Dems are glad to get rid of stumbling, fumbling Uncle Joe, who was finding it hard to run with one foot constantly in his mouth. Now they’re stuck with candidates dedicated to open borders, free health care for border-jumpers, and a whole lot more obviously insane policy experiments borrowed from the Herbert Marcuse playbook. Good luck with that.

Support for impeaching Trump hits new high -Support for impeaching President Donald Trump is growing. A batch of recent polling confirms the Democratic impeachment push is gaining steam — including a new POLITICO/Morning Consult survey that shows for the first time that more voters support than oppose proceedings to remove Trump from office. The uptick is primarily among Democrats, as Republican voters surveyed continue to have Trump's back. In the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, 46 percent of voters said Congress should begin impeachment proceedings vs. 43 percent who said they should not. Eleven percent had no opinion. That support represented a 3-point bump from last week, when voters were evenly split. The new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll comes as at least a half-dozen other media outlets have released surveys showing support for impeachment rising. The polls suggest that Democrats are gaining support for the impeachment inquiry as the Ukraine scandal unspools. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had resisted escalating the House’s investigations of Trump because of the political risks, but the latest surveys suggest the party is unlikely to bleed support from Democratic voters over the decision to challenge Trump head-on.Still, the move isn’t without risk. The percentage of voters who disapprove of Trump’s job performance in the latest poll, 56 percent, still exceeds the 46 percent who think Congress should begin impeachment proceedings to remove him, or the 51 percent who say they support the current impeachment inquiry — a step short of actual impeachment proceedings. Those findings indicate that there is a slice of moderate voters who disapprove of Trump but think Democrats are going too far.  And when the polls ask specifically about removing Trump from office, voters are sharply divided or tilt against it. In a Monmouth University poll released Tuesday, 49 percent of voters called the impeachment inquiry a “good idea,” while 43 percent said it was a “bad idea.” But only 44 percent said Trump should be forced out of office, fewer than the 52 percent who said he shouldn’t.

The Problem With Impeachment - Chris Hedges - Impeaching Donald Trump would do nothing to halt the deep decay that has beset the American republic. It would not magically restore democratic institutions. It would not return us to the rule of law. It would not curb the predatory appetites of the big banks, the war industry and corporations. It would not get corporate money out of politics or end our system of legalized bribery. It would not halt the wholesale surveillance and monitoring of the public by the security services. It would not end the reigns of terror practiced by paramilitary police in impoverished neighborhoods or the mass incarceration of 2.3 million citizens. It would not impede ICE from hunting down the undocumented and ripping children from their arms to pen them in cages. It would not halt the extraction of fossil fuels and the looming ecocide. It would not give us a press freed from the corporate mandate to turn news into burlesque for profit. It would not end our endless and futile wars. It would not ameliorate the hatred between the nation’s warring tribes—indeed would only exacerbate these hatreds.Impeachment is about cosmetics. It is about replacing the public face of empire with a political mandarin such as Joe Biden, himself steeped in corruption and obsequious service to the rich and corporate power, who will carry out the same suicidal policies with appropriate regal decorum. The ruling elites have had enough of Trump’s vulgarity, stupidity and staggering ineptitude. They turned on him not over an egregious impeachable offense—there have been numerous impeachable offenses including the use of the presidency for personal enrichment, inciting violence and racism, passing on classified intelligence to foreign officials, obstruction of justice and a pathological inability to tell the truth—but because he made the fatal mistake of trying to take down a fellow member of the ruling elite. Yes, Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to give him dirt on Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, and there probably is some. Yes, it appears the U.S. president withheld roughly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in order to exert leverage over that government. Yes, he attempted to block the release of the whistleblower report that detailed his conduct. Yes, this is a violation of the law, one that many Democrats in Congress see as an impeachable offense. But this kind of dirty quid pro quo is the staple of politics and international relations.

Dead Deutsche Banker's Son Peddled Trump Financial "Dirt" To The Highest Bidder - Which Adam Schiff Promptly Subpoenaed -- A trove of insider Deutsche Bank documents was subpoenaed by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) after a bizarre series of events involving Moby. Val Broeksmit, stepson of top Deutche Bank executive Bill Broeksmit - who committed suicide in January 2014 in the wake of several banking scandals he had overseen, had been trying to sell or distribute information from the German bank which he obtained after his father's death, which may have contained information on Donald Trump, according to the New York Times.  Mr. Broeksmit’s late father, Bill, had been a senior executive there, and his son possessed a cache of confidential bank documents that provided a tantalizing glimpse of its internal workings. Some of the documents were password-protected, and there was no telling what secrets they held or how explosive they could be.  Federal and state authorities were swarming around Deutsche Bank. Some of the scrutiny centered on the lender’s two-decade relationship with President Trump and his family. Other areas of focus grew out of Deutsche Bank’s long history of criminal misconduct: manipulating markets, evading taxes, bribing foreign officials, violating international sanctions, defrauding customers, laundering money for Russian billionaires. –NYT Broeksmit was eventually introduced to Schiff through the musician Moby (Schiff's "friend and neighbor" who said the CIA asked him to help spread dirt on Trump and Russia - h/t @LeicaLexus). When Schiff refused to pay for the materials, the lawmaker instead issued a subpoena for them.  Mr. Schiff’s investigators badly wanted the secret Deutsche files. Mr. Broeksmit tried to extract money from them — he pushed to be hired as a consultant to the committee — but that was a nonstarter. An investigator, Daniel Goldman, appealed to his sense of patriotism and pride. “Imagine a scenario where some of the material that you have can actually provide the seed that we can then use to blow open everything that [Trump] has been hiding,” Mr. Goldman told Mr. Broeksmit in a recorded phone call. “In some respects, you — and your father vicariously through you — will go down in American history as a hero and as the person who really broke open an incredibly corrupt president and administration.” (Mr. Broeksmit wouldn’t budge; eventually, Mr. Schiff subpoenaed him.) –NYT

Twitter Removes Viral Biden Meme Posted By Trump -- Twitter removed a viral meme posted by President Trump which highlighted Joe Biden’s duplicity on his son’s business dealings in response to a claim by the copyright owner.  The meme showed Biden denying that he had ever spoken to his son Hunter about the latter’s overseas business dealings. The clip then cuts to a Nickelback video with the lyrics, “Look at this photograph, every time I do it makes me laugh.”  A photograph of Biden, his son Hunter, and a man identified as a “Ukraine gas exec” on a golf course together appears on screen with hearts drawn around their heads.  The meme was removed by Twitter this morning in response to a request from the copyright owner. Warner Media Group owns the rights to Nickelback’s music and it is likely they who asked Twitter to take it down.

Trump Asked Australian PM to Help Barr Investigate Mueller Findings: Report -  President Trump asked Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to help U.S. Attorney General William Barr investigate the Mueller Report, according to a report from the New York Times.  The Times based its report on two anonymous American officials who claim to have knowledge of the phone conversation between Trump and Morrison. One of these officials said that the transcript of the call was restricted to a small circle of aides, similar to the process carried out regarding the transcript of a call between Trump and Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelentsky, which is now at the center of an impeachment inquiry against Trump.  According to the officials, Trump spoke to Morrison to ask for the Australian government’s cooperation with a Justice Department review of the Mueller investigation into alleged collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russian government members during the 2016 presidential election. The investigation eventually dismissed those allegations. One official said the conversation came at Barr’s request. Former justice department officials told theTimes that Barr would need to request the cooperation of foreign governments in order to obtain documents relating Barr’s probe of the Mueller investigation.  When asked for comment, a Justice Department official told NBC that Barr’s request “wasn’t a push. It was an ask.”

 Trump Called Boris Johnson for Help Discrediting Mueller Inquiry: Report -- President Trump called Boris Johnson to ask for help in discrediting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, The Times of London reports. Trump is said to have called Johnson on July 26, two days after the prime minister took office, and reportedly asked Johnson for help in gathering evidence to undermine the investigation into his campaign’s links to Russia. That call also was one day after Trump spoke to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in the phone call that sparked the impeachment proceedings against him. Trump also contacted the Australian prime minister for help with an investigation into the origins of the Mueller inquiry. The Times reports Attorney General William Barr arrived in London days after Trump’s call with Johnson to attend a meeting of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. Barr reportedly told British officials that he suspected the information that led to the Mueller investigation came from British agencies.

DOJ says Trump contacted foreign countries to assist Barr's Russia inquiry -The Department of Justice (DOJ) said Monday that President Trump contacted foreign countries at Attorney General William Barr’s request to ask them for assistance in an ongoing investigation into the origins of the Russian interference probe.“As the Department of Justice has previously announced, a team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins of the U.S. counterintelligence probe of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Durham is gathering information from numerous sources, including a number of foreign countries,” Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in a statement.“At Attorney General Barr’s request, the President has contacted other countries to ask them to introduce the Attorney General and Mr. Durham to appropriate officials,” Kupec added.The Justice Department statement quickly followed reports that Trump had asked Australia’s prime minister during a recent phone call to assist Barr in gathering information for the Russia inquiry and that Barr had held meetings overseas in Italy seeking the country's help. Barr has also reportedly requested assistance from British intelligence officials in connection with the inquiry.   Democrats have accused Trump and Barr of pursuing a politically motivated investigation. Trump railed against former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe as a “witch hunt” and has at times claimed the investigation into his campaign’s links to Russia was “illegal.”White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said Monday that Barr asked Trump to “provide introductions to facilitate” the ongoing investigation, accusing Democrats of not wanting “the truth to come out.” "This call relates to a DOJ inquiry publicly announced months ago to uncover exactly what happened," Gidley said in a statement Monday. "The DOJ simply requested that the President provide introductions to facilitate that ongoing inquiry, and he did so, that's all."

‘Straight Shooter’ Justice Dept. Watchdog Has Held His Fire on Powerful People - As Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz finalizes his probe of allegations of abuses surrounding the surveillance of a Trump campaign aide, some colleagues and Republican lawmakers say they have no doubt he's conducted a tough, impartial investigation. They expect him to deliver a hard-hitting report, due for release next month. Others are more skeptical. While acknowledging that Horowitz is widely respected, these critics say his work has long been hampered by biases, conflicts and a tendency to play favorites, as in past probes of former FBI Director James Comey, whom Horowitz worked under in New York. Their main complaint is that he pulls his punches. In probing whether Comey illegally leaked classified information to the New York Times, Horowitz in the end accepted his argument that the memo of a conversation with President Trump was sensitive but “not classified” – even though the memo contained information about the FBI's ongoing counterintelligence investigation of the president’s national security adviser. “I see a pattern of him pulling up short and trying to be a bit of a statesman instead of making the hard calls,” said Chris Swecker, a 24-year veteran of the FBI who served as assistant director of its criminal investigative division, where he oversaw public corruption cases. "I’m afraid he’s going to do the same thing with the FISA report – a finding that sounds tough, but in the end, ‘No harm, no foul,’ ” Swecker added, in reference to Horowitz’s probe of possible Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses against Carter Page, the former Trump adviser.

 Trump lawyers tell judge House Democrats can't sue for his tax returns - President Trump's lawyers in a filing Monday urged a federal judge to toss out a House Democratic lawsuit aimed at obtaining the president's tax returns. The lawyers, who represent both the administration and Trump personally, argued that the House Ways and Means Committee does not have the right to sue the president to enforce a subpoena for his tax returns. Trump's lawyers described congressional lawsuits against the president as "foreign" to the judicial system established in the Constitution in their memo to Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "The dispute here entails no injury to Congress cognizable within the judicial power of the United States, and the Committee lacks the authority to sue on the House’s behalf in any event," the memo stated. Trump's lawyers said the court does not have jurisdiction to intervene in the dispute between the House committee and the executive branch over the subpoenas. "Even if Congress could grant federal courts subject matter jurisdiction to enforce its informational demands to the Executive Branch, Congress has nowhere attempted to confer jurisdiction upon the courts to enforce subpoenas issued by the House," the memo read. The memo further stated that the Ways and Means Committee needs to continue negotiations with the president's lawyers until all options are exhausted before suing for the tax returns. "The Court should not adjudicate the merits of this suit unless and until the Committee earnestly pursues and exhausts the constitutionally mandated negotiation and accommodation process," Trump's lawyers argued.

There’s Another Whistleblower Complaint. It’s About Trump’s Tax Returns. -An unnamed civil servant is alleging serious interference in government business. If the allegations are true, they could be a game-changer. They might set in motion the release of lots of other secret documents showing that President Trump has abused his authority for his personal benefit.  This whistleblower alleges a whole different category of impropriety: that someone has been secretly meddling with the Internal Revenue Service’s audit of the president.In defiance of a half-century norm, Trump has kept his tax returns secret.We don’t know exactly what he might be hiding. His bizarre behavior, though, suggests it’s really bad.  Maybe these documents would reveal something embarrassing but not criminal (e.g., the relatively puny size of his fortune). Maybe they’d reveal that some of his financial dealings are legally dubious or even fraudulent, which would be consistent with past Trump-family tax behavior.Most significantly, they might reveal that Trump has been profiting off the presidency. Among the relevant conflict-of-interest questions that Trump’s taxes could answer: whom he gets money from, whom he owes money to (and on what terms) or how his 2017 tax overhaul enriched him personally.Not that you’d know it from the administration’s stonewalling, but Congress actually has unambiguous authority to get Trump’s returns. In fact, it has had the authority to get any federal tax return, no questions asked, for nearly a century. Under a 1924 law, Treasury “shall furnish” any tax document requested by the House Ways and Means or Senate Finance Committee chairs. That’s exactly what the House Ways and Means chairman, Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), did in the spring. The statute doesn’t require him to state any legislative purpose for his request, but he provided one anyway: He said that committee needed to make sure the IRS, which it oversees, is properly conducting its annual audit of the president and vice president, as the IRS manual has required post-Watergate.

House Dems Probe Trump Hotels ‘Ghost Bookings’ by Foreign Governments, Groups - House Democrats are reportedly looking into allegations that groups, including at least one foreign government, have booked blocks of Trump Hotel rooms with no intention of using them. Politico reports the hotel probe is part of a broader investigation by the House Oversight Committee into whether the president is breaking the law by accepting money from the U.S. or foreign governments through his properties. House investigators are looking into the allegations that powerful groups tried to please the president by booking rooms at his hotels, but never staying in them. “Now we’re looking at near raw bribery,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) said, according to Politico. “That was the risk from day one—foreign governments and others trying to seek favor because we know Trump pays attention to this.... It’s an obvious attempt to curry favor with him.”

Warren lobbying tax could hit banking industry hard — Financial services trade groups and large banks are among the organizations targeted in Sen. Elizabeth Warren's proposal to impose steep taxes on lobbying. In a blog post Wednesday, the Massachusetts Democrat and presidential candidate announced what she described as a crackdown on “excessive lobbying.” Her plan would impose a 35% tax on lobbying expenditures between $500,000 and $1 million per year by corporations and trade groups. Organizations that spend between $1 million and $5 million would face a 60% tax. Lobbying expenditures above $5 million would be taxed at 75%. “This tax will reduce the incentive for excessive lobbying, and raise money that we can use to fight back against this kind of onslaught when it occurs,” Warren wrote in a blog post on her campaign website. “Every dollar raised by the lobbying tax will be placed into a new Lobbying Defense Trust Fund dedicated to directing a surge of resources to Congress and federal agencies to fight back against the effort to bury public interest actions by the government.” In the post, Warren described corporate lobbyists as “experts at killing widely popular policies behind closed doors.” Some details of the plan remained murky, but the various tax buckets suggest several trade groups who speak on behalf of financial services firms would be affected, based on data for their lobbying expenditures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The American Bankers Association would likely be the only banking trade group to be taxed at the 75% level. The group has already spent more than $5 million on lobbying in 2019, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. The Independent Community Bankers of America and the Consumer Bankers Association would be subjected to the 60% tax on expenditures for spending more than $1 million on lobbying in 2019, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. The Bank Policy Institute, which was formed last year when the Clearing House Association and the Financial Services Roundtable merged, would at least be subjected to the 35% lobbying tax. The group has spent about $840,000 so far on lobbying in 2019, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The proposal would not subject just trade groups to new taxes. Lobbying expenditures at a number of large and regional banks exceeded the minimums Warren proposes for her lobbying tax, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Among the four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase all would face the 60% tax with their lobbying expenditures each exceeding $1 million.

Repo Turmoil Lets Banks Pump Low-Risk Profits -- The turmoil that’s gripped repo markets this month, leaving hedge funds and small broker-dealers scrambling for cash, has turned into a stream of low-risk profits for some of the world’s biggest banks. When the low-profile system for short-term secured lending sputtered for lack of funding, sending borrowing costs to the highest in a decade, banks flush with cash were slow to step forward, reined in by new rules and lacking traders with expertise. But behind the scenes, lenders such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. have begun offering more money, lured by much higher returns than they get parking it at the central bank, according to executives in the market. The result: Banks have offered enough to burnish their earnings. Yet it’s too little to let the market function as quietly and smoothly as it has for the much of the past decade. The dysfunction has kept the Federal Reserve pumping in money to ease the pain of hedge funds and broker-dealers that need to finance their Treasury holdings. Large U.S. banks grew hesitant to respond to swings in repo markets for a variety of reasons including post-crisis liquidity and capital rules that constrain their flexibility to act and a reduction of desks that handle such deals. It all came to a head suddenly in mid-September, when a confluence of factors left an unusually severe shortage of cash in a critical part of the global financial system’s plumbing. The money that big banks were willing to lend fell out of balance with the volume of securities that dealers hoped to finance -- far beyond the crunches more typically seen at the end of financial quarters. The Federal Reserve has been intervening ever since, pumping in cash to keep funding markets working. The situation cast a spotlight on how thoroughly the environment for short-term funding has changed since the 2008 credit crisis, according to bank executives, traders and observers of the market. They said that’s even created a generational gap: Big banks and regulators have seen so little repo-market turmoil in recent years that they have lost some of their reflexes.

The Repo Loan Crisis, Dead Bankers, and Deutsche Bank: Timeline of Events - Pam Martens - Last week, as the Fed was carrying out hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency loan operations on Wall Street for the second week in a row – the first such operations since the financial crisis – Deutsche Bank’s headquarters office in Frankfurt, Germany was being raided by police for the second time in less than a year. That’s not the sort of thing that inspires confidence among depositors to keep their money in your bank. Deutsche Bank has been a constant headache for the U.S. financial system because it is heavily intertwined via derivatives with the big banks on Wall Street, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. It has become the dark cloud on the horizon in the same way Citigroup cast a negative pall in the early days of the financial crisis of 2008. (It’s not a good omen that Citigroup’s stock eventually went to 99 cents and the bank received the largest taxpayer and Federal Reserve bailout in U.S. history. The Fed alone secretly pumped $2.5 trillion in revolving loans into Citigroup from December 2007 to the middle of 2010.) The latest raid at Deutsche Bank occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, September 24 and 25, and was related to the $220 billion money laundering probe of Danske Bank, Denmark’s largest lender. Deutsche Bank served as correspondent bank to Danske’s Estonia branch where the laundering is alleged to have occurred. On Wednesday, as the raid was proceeding, the body of Aivar Rehe who previously ran the Estonia business of Danske Bank, was discovered by police in Estonia. Rehe had been questioned by prosecutors and was considered a key witness in the probe. His death is being called an apparent suicide by European media. On the day the police raid started at Deutsche Bank, Tuesday, September 24, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York offered $30 billion in 14-day emergency term loans and had demand for more than twice that amount. That led the New York Fed to increase its subsequent 14-day term loans from $30 billion to $60 billion later in the week. The Fed’s overnight repo loans that were offered every day last week were also increased from $75 billion per day to $100 billion per day. As the timeline below illustrates, Deutsche Bank has been in a slow motion collapse as a result of its serial crime charges while international regulators have failed to address the fact that it is a counterparty to $49 trillion notional (face amount) in derivatives according to its 2018 annual report and thus presents systemic risk throughout the global financial system. Wall Street On Parade believes that the repo crisis on Wall Street may, at least in part, relate to big Wall Street banks backing away from lending to Deutsche Bank. You can read the timeline below and make up your own mind.

Too big to lend? JPMorgan cash hit Fed limits, roiling U.S. repos  (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co has become so big that some rival banks and analysts say changes to its $2.7 trillion balance sheet were a factor in a spike last month in the U.S. “repo” market, which is crucial to many borrowers. Rates in the $2.2 trillion market for repurchase agreements rose as high as 10% on September 17 as demand for overnight cash from companies, banks and other borrowers exceeded supply. While not seen as an sign of distress as it was during the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in 2008, the spike did prompt the U.S. Federal Reserve to promise to lend at least $75 billion each day until Oct. 10 to relieve the pressure. Analysts and bank rivals said big changes JPMorgan made in its balance sheet played a role in the spike in the repo market, which is an important adjunct to the Fed Funds market and used by the Fed to influence interest rates. Without reliable sources of loans through the repo market, the financial system risks losing a valuable source of liquidity. Hedge funds, for example, use it to finance investments in U.S. Treasury securities and banks turn to it as option for raising suddenly-needed cash for clients. Publicly-filed data shows JPMorgan reduced the cash it has on deposit at the Federal Reserve, from which it might have lent, by $158 billion in the year through June, a 57% decline.

JPMorgan Chase Has a Pattern of Criminality; Now Wall Street Is Pointing to the Bank as a Cause of the Fed’s Emergency Loans - Pam Martens - Two notable things happened on Monday, September 16, 2019. Rates started to spike in the overnight loan (repo) market, reaching a high of 10 percent the next day and forcing the Federal Reserve to step in as a lender of last resort for the first time since the financial crisis. The Fed has had to intervene every business day since then with overnight loans, funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to its primary dealers, while also providing $150 billion in 14-day term loans to unnamed banks. The other notable thing to occur on September 16 was this: The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, had its precious metals desk charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with being a criminal enterprise for approximately eight years as it rigged the prices of gold, silver and other precious metals. The head of that desk and two other precious metals traders were charged with racketeering under the RICO statute that is typically reserved for organized crime. The Justice Department said that the traders and their co-conspirators (others may be named at a later date) “conducted the affairs of the desk through a pattern of racketeering activity, specifically, wire fraud affecting a financial institution and bank fraud.” Wall Street veterans cannot remember any other time in history when the RICO statute (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) was used against a large bank in the United States. It was, however, used to indict members of the Gambino and Bonanno crime families in 2017. JPMorgan Chase and its wily Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, knew that the Justice Department was likely to be making serious charges about its precious metals desk. One of its traders on that desk, John Edmonds, had pleaded guilty to the Justice Department in October of last year and was cooperating in the probe. In its February 2019 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, JPMorgan Chase indicated that it knew more charges could be coming, writing that: “Various authorities, including the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, are conducting investigations relating to trading practices in the precious metals markets and related conduct.” Yesterday, Reuters’ David Henry reported the following:“Analysts and bank rivals said big changes JPMorgan made in its balance sheet played a role in the spike in the repo market, which is an important adjunct to the Fed Funds market and used by the Fed to influence interest rates…“Publicly-filed data shows JPMorgan reduced the cash it has on deposit at the Federal Reserve, from which it might have lent, by $158 billion in the year through June, a 57% decline.” Reuters quotes an unnamed executive from another Wall Street bank calling JPMorgan’s cash move from the Fed “massive.” And, indeed, moving $158 billion within a 6-month period is not small change. The Reuters’ article notes further that JPMorgan’s draw down on its cash “accounted for about a third of the drop in all banking reserves at the Fed during the period.”

Banks roll out repo-linked lending rates but await further rate cuts-  Banks have started rolling out benchmark-linked lending rates as per the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) mandate. RBI had decided in favour of external benchmark linked lending rates over the existing marginal cost of funds-based lending rate (MCLR) system because according to the regulator, the transmission of policy rate changes to the lending rate of banks under the MCLR framework wasn't satisfactory.The regulator issued a circular on 4 September mandating that banks link all new floating rate loans to an external benchmark like repo rate, 3-month or 6-month treasury bill yield, or any other benchmark published by the Financial Benchmarks India Pvt. Ltd., from 1 October 2019. Most banks have chosen to link their rates with RBI repo rate, and even before RBI had made it mandatory, several banks, including State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda and Oriental Bank of Commerce had launched repo-linked lending rate products. This was done in an effort to ensure faster transmission of policy rate cuts to borrowers.While most banks have chosen to link their rates to the repo rate which is currently at 5.4%, many haven’t put out their detailed rate structure. The exact numbers are still up in the air as banks wait for RBI's monetary policy review due on 4 October, in which the RBI is expected to cut rates by another 25 basis points, which would bring down the lending rates further. RBI has cut the repo rate by 110 basis points from 6.5% to 5.4% since January.

There’s Nothing Normal About the Fed Pumping Hundreds of Billions Weekly to Unnamed Banks on Wall Street: “Somebody’s Got a Problem” -- Pam Martens - Yesterday, the House Financial Services Committee released its hearing schedule for October. There is not a peep about holding a hearing on the unprecedented hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is pumping into unnamed banks on Wall Street at a time when there is no public acknowledgement of any kind of financial crisis taking place. Congressional committees should have been instantly on top of the Fed’s actions when they first started on September 17 because the Fed had gone completely rogue from 2007 to 2010 in funneling an unfathomable $29 trillion in revolving loans to Wall Street and global banks without authority or even awareness from Congress. The Fed also fought a multi-year court battle with the media in an effort to keep its giant money funnel a secret. According to Section 1101 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, both the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee are to be briefed on any emergency loans made by the Fed, including the names of the banks doing the borrowing. The section reads:  “The [Federal Reserve] Board shall provide to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate and the Committee on Financial Services of the House of Representatives, (i) not later than 7 days after the Board authorizes any loan or other financial assistance under this paragraph, a report that includes (I) the justification for the exercise of authority to provide such assistance; (II) the identity of the recipients of such assistance; (III) the date and amount of the assistance, and form in which the assistance was provided; and (IV) the material terms of the assistance, including — (aa) duration; (bb) collateral pledged and the value thereof; (cc) all interest, fees, and other revenue or items of value to be received in exchange for the assistance; (dd) any requirements imposed on the recipient with respect to employee compensation, distribution of dividends, or any other corporate decision in exchange for the assistance; and (ee) the expected costs to the taxpayers of such assistance…”  According to multiple sources we queried, the New York Fed has not made the names of these banks doing the borrowing available to either the Senate or House committees. And if there is pushback from the Committees, the public is not hearing about it. It was this exact kind of complacency and lack of leadership on the part of Congress in the early days of the financial crisis in 2007 that gave the Fed the guts to press a button and electronically create trillions of dollars to bail out the worst actors on Wall Street as they used large chunks of that money to reward themselves with tens of millions of dollars in bonuses and pay billions of dollars of the bailout money to lawyers to block their being prosecuted for fraud.

Fed plans meeting to finalize reg relief for midsize banks — The Federal Reserve Board will hold a meeting next week to finalize changes to its enhanced supervision program as well as requirements for institutions to submit wind-down plans. The meeting Thursday will focus on a plan seen as benefiting mostly midsize and regional banks. The Fed in October proposed to create a tiered structure for domestic bank and thrift holding companies with over $100 billion of assets. The proposal would be a departure from the post-crisis policy of subjecting all banks with over $50 billion of assets to enhanced supervision. Under the new system, supervision for midsize banks would be eased compared to the largest banks. The Fed also proposed in April a similar tiered structure for foreign banks and a reduction in how often firms submit resolution plans. The Fed proposed some of the changes on its own and some in concert with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The new structure would reduce capital, liquidity and procedural requirements for many of the bank holding companies the Fed supervises. But in certain cases, the liquidity requirements for some foreign banks would actually become stronger. The October proposal for U.S. banks was largely mandated by the regulatory law enacted by Congress last spring. While lawmakers had not specifically required the central bank to alter foreign bank requirements, the plan to do so was widely anticipated. The Fed will also discuss the April proposal to ease living will requirements, which was issued jointly FDIC. That plan would create similar risk-based categories to tailor resolution plan requirements for firms based mostly on size. Federal Reserve Gov. Lael Brainard dissented from all of the proposals.

Derivative Risks Rising: Sell-Off in Interconnected Mega Banks and Insurers - Pam Martens -  -- The Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost 838 points in the past two days of trading. On a percentage basis, its losses pale in comparison to the losses experienced over the past two days by some of the biggest global banks as well as insurance companies that are derivative counterparties to the big banks. Mega banks continue to be allowed to tie their risky trading gambles to the balance sheets of insurers that also hold life insurance policies and retirement annuities for Moms and Pops across the U.S. by using the insurers as counterparties for their derivative trades. That this is still happening illustrates just how little has changed in the way of enlightened regulation of Wall Street since the banks brought down the big insurer, AIG, in 2008. The U.S. government was forced to seize AIG and institute a $185 billion bailout. AIG also held life insurance policies and retirement annuities for Moms and Pops across the country while it was simultaneously backing tens of billions of dollars of credit derivatives for Wall Street banks, which it couldn’t make good on. We know which insurance companies are making risky derivative gambles with the mega banks because the 2017 Financial Stability Report from the Office of Financial Research (OFR), the Federal agency created under the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform legislation, named them. Those U.S. insurers are: Ameriprise Financial, Hartford Financial Services Group, Lincoln National Corp., Prudential Financial, Voya Financial, MetLife and – as a commentary on the failure of Dodd-Frank – AIG is still in the game. MetLife is a particularly problematic situation for regulators. It went to Federal district court and won a ruling to block the government from labeling it a SIFI (Systemically Important Financial Institution) during the Obama administration, which would have subjected it to more oversight and regulation. (The Trump administration dropped the appeal in the case in 2018.) But MetLife continues to trade like it has a systemic problem when there are clouds on the financial horizon. In two trading days in June 2016, following the Brexit vote in the U.K., MetLife lost 17.3 percent of its market value or $8.4 billion. We thought it might be instructive to see what a trading chart looked like over the past two days showing how MetLife compared to several global banks (Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) that also did poorly in that span of time. The deeply correlated chart below should give regulators, Congress and every American taxpayer pause.

Exclusive: Nasdaq cracks down on IPOs of small Chinese companies - - Nasdaq Inc  is cracking down on initial public offerings (IPOs) of small Chinese companies by tightening restrictions and slowing down their approval, according to regulatory filings, corporate executives and investment bankers.  Nasdaq’s attempt to limit these stock market flotations comes as a growing number of them end up raising most of the capital in their IPO from Chinese sources, rather than from U.S. investors. The shares of most small Chinese companies trade thinly following their U.S. listing, because most of them stay in the hands of a few insiders. Their low liquidity makes them unattractive to many large institutional investors, to whom Nasdaq is seeking to cater. For example, when 111 Inc (YI.O), a Chinese online pharmacy network, raised $100 million in its IPO on Nasdaq last year, shares were mainly sold to connections of the company’s executives, 111 CEO Liu Junling told Reuters in an interview. Digital influencer incubator Ruhnn Holding Ltd (RUHN.O), after-school education provider Puxin Ltd (NEW.N), and pet product manufacturer Dogness International Corp (DOGZ.O) are other examples of Chinese companies that listed on Nasdaq in the last two years with more investors from China snapping up their shares than from the United states, according to sources close to the companies. Ruhnn, Puxin, and Dogness did not respond to requests for comment. “One critical quality of our capital markets is that we provide non-discriminatory and fair access to all eligible companies. The statutory obligation of all U.S. equity exchanges to do so creates a vibrant market that provides diverse investment opportunities for U.S. investors,” a Nasdaq spokeswoman said.

Kraninger’s stance on CFPB constitutionality puts rules in limbo - By declaring that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional, CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger has potentially opened a floodgate of litigation against the agency. Last month, Kraninger sided with the Department of Justice in urging the Supreme Court to accept a case challenging the CFPB’s constitutionality. Kraninger's stance has led to confusion about the agency’s past and future actions. At least one federal judge so far has delayed pending litigation until the Supreme Court weighs in. “Not only does this raise the validity of all enforcement actions, but all regulations that have been issued and all penalties assessed, perhaps with the exception of settlement agreements,” said Joe Lynyak, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney. The Supreme Court could decide as early as this month — when it announces its docket for the upcoming term —whether to take a case in which Selia Law, a California law firm, claims it doesn't have to respond to a CFPB civil investigative demand because the bureau’s single-director structure is unconstitutional. If the Supreme Court takes the case, a potential decision could come as early as next summer, before the presidential election. Meanwhile, the single-director structure of the Federal Housing Finance Agency is also being challenged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders, who want the high court to take their case. Under current law, a CFPB director cannot be fired by a president unless it is "for cause." But critics of the agency say that provision is unconstitutional and gives a CFPB chief, who does not answer to a board or commission, too much power. Kraninger wrote to congressional leaders last month that the agency "should adopt the Department of Justice’s view that the for-cause removal provision is unconstitutional." “A Supreme Court decision holding that the for-cause removal provision is unconstitutional should not affect the Bureau’s ability to carry out its important mission,” she said. But regulated companies have seen Kraninger’s latest response to the constitutionality question as an open invitation to challenge the bureau’s authority.  “If Kraninger signed off on a civil investigative demand or enforcement action, and she’s now saying the structure of the agency is unconstitutional, how can those actions be valid?"  "The logical conclusion is, if the power vested in the director is unconstitutional, then anything that stems from those powers is null and void because that power was unchecked."

 ‘Unconstitutional, unlawful and unsupported’: How Facebook initially tried to fight a multibillion-dollar U.S. fine Facebook initially mounted an aggressive legal offensive against federal regulators who sought to fine the tech giant billions of dollars for privacy abuses, arguing in newly revealed documents that the company did not harm consumers or profit from mishandling users’ data — and that it would have prevailed in court if it had come to that.The arguments laid out by Facebook lawyers in a Feb. 28 white paper — obtained by The Washington Post through a federal open-records request — shed new light on the tech giant’s bare-knuckle, behind-the-scenes efforts at times to spare itself from the toughest punishments by the Federal Trade Commission. The case resulted in a record-breaking settlement that some critics still decried as too weak.The FTC’s investigation stemmed from Facebook’s entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that improperly accessed tens of millions of Facebook users’ personal information. The incident, along with Facebook’s other data mishaps, led FTC lawyers to conclude that the tech giant had violated a prior government order to improve its privacy practices. That opened the door for the agency to seek civil penalties. Initially, FTC staffers computed that Facebook’s misdeeds could result in a fine into the tens of billions of dollars, The Post first reported this summer, citing multiple people familiar with the matter. It is not clear whether the agency presented that amount to Facebook before the company’s February white paper; key numbers were redacted from the copy given to The Post. But the document still included a fiery response from Facebook, which called the FTC’s proposed fine “excessive, arbitrary, and capricious” and said it violated the Constitution and the FTC’s governing laws.The “proposed penalty is unconstitutional, unlawful and unsupported by the allegations in the draft complaint,” lawyers wrote. “No court would entertain such a penalty, and neither will Facebook."The legal jostling between Facebook and the FTC illustrates the precarious decision that government regulators ultimately would have to make — try to fight the tech giant in federal court, embarking on a lengthy, painful legal battle, or settle with the company and obtain whatever relief Facebook was willing to stomach.

Mark Zuckerberg Says What He Thinks About Elizabeth Warren In Leaked Audio -- Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees he’s ready to “go to the mat and ... fight” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other politicians who have called for big tech companies to be broken up, and predicted the social media giant will prevail even if Warren wins the presidency in 2020. “There might be a political movement where people are angry at the tech companies or are worried about concentration or worried about different issues and worried that they’re not being handled well,” Zuckerberg told Facebook employees in Q&A sessions in July, according to leaked audio recordings published by The Verge on Tuesday. “That doesn’t mean that, even if there’s anger and that you have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies. I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge.”   He continued: Does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in … It’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight. Warren responded to the disclosure by reiterating her plan to break up tech giants, tweeting Tuesday: “What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy.”

Mark Zuckerberg agrees with Sen. Sanders on billionaires: ‘No one deserves to have that much money’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the surprising call to live-stream an employee Q&A session to the public on Thursday after recordings from a similar meeting in July were leaked and published earlier this week. Zuckerberg addressed a range of topics and even waded into political views expressed by presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He was also asked which types of fake news Facebook tries to prevent and how the San Francisco Bay Area’s housing crisis is impacting the company. Asked to respond to Sen. Sanders’s comment that billionaires should not exist, Zuckerberg offered an unexpected viewpoint, considering his Facebook ownership makes him worth over $69 billion. “I understand where he’s coming from,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t know that I have an exact threshold on what amount of money someone should have but on some level no one deserves to have that much money.” Sen. Warren has taken more of a direct attack on Facebook, claiming that the company should be broken up. The Verge on Tuesday published audio and transcripts from a Q&A session in which Zuckerberg blasted Warren’s plan and said he’d “go to the mat” and fight it. Zuckerberg said on Thursday that he stands by all the content in the leaked recording, but he added, “let’s try not to antagonize her further.” In announcing the public session, Zuckerberg wrote in a post that he thought “it would be good to show everyone what these Q&As are like.” He said that he thinks an intern leaked the contents of the prior Q&A because it was a session for interns.

Facebook says Libra is out of its control. But Libra’s overseers are a web of Silicon Valley insiders – CNN - In its effort to bring the Libra cryptocurrency to life, perhaps the biggest hurdle for Facebook is a lack of trust and opposition from regulators around the world, who are concerned about Libra's potential implications for privacy and financial stability and Facebook's role in managing it. Facebook's (FB) answer to those criticisms is the Libra Association, a group the company says is an independent, Switzerland-based organization that will govern the digital currency. The organization is a coalition of companies and nonprofits and is designed as a sort of buffer between Facebook and the project it developed. Facebook says it will ensure neither it nor any other company has an outsized influence over the new currency. The group has 28 "founding member" organizations but plans to grow to 100.But many of those founding members have close personal, professional and financial ties to Facebook and one another, calling Facebook's characterization of the Association into question.Those links reach the group's top leadership. Experts say the connections raise questions aboutFacebook's ongoing influence over the project and whose values will be applied to Libra."When the white paper said Facebook will be just one of 100 members, you can see with your own eyes that's not quite true," said Katharina Pistor, a professor at Columbia Law School and an expert on corporate governance and finance. This is important because of what Libra aims to be and the responsibilities the Association would have, duties previously held mostly by governments and central banks.

 Senior Twitter Executive Exposed As British Psy-Ops Soldier - Middle East Eye are reporting a striking story that, if true, should be circulated widely as possible. It sheds a whole new light on just how deeply interwoven the Social Media monoliths and the Deep State truly are:The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit, Middle East Eye has established.Apparently, Gordon McMillan – twitter’s head of editorial for Europe, Middle East and Africa – not only works for the British government, but is a reservist in the 77th Brigade. In case you don’t know what the 77th Brigade is, it’s a “counter-intelligence” unit set up to “combat disinformation” on social media.Translation:They spread pro-Western propaganda on Twitter and Facebook. The unit was announced in 2015, in response – you can imagine – to a series of losses on the information warfare front, mainly re: Syria and Ukraine. The Guardian happily reported it at the time, calling them “Facebook Warriors”:

 Vimeo Sued For Storing Faceprints of People Without Their Consent  -- You didn’t tell me that you’re collecting and storing my faceprint, you didn’t tell me why or for how long, you didn’t get my written OK to do it, and you haven’t told us how long you’re retaining our biometrics or how we can get you to nuke them, another Illinois resident has said in yet another proposed facial recognition class action lawsuit based on the state’s we’re-not-kidding-around biometrics law.  This one’s against the video-sharing, face-tagging website Vimeo.  The complaint was filed on 20 September on behalf of potentially thousands of plaintiffs under theIllinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Illinois resident Bradley Acaley is lead plaintiff  The suit takes aim at Vimeo’s Magisto application: a short-form video creation platform purchased by Vimeo in April 2019 that uses facial recognition to automatically index the faces of people in videos so they can be face-tagged. Facebook is facing a similar class-action suit over BIPA: Last month, yet another in a string of US courts reaffirmed that Facebook users can indeed sue the company over its use of facial recognition technology.  That suit – Patel v. Facebook, first filed in 2015 – has been allowed to go forward as a stream of courts have refused to let Facebook wiggle out of it… in spite of Facebook’s many attempts. Last month’s decision to let Patel v. Facebook go ahead was the first decision of an American appellate court that directly addresses what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) calls the “unique privacy harms” of the ever-more ubiquitous facial recognition technology that’s increasingly being foisted on the public without our knowledge or consent.

Mark Cuban: ‘I have close to a billion dollars in Amazon stock’ -- Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has made it known he’s a big investor inAmazon, but he offered insight Monday into how sizable his position is.“I have close to a billion dollars in Amazon stock,” Cuban said in a Fox Business Network interview. “It’s my biggest holding.”Cuban told CNBC in May that Netflix and Amazon were his two biggest holdings, but he didn’t at the time disclose the amount he held.“It’s been that way for years,” he said at the time.Last year, Cuban said he had “maybe four” dividend-owning stocks, two short positions and Netflix and Amazon.“I’ve got a whole lot of cash on the sidelines,” Cuban said in August 2018, citing uncertainty in the broader market and U.S. debt levels.Cuban also has openly discussed an independent bid for president, but he told Fox Business Network that his family “voted it down.” “If you can change their mind, I’m all in,” he told host Neil Cavuto. He was referring to the sources used by a whistleblower, who filed a bombshell complaint last month alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election” by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate rumors of wrongdoing against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

We Can’t Rely on Corporations to Reform Themselves – We Must Challenge Their Power --It is almost as if we were not meant to notice. Last month the influential Business Roundtable released a letter, signed by 183 Chief Executives from some of the biggest companies in the world, redefining the role of corporations in society. Breaking with almost 50 years of practice, the group announced that from now on they would commit to protecting the interests not just of shareholders, but of all stakeholders. Delivered at the height of the business vacation season, with corporate responsibility sitting low on the to-do list behind ice cream and afternoon naps, the timing was incongruous and the wording, like all compromises to consensus, promises almost nothing at all. The global reader may stumble over some of the phrasing, such as the commitment to a “free market economy that serves all Americans” – this from multinational companies with globe-spanning markets, outsourced operations and cross-border impact. We may also wonder how the announcement changes the workings of the free market in any discernible way. The weak pledges – to look after customers, to maintain good supplier relationships, to care for communities and the environment – could have been lifted from any one of the companies’ existing annual reports..Indeed the whole letter reads as a poor imitation of the “benefit corporation”, a corporate model designed to legally commit companies to having a “material positive impact on society and the environment”. But reading between the lines is where we get the strongest sense of what this letter is really about: it is a desperate, placatory promise by the leaders of a Ponzi scheme in fear that their pyramid of willing fools may be wising up. The cognitive dissonance of efficient, beneficent, and generous free market capitalism in a world showing increasing signs of social and ecological crisis is beginning to agitate the subjects. We are waking up from the Matrix, and this statement is meant to coax us back under. The Business Roundtable, rather than offering an alternative to the free market logic that got them to their positions of power, instead doubles down. “America’s businesses”, we are told, “have been a critical engine to its success.” The implication is that American business will also be a critical engine to getting us out of the mess that American business got us into. Meanwhile, the state is nowhere to be seen in this proposed solution, which plays on the accepted view that government is in paralysis and disarray, that the much-needed changes will be too politically difficult, therefore business must step-in to fix the chronic problems which the state cannot fix itself.

Maybe corporations don't have enough power. - Kevin Erdmann - I think I have expressed skepticism previously that corporate or monopsonist power can explain the apparent growth in income inequality.  First, a careful look at changing income proportions shows that a decent portion of the drag on real incomes is due to housing expenses. Relatively little is due to rising corporate or interest income. Most of the relative difference between high and low incomes is more variance between different laborers or between wage earners and professionals who are frequently proprietors.  In fact, if corporate income or power was rising, monopsony power in labor markets should lead to less variance in wages.  High wages come from skill development and specialization. Frequently these are tied to specific institutional contexts. Specialization would make high earners more vulnerable to being captured by a few or one corporate buyer of their labor.  In a context of monopsony power, wages at the top of the spectrum would be held lower. Corporations wouldn't then voluntarily distribute them to workers with lower wages. But if firms lacked monopoly power, they wouldn't be able to retain the gains from that. The gains would be captured as consumer surplus by the firms' customers. In order to be competitive in the market for their goods and services, firms would have to assert their monopsonist power just to remain competitive by transferring those gains to the consumer.  Here, I am reminded of the conventional wisdom that asserts that mid 20th century corporations were more loyal to their workers and that a corporate job was more of a lifetime gig because corporations took care of their workers.  That doesn't really match very well with income data which doesn't show much variation in corporate operating income as a portion of total domestic income over long periods of time. But it does match with a context where more skilled workers were captured by powerful firms and less skilled workers benefit indirectly as consumers.  Maybe labor incomes had less variance because firms back then were more powerful.

Home-Flipper Lending Hits 13-Year High- What Can Possibly Go Wrong? - The flippers are back and the competition fierce as there are fewer and fewer foreclosed properties to bid on. Haven't we been down this road before? As the competition heats up, Lending to House Flippers Hits a 13-Year High.

• It is getting much harder to profit on house flipping today. Home prices are high, there are very few distressed or foreclosed properties available to buy cheaply, and the competition among investors is fierce.
• The good news is, mortgage rates are historically low for bank lending, and private lenders are eager to invest their cash somewhere other than the volatile stock and bond markets.
• The dollar volume of financed flip purchases in the second quarter of this year jumped 31% annually, from $6.4 billion to $8.4 billion, according to ATTOM Data Solutions.That is the highest level since the third quarter of 2006.

Vipin Motwani an investor with Iron Gate Development in the Washington, D.C. area expects to flip about 15 homes this year. “It’s always smarter to use a mortgage because you get leverage, you can do many more deals, right?” said Motwani. “Also the banks have become a little bit more easy in lending on this flip business. It used to be a lot tougher.” The Last Chance for a Good Price Was 7 Years Ago. Yet, it's "always smarter to use leverage to get more deals." "Right?"  What can possibly go wrong?

Fannie Mae: Mortgage Serious Delinquency Rate Unchanged in August - Fannie Mae reported that the Single-Family Serious Delinquency was unchanged at 0.67% in August, from 0.67% in July. The serious delinquency rate is down from 0.82% in August 2018.These are mortgage loans that are "three monthly payments or more past due or in foreclosure". The Fannie Mae serious delinquency rate peaked in February 2010 at 5.59%. This matches last month as the lowest serious delinquency rate for Fannie Mae since June 2007. By vintage, for loans made in 2004 or earlier (2% of portfolio), 2.50% are seriously delinquent. For loans made in 2005 through 2008 (4% of portfolio), 4.20% are seriously delinquent, For recent loans, originated in 2009 through 2018 (94% of portfolio), only 0.32% are seriously delinquent. So Fannie is still working through a few poor performing loans from the bubble years. The increase in the delinquency rate in late 2017 was due to the hurricanes - there were no worries about the overall market. I expect the serious delinquency rate will probably decline to 0.4 to 0.6 percent or so to a cycle bottom.

 New plunge in mortgage rates could save borrowers thousands of dollars - Fall homebuyers are getting a bonus. The sell-off in the stock market is causing an unexpected turnaround in mortgage rates. Mortgage rates fell throughout much of the summer but then made a sharp jump higher in September. Now rates are headed back down, along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which fell more than 800 points total on Tuesday and Wednesday, the two first days of October. The average rate on the popular 30-year fixed mortgage was at 3.75% last Friday. By Thursday, it had dropped to 3.62%, according to Mortgage News Daily. This is an average for borrowers with solid credit scores and at least a 20% down payment. More dramatic is the comparison with a year ago. Rates are now about 1.25 percentage point lower than they were at this time last year. For the average borrower taking out a $300,000 mortgage, that is a savings of about $225 on the monthly payment, or $2,700 per year. That is big savings for borrowers refinancing their loans, and it gives buyers significantly more purchasing power in an already pricey housing market. Lower rates are already boosting sales for the nation’s homebuilders. Lennar posted higher-than-expected new orders in the third quarter as interest rates dropped. “The market for new homes has been improving from last year’s pause, as lower interest rates have stimulated demand and improved affordability, while the overall fundamentals of the economy have remained strong,” Lennar Executive Chairman Stuart Miller said on a call with analysts. He also said low rates outweighed concern over a potential recession. “I know that there is a lot of question about upcoming potential recession and things like that. Our customers don’t seem to be viewing it that way, and I think that the housing market in general seems solid and strong and continuing to improve,” Miller added.

CoreLogic: House Prices up 3.6% Year-over-year in August -- The CoreLogic HPI is a three month weighted average and is not seasonally adjusted (NSA).From CoreLogic: CoreLogic Reports August Home Prices Increased by 3.6% Year Over Year: CoreLogic® ... today released the CoreLogic Home Price Index (HPI™) and HPI Forecast™ for August 2019, which shows home prices rose both year over year and month over month. Home prices increased nationally by 3.6% from August 2018. On a month-over-month basis, prices increased by 0.4% in August 2019. (July 2019 data was revised. Revisions with public records data are standard, and to ensure accuracy, CoreLogic incorporates the newly released public data to provide updated results each month.) Home prices continue to increase on an annual basis with the CoreLogic HPI Forecast indicating annual price growth will increase 5.8% by August 2020. On a month-over-month basis, the forecast calls for home prices to increase by 0.3% from August 2019 to September 2019. The CoreLogic HPI Forecast is a projection of home prices calculated using the CoreLogic HPI and other economic variables. Values are derived from state-level forecasts by weighting indices according to the number of owner-occupied households for each state. “The 3.6% increase in annual home price growth this August marked a big slowdown from a year earlier when the U.S. index was up 5.5%,” said Dr. Frank Nothaft, chief economist at CoreLogic. “While the slowdown in appreciation occurred across the country at all price points, it was most pronounced at the lower end of the market. Prices for the lowest-priced homes increased by 5.5%, compared with August 2018, when prices increased by 8.4%. This moderation in home-price growth should be welcome news to entry-level buyers.”  This graph is from CoreLogic and shows the YoY change in their index.

There are precious few places in America where the average worker can afford a median-priced home  - Homeownership is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve — and a new report shows that relief isn’t coming any time soon.  Across 74% of counties nationwide, average wage earners could not afford to buy a median-priced home as of the third quarter of 2019, according to a report released Thursday by property-data firm Attom Data Solutions. That’s up from six months ago, when 71% of housing markets were unaffordable for average workers.  Attom calculated affordability by determining the amount of income needed to make monthly house payment, such as mortgage, property taxes and insurance premiums. The analysis assumed the homeowner in question only put 3% down when they purchased the property. Attom compared that amount to the average weekly wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There were only 127 counties out of the nearly 500 that Attom analyzed where a person who earned the average salary could afford to make the housing payments for a median-priced home in their area. Among the parts of the country where this was true were Houston, Detroit, Philadelphia and Cleveland.

Construction Spending Increased Slightly in August, Down 1.9% YoY - From the Census Bureau reported that overall construction spending increased slightly in August:  Construction spending during August 2019 was estimated at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $1,287.3 billion, 0.1 percent above the revised July estimate of $1,285.6 billion. The August figure is 1.9 percent below the August 2018 estimate of $1,312.2 billion. Private spending decreased and public spending increased: Spending on private construction was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $955.0 billion, nearly the same as the revised July estimate of $954.8 billion. ... In August, the estimated seasonally adjusted annual rate of public construction spending was $332.3 billion, 0.4 percent above the revised July estimate of $330.8 billion. This graph shows private residential and nonresidential construction spending, and public spending, since 1993. Note: nominal dollars, not inflation adjusted. Private residential spending had been increasing - but turned down in the 2nd half of 2018 - and is now 25% below the bubble peak. Non-residential spending is 8% above the previous peak in January 2008 (nominal dollars). Public construction spending is 2% above the previous peak in March 2009, and 27% above the austerity low in February 2014. The second graph shows the year-over-year change in construction spending. On a year-over-year basis, private residential construction spending is down 5%. Non-residential spending is down 3% year-over-year. Public spending is up 5% year-over-year. This was slightly below consensus expectations. Another somewhat weak construction spending report.

Reis: Apartment Vacancy Rate unchanged in Q3 at 4.7% --Reis reported that the apartment vacancy rate was at 4.7% in Q3 2019, unchanged from 4.7% in Q2, and unchanged from 4.7% in Q3 2018. The vacancy rate peaked at 8.0% at the end of 2009, and bottomed at 4.1% in 2016. From economist Barbara Byrne Denham at Reis: The apartment vacancy rate was flat in the quarter at 4.7%. In the third quarter of 2018 it was also 4.7%. Overall vacancy has changed 0.3% in last two years. Both the national average asking rent and effective rent, which nets out landlord concessions, increased 0.8% in the third quarter. At $1,484 per unit (asking) and $1,413 per unit (effective), the average rents have increased 3.8% from the third quarter of 2018.... Apartment occupancy growth was subdued in the third quarter, although fundamentals remain healthy. That is, demand growth increased in line with supply growth, and rent growth held steady at just below 1% in the quarter. Despite a deceleration in the overall economy, the demand for apartments should continue at this pace as the housing market takes the brunt of any and all uncertainty. New and existing homes sales have improved in the last month, but condo and coop sales were lower than a year ago. The back-and-forth in the two markets should continue this year and next as consumers exercise caution given so much uncertainty on the trade war and global front. Still, the housing vs. apartment markets are not a zero-sum game. As long as job growth remains healthy, the demand for both will stay positive shoring up home prices and rents equally.

Reis: Office Vacancy Rate unchanged in Q3 at 16.8% - Reis reported that the office vacancy rate was at 16.8% in Q3, unchanged from 16.8% in Q2 2019. This is up from 16.7% in Q3 2018, and down from the cycle peak of 17.6%. From Reis Senior Economist Barbara Byrne Denham: The Office vacancy rate was flat in the quarter at 16.8%. In the third quarter of 2018 it was 16.7%. Overall vacancy has declined only 0.3% in last five years. Both the national average asking rent and effective rent, which nets out landlord concessions, increased 0.6% in the third quarter. At $34.06 per square foot (asking) and $27.65 per square foot (effective), the average rents have increased 2.6% from the third quarter of 2018. ...  Office occupancy growth has been sluggish throughout this expansion as firms lease far fewer square feet per added job. Rent growth has also disappointed owners. Each quarter seems to bring more cautiousness as firms weather continued uncertainty from the trade war and global economy. Still, the U.S. has added 350,000 office jobs this year through August, down from 470,000 office jobs added in the first eight months of 2018, but further evidence of steady growth. This should keep office occupancy growth positive. Indeed, the news on the office market has not generated headlines, but growth remains positive and should remain positive this year and next.

 Reis: Mall Vacancy Rate Mixed in Q3 2019 - Reis reported that the vacancy rate for regional malls was 9.4% in Q3 2019, up from 9.3% in Q2 2019, and up from 9.1% in Q3 2018. This is at the cycle peak of 9.4% in Q3 2011, and up from the cycle low of 7.8% in Q1 2016.For Neighborhood and Community malls (strip malls), the vacancy rate was 10.1% in Q3, down from 10.2% in Q2, and down from 10.2% in Q3 2018. For strip malls, the vacancy rate peaked at 11.1% in Q3 2011, and the low was 9.8% in Q2 2016.Comments from Reis: The Retail vacancy rate declined in the quarter to 10.1% from 10.2% in the second quarter. In the third quarter of 2018 it was also 10.2%. Overall vacancy has declined only 0.3% in last five years. Both the national average asking rent and effective rent, which nets out landlord concessions, increased 0.3% in the third quarter. At $21.45 per square foot (asking) and $18.79 per square foot (effective), the average rents have increased 1.5% and 1.6%, respectively, from the third quarter of 2018. The Mall vacancy rate increased to 9.4%, from 9.3% last quarter and a low of 7.8% in 2016. Rent growth was positive at 0.2% for the quarter and 0.6% for the year. Although retail store closures and bankruptcies still dominate the news, the overall retail property statistics have held steady as new users fill vacated space of large department stores....Similar to its sibling property types, the retail sector continued to shrug off bad news in the broader sector. Just this week, the news media seemed to yawn when retailing power house Forever 21 declared bankruptcy. Reports said they would close 178 of their 600 stores. The retail sector has withstood numerous store closings, this latest one should not deliver a big blow. Retail spending remains healthy as consumer spending keeps climbing in step with job growth. In short, the retail sector is poised to continue to grow at the current slow but steady rate.This graph shows the strip mall vacancy rate starting in 1980 (prior to 2000 the data is annual). The regional mall data starts in 2000. Back in the '80s, there was overbuilding in the mall sector even as the vacancy rate was rising. This was due to the very loose commercial lending that led to the S&L crisis. Recently both the strip mall and regional mall vacancy rates have increased from an already elevated level.  Mall vacancy data courtesy of Reis

Forever 21 Goes Bust Adding More Stores to Retail Apocalypse -Forever 21 Inc. filed for bankruptcy, joining the growing list of fashion retailers felled by heavy competition, high rents and the defection of shoppers to online outlets. Plans include cutting at least 178 domestic outlets from Forever 21’s approximately 800 stores, after a disastrous expansion outside the U.S. The Chapter 11 court filing on Sunday allows Forever 21 to keep operating while it works out a strategy to pay its creditors and turn the business around. All told, the retailer employs about 6,400 full-time and 26,400 part-time workers, court papers show. Forever 21 said it expects to exit most of its outlets in Asia and Europe, and it will shut all of its 44 Canadian stores that provide about 2,000 jobs, according to company statements.Forever 21 suffered from the same cutthroat pricing and online competition that has forced other U.S. retailers to close thousands of stores in the past two years. But its problems were deepened by inventory miscalculations--underspending one year, then overspending the next -- and a botched international venture, according to court papers.The rapid global expansion left the company stuck with locations that were too expensive and too big, court papers show. Despite having 262 stores by 2015 outside the U.S., it couldn’t achieve economies of scale because of geographical differences in taste and climate. The result: Forever 21 is losing $10 million a month in Canada, Europe and Asia. Stateside sales are relatively strong, according to court papers filed in Wilmington, Delaware.

Kroger to lay off hundreds, as questions about its turnaround plan linger -  Kroger is laying off hundreds of employees across the family of grocery stores it owns, a person familiar with the situation tells CNBC.The unionized grocer, which also owns Harris Teeter, Ralphs, Fred Meyer, has 443,000 full-time and part-time employees.A spokeswoman for Kroger told CNBC in a statement that “As part of ongoing talent management, many store operating divisions are evaluating middle management roles and team structures with an eye toward keeping resources close to the customer.”She added that the company’s store divisions, which operate independently, are all “taking steps to ensure they have the right talent in the right store leadership positions.”Kroger is not the first grocer to reconsider middle management as it looks to restructure its business. Walmart’s club store, Sam’s Club, in 2014 laid off 2,300 employees, including middle managers, as part of its turnaround. Last year, the retailer closed 63 stores and converted some of them to e-commerce facilities.

Consumer Stress- Defaults Rise To Highest Level In 2019 -- One of the loudest narratives heading into the fall by the mainstream financial press is that a healthy consumer is propping up the US economy. Consumer spending at retailers, bars, and restaurants have slowed but nothing to warn about yet. Powered by record-high credit card spending, Americans are nearing the point of maximum leverage, which could be an ominous sign that good times are nearing an end. The Trump administration, continuing to promote "the greatest economy ever" narrative to tens of millions of Americans ahead of a downturn is probably one of the most irresponsible things that a government can do. Artifical optimism has allowed consumers to rack up more debt than 2008, and it's a ticking time bomb that could shock millions since they haven't planned for a recession.Consumer stress is starting to appear via new default data from S&P Dow Jones Indices and Experian. Their Consumer Credit Default Indices measure the changes in consumer credit defaults and show that the composite rate rose 7bps to 0.92% in August, the highest of the year. The auto loan default rate moved higher by 9bps to 0.98%, and the first mortgage default rate increased 7bps to 0.69%. The report said Chicago and Dallas were some of the major metropolitan areas that showed MoM increases in default rates from July to August. Each was up 10bps to 1.05% and 0.93% respectively. The default rate for New York rose 5bps to 0.94%, while the rate for Los Angeles rose 3bps to 0.77 %. Miami was the only major city where default rates edged lower in late summer. S&P/Experian Consumer Credit Default Indices are summarized in the table below. Auto loans and first mortgages were the drivers' late summer in pushing up the overall composite on an MoM and YoY basis.

YouTube is Experimenting With Ways To Make Its Algorithm Even More Addictive - MIT Technology Review - Recommendation algorithms are some of the most powerful machine-learning systems today because of their ability to shape the information we consume. YouTube’s algorithm, especially, has an outsize influence. The platform is estimated to be second only to Google in web traffic, and70% of what users watch is fed to them through recommendations. In recent years, this influence has come under heavy scrutiny. Because the algorithm is optimized for getting people to engage with videos, it tends to offer choices that reinforce what someone already likes or believes, which can create an addictive experience that shuts out other views. This also often rewards the most extreme and controversial videos, which studieshave shown can quickly push people into deep rabbit holes of content and lead to political radicalization.While YouTube has publicly said that it’s working on addressing these problems, a new paper from Google, which owns YouTube, seems to tell a different story. It proposes an update to the platform’s algorithm that is meant to recommend even more targeted content to users in the interest of increasing engagement. Here’s how YouTube’s recommendation system currently works. To populate the recommended-videos sidebar, it first compiles a shortlist of several hundred videos by finding ones that match the topic and other features of the one you are watching. Then it ranks the list according to the user’s preferences, which it learns by feeding all your clicks, likes, and other interactions into a machine-learning algorithm.Among the proposed updates, the researchers specifically target a problem they identify as “implicit bias.” It refers to the way recommendations themselves can affect user behavior, making it hard to decipher whether you clicked on a video because you liked it or because it was highly recommended. The effect is that over time, the system can push users further and further away from the videos they actually want to watch.To reduce this bias, the researchers suggest a tweak to the algorithm: each time a user clicks on a video, it also factors in the video’s rank in the recommendation sidebar. Videos that are near the top of the sidebar are given less weight when fed into the machine-learning algorithm; videos deep down in the ranking, which require a user to scroll, are given more. When the researchers tested the changes live on YouTube, they found significantly more user engagement.

September Vehicle Sales Forecast: 16.8 Million SAAR From JD Power: Record Q3 Spending Accelerates Auto Sales After Year's Slow Start - New-vehicle retail sales in September are expected to fall from a year ago, according to a forecast developed jointly by J.D. Power and LMC Automotive. Retail sales are projected to reach 1,007,000 units, a 15.2% decrease compared with September 2018. Controlling for the number of selling days, this translates to a decline of 7.8% from last year on two fewer selling days. (Note: This year excludes the Labor Day holiday and has one fewer weekend than September 2018.)...Total sales in September are projected to reach 1,244,000 units, a 13.3% decrease compared with September 2018. Adjusting the results for two fewer selling days results in a decline of 5.8%.The seasonally adjusted annualized rate (SAAR) for total sales, which normalizes sales for the exclusion of the Labor Day holiday and one fewer weekend this year, is expected to be 16.8 million units.…“After delivering record sales results in August, when retail sales rose 6.2% on a selling-day adjusted basis, the decline in September sales was expected and reflects a quirk in how the industry reports sales. The large decline in sales this month is driven primarily by the timing of the Labor Day holiday. Unlike most years, sales from the Labor Day holiday weekend were included in August sales reporting instead of September. With close to 250,000 new vehicles sold during the holiday weekend, the exclusion from September reporting is significant.” This forecast is for sales be solid in September, but down from 17.0 million SAAR in August, and down from 17.3 million SAAR in September 2018.

The Collapse Is Here - Initial U.S. Auto Sales For September Paints An Ugly Picture - After a couple months of stagnation, automobile sales in the United States took a significant step backwards in September, according to Bloomberg. This sets the stage for increased incentive spending by carmakers, who will be desperate to clear inventory heading into the end of the year. Initial auto sales results from Toyota and Honda can only be described as disasters. Both companies suffered double digit declines in September, with Honda missing its estimated numbers by nearly 10% and Toyota missing its estimates by about 5%. General Motors also missed estimates, posting an increase in sales of 6.3% versus estimates of 7.1%.  The performance of these automakers suggests that the picture could get even uglier when other companies report US results this week. Overall deliveries of cars and light trucks could come in worse than the 12% drop that is estimated. These sharp misses continue to paint the picture of a global auto market that is steeped in recession, namely due to a broke consumer after a decade of low interest rates and endless incentives. Any prolonged slowdown would put significant pressure on auto dealers, who are already in a precarious position with outgoing model year vehicles "clogging their lots".

BEA: September Vehicles Sales increased to 17.2 Million SAAR - The BEA released their estimate of September vehicle sales this morning. The BEA estimated sales of 17.19 million SAAR in September 2019 (Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate), up 1.1% from the August sales rate, and down 0.7% from September 2019.  Sales in 2019 are averaging 16.96 million (average of seasonally adjusted rate), down 1.1% compared to the same period in 2018. This graph shows light vehicle sales since 2006 from the BEA (blue) and an estimate for September (red). A small decline in sales to date this year isn't a concern - I think sales will move mostly sideways at near record levels.  This means the economic boost from increasing auto sales is over (from the bottom in 2009, auto sales boosted growth every year through 2016).  The second graph shows light vehicle sales since the BEA started keeping data in 1967.  Note: dashed line is current estimated sales rate of 17.19 million SAAR.For a longer-term perspective on the Goods Producing and Service Providing employment, see our monthly analysis, Secular Trends in Employment: Goods Producing Versus Services Providing, which is based on data from the Department of Labor's monthly jobs report reaching back to 1939.

Cars with high-tech safety systems are still really bad at not running people over - (videos) For years now, automakers have been stuffing their cars with loads of advanced technology on the promise that all these sensors and software will make for a less deadly driving experience. But new research suggests that new technology isn’t doing enough to keep pedestrians safe.The American Automobile Association (AAA) conducted a series of tests using vehicles with automatic emergency braking and pedestrian detection alerts on a closed course with dummy pedestrians. And what they found was highly upsetting. The vehicles struck the dummy pedestrians that were crossing the road 60 percent of the time — and this was in daylight hours at speeds of 20 mph. The researchers then swapped the adult dummies with a child-sized version, and the results got much, much worse: a collision occurred 89 percent of the time. Testing at night or at higher speeds also yielded a distressing number of collisions. When encountering an adult pedestrian at night, these supposed high-tech detection systems were “ineffective,” AAA says. None of the cars tested were able to detect an adult pedestrian at night.The researchers tested several other scenarios, including encountering a pedestrian after a right-hand turn and two adults standing alongside the road with their backs to traffic. The latter scenario resulted in a collision 80 percent of the time, while the former yielded a 100 percent collision rate. Four model year 2019 vehicles were used in AAA’s testing: Chevy Malibu, Honda Accord, Tesla Model 3, and Toyota Camry. Each vehicle was outfitted with sensors and cameras to capture information about vehicle dynamics, position data, and visual notifications from the detection systems.

AAR: September Rail Carloads down 7.0% YoY, Intermodal Down 4.6% YoY From the Association of American Railroads (AAR) Rail Time Indicators. Graphs and excerpts reprinted with permission. There’s still no relief in sight for U.S. rail traffic. Total originated U.S. rail carloads fell 7.0% in September 2019 from September 2018, their eighth straight year-over-year decline. In the third quarter, total carloads were down 5.4%; for the year through September, they were down 3.8%. … Intermodal was weak too — originations were down 4.6% in September, down 5.8% in the Q3 2019 (the biggest quarterly percentage decline since Q3 2009); and down 4.1% for the year to date.  This graph from the Rail Time Indicators report shows the year-over-year changes in U.S. Carloads. U.S. rail traffic continues to falter. Total carloads originated were 992,542 in September 2019, down 7.0%, or 74,172 carloads, from September 2018. It was the eighth straight monthly year-over-year decline and the second biggest percentage decline in those eight months. In the third quarter, total carloads were down 5.4%. For the first nine months of 2019, total U.S. carloads were down 3.8%, or 384,418 carloads, from 2018. The second graph is the year-over-year change for intermodal traffic (using intermodal or shipping containers):  Rail intermodal remains weak too. Total originations in September were 1.06 million, down 5.9% (65,989 containers and trailers) from September 2018. Weekly average intermodal originations in September 2019 were 265,371, the lowest for September since 2016. Intermodal was down 5.8% in Q3 2019 from Q3 2018; that’s the biggest quarterly percentage decline for intermodal since Q3 2009. In 2019 through September, intermodal was down 4.1% (441,953 units) from last year, though year-to-date intermodal volume through September (10.39 million units) was the second highest ever (behind 2018).

August Trade Deficit at $54.89B - The U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, also known as the FT-900, is published monthly by the Bureau of Economic Analysis with data going back to 1992. The monthly reports include revisions that go back several months. This report details U.S. exports and imports of goods and services.Here is an excerpt from the latest report:The U.S. monthly international trade deficit increased in August 2019 according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau. The deficit increased from $54.0 billion in July (revised) to $54.9 billion in August, as imports increased more than exports. The previously published July deficit was $54.0 billion. The goods deficit increased $0.8 billion in August to $74.4 billion. The services surplus decreased less than $0.1 billion in August to $19.5 billion. Current Release. Today's headline number of -54.89B was slightly lower than the Investing.com forecast of -54.50B.  Here is a snapshot that gives a better sense of the extreme volatility of this indicator.

Trade Deficit increased to $54.9 Billion in August - From the Department of Commerce reported: The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that the goods and services deficit was $54.9 billion in August, up $0.9 billion from $54.0 billion in July, revised. August exports were $207.9 billion, $0.5 billion more than July exports. August imports were $262.8 billion, $1.3 billion more than July imports. Both exports and imports increased in August.Exports are 26% above the pre-recession peak and unchanged compared to August 2018; imports are 13% above the pre-recession peak, and unchanged compared to August 2018.In general, trade had been picking up, but both imports and exports have moved more sideways recently.The second graph shows the U.S. trade deficit, with and without petroleum. The blue line is the total deficit, and the black line is the petroleum deficit, and the red line is the trade deficit ex-petroleum products. Oil imports averaged $54.13 per barrel in August, down from $56.48 in July, and down from $62.64 in August 2018. The trade deficit with China decreased to $31.8 billion in August, from $38.6 billion in August 2018.

US factory orders dip in August; core capital goods revised down -- (Reuters) - New orders for U.S.-made goods slipped in August and business spending on equipment was much weaker than initially thought, the latest indications that manufacturing was in a slump. Factory goods orders dipped 0.1% after surging by an unrevized 1.4% in July, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast factory orders would fall 0.2% in August. Factory orders edged down 0.1% compared to August 2018. Shipments of manufactured goods fell 0.1% in August after decreasing 0.3% in the prior month. Pointing to underlying weakness in the sector, which accounts for about 11% of the economy, unfilled orders at factories nudged up 0.1% after the same gain in July. Inventories were unchanged in August after ticking up 0.1% in July.A survey from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) on Tuesday showed a measure of national factory activity tumbled to more than a 10-year low in September. The ISM said comments from manufacturers “reflect a continuing decrease in business confidence,” and also noted that “global trade remains the most significant issue.” Ironically, manufacturing has borne the brunt of the 15-month U.S.-China trade war, which has thumped business confidence. The Trump administration has argued that trade tariffs are necessary to protect industries from what it says is unfair foreign competition. Troubles in manufacturing, which are also the result of an inventory overhang and the grounding of Boeing’s (BA.N) 737 MAX plane after two fatal crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, have been underscored by factories cutting overtime for workers. Transportation equipment orders fell 0.4% in August after increasing 7.3% in July. Orders for civilian aircraft and parts dropped 17.1% after rising 52.2% in the prior month. There were also decreases in orders for computers and electronic products and electrical equipment, appliances and components. Machinery orders, however, rose 0.4% in August after declining 1.0% in July. The Commerce Department also said August orders for non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft, which are seen as a measure of business spending plans on equipment, fell 0.4% instead of the 0.2% drop reported last month. Shipments of core capital goods, which are used to calculate business equipment spending in the gross domestic product report, increased 0.3% in August instead of rising 0.4% as previously reported. Business investment declined at its steepest pace in 3-1/2 years in the second quarter.

September Class 8 Heavy Duty Truck Orders Collapse 71% - Preliminary Class 8 order data for September is starting to trickle in and, like the data preceding it so far this year - it's ugly. Class 8 orders were crushed 71% in September, reaching 12,600 units, according to Baird and Morgan Stanley. This follows a 79% plunge in August. This makes September the 11th consecutive month of YOY order declines and the 9th consecutive month of orders below 20,000. Class 8 orders are often seen as a pulse on the U.S. economy. Morgan Stanley analyst Courtney Yakavonis wrote in a note that she expects YOY order declines to continue into the year's end. But Baird analyst David Leiker said he was gaining "increased confidence" that a bottom in declines was likely near - but that's a story we have heard from ACT Research analysts all year and orders just continue to collapse.  The blame continues to fall on the trade war. "Little has changed since August with respect to the freight market and freight rates, while uncertainties surrounding trade and tariffs continue to weigh on truck buyers' psyches," said Steve Tam, ACT vice president, according to FreightWaves.

ISM Manufacturing index Decreased to 47.8 in September -- The ISM manufacturing index indicated contraction in September. The PMI was at 47.8% in September, down from 49.1% in August. The employment index was at 46.3%, down from 47.4% last month, and the new orders index was at 47.3%, up from 47.2%.  From the Institute for Supply Management: September 2019 Manufacturing ISM® Report On Business® “The September PMI® registered 47.8 percent, a decrease of 1.3 percentage points from the August reading of 49.1 percent. The New Orders Index registered 47.3 percent, an increase of 0.1 percentage point from the August reading of 47.2 percent. The Production Index registered 47.3 percent, a 2.2-percentage point decrease compared to the August reading of 49.5 percent. The Employment Index registered 46.3 percent, a decrease of 1.1 percentage points from the August reading of 47.4 percent. The Supplier Deliveries Index registered 51.1 percent, a 0.3-percentage point decrease from the August reading of 51.4 percent. The Inventories Index registered 46.9 percent, a decrease of 3 percentage points from the August reading of 49.9 percent. The Prices Index registered 49.7 percent, a 3.7-percentage point increase from the August reading of 46 percent. The New Export Orders Index registered 41 percent, a 2.3-percentage point decrease from the August reading of 43.3 percent. The Imports Index registered 48.1 percent, a 2.1-percentage point increase from the August reading of 46 percent.  “Comments from the panel reflect a continuing decrease in business confidence. September was the second consecutive month of PMI® contraction, at a faster rate compared to August. Demand contracted, with the New Orders Index contracting at August levels, the Customers’ Inventories Index moving toward ‘about right’ territory and the Backlog of Orders Index contracting for the fifth straight month (and at a faster rate). The New Export Orders Index continued to contract strongly, a negative impact on the New Orders Index. Consumption (measured by the Production and Employment indexes) contracted at faster rates, again primarily driven by a lack of demand, contributing negative numbers (a combined 3.3-percentage point decrease) to the PMI® calculation. Inputs — expressed as supplier deliveries, inventories and imports — were again lower in September, due to inventory tightening for the fourth straight month.  “Global trade remains the most significant issue, as demonstrated by the contraction in new export orders that began in July 2019.   Here is a long term graph of the ISM manufacturing index.

US manufacturing survey shows worst reading in a decade --A gauge of U.S. manufacturing showed the lowest reading in more than 10 years in September as exports dived amid the escalated trade war. The U.S. manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index from the Institute for Supply Management came in at 47.8% in September, the lowest since June 2009, marking the second consecutive month of contraction. Any figure below 50% signals a contraction. The new export orders index was only 41%, the lowest level since March 2009, down from the August reading of 43.3%, ISM data showed. “We have now tariffed our way into a manufacturing recession in the U.S. and globally,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group. The report fanned fears of a recession and hit the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 200 points, erasing earlier gains on Tuesday. “Global trade remains the most significant issue, as demonstrated by the contraction in new export orders that began in July 2019. Overall, sentiment this month remains cautious regarding near-term growth,” Timothy Fiore, ISM chair, said in a statement. The ISM employment gauge for the sector showed the lowest reading since January 2016, primarily driven by a lack of demand. New orders, backlog, raw materials inventories exports and imports also contracted across the board last month, ISM data showed. “There is no end in sight to this slowdown, the recession risk is real,” Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank said in a note on Tuesday following the report. The deeper contraction in the manufacturing sector is the latest sign that the escalated trade war between the U.S. and China is taking a big bite from the economy. Manufacturing was once considered a big winner under the Trump administration with improvement in employment and activity over the past few years. President Donald Trump blamed high interest rates and a strong dollar for the weakness in manufacturing, saying in a tweet Tuesday the central bank “allowed the Dollar to get so strong ... that our manufacturers are being negatively affected. Fed Rate too high.”

Markit Manufacturing: "September PMI rises to five-month high as output growth strengthens"- The September US Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index conducted by Markit came in at 51.1, up 0.8 from the 50.3 final August figure. Markit's Manufacturing PMI is a diffusion index: A reading above 50 indicates expansion in the sector; below 50 indicates contraction. Here is an excerpt from Chris Williamson, Chief Business Economist at IHS Markit in their latest press release:"News of the PMI hitting a five-month high brings a sigh of relief, but manufacturing is not out of the woods yet. The September improvement fails to prevent US goods producers from having endured their worst quarter for a decade. Given these PMI numbers, the manufacturing recession appears to have extended into its third quarter." [Press Release]Here is a snapshot of the series since mid-2012.

US Manufacturing Weakest Since 2009- Business Sentiment Stuck At Gloomy Levels - It's been an ugly night for global economic surveys. September manufacturing PMIs from South Korea, Indonesia, South Africa, Italy, and the UK all printed below 50.0, confirming ongoing global weakness, and Sweden was a disaster. Only Canada and Brazil managed upside surprises as all eyes are firmly focused on US manufacturing surveys - hoping they will track the massive surge in US economic surprise data.

• Markit Manufacturing PMI 51.1 (51.0 exp), up from 50.3 in August
• ISM Manufacturing 47.8 (50.0 exp), down from 49.1 in August

This is the weakest ISM since June 2009, with New Orders weakest since March 2009. This is the second straight reading below 50, the line separating expansion and contraction, extending the drop from a 14-year high just over a year earlier. The pullback in the employment gauge, to 46.3 from 47.4, comes amid economist projections that the main monthly Labor Department report Friday will show limited manufacturing payroll growth. Economists forecast a 3,000gain in factory employment for a second month. The measure of export orders, a proxy for overseas demand, fell to 41, the lowest level since March 2009, while the imports index remained in contraction.

Dallas Fed: "Texas Manufacturing Expansion Continues" - From the Dallas Fed: Texas Manufacturing Expansion Continues - Texas factory activity continued to expand in September, according to business executives responding to the Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey. The production index, a key measure of state manufacturing conditions, fell four points to 13.9, suggesting output growth continued but at a slightly slower pace than in August. Other measures of manufacturing activity also suggested slightly slower expansion in September. The new orders index edged down two points to 7.1, while the shipments index fell three points to 14.7. Similarly, the capacity utilization index fell four points to 12.0. A bright spot this month was the growth rate of orders index, which edged up to 4.4, a five-month high. Perceptions of broader business conditions remained positive in September. The general business activity index came in at 1.5, a second positive reading in a row after three months in negative territory. The company outlook index inched up to 7.4, its highest reading since February. The index measuring uncertainty regarding companies’ outlooks remained elevated at 13.3. Labor market measures suggested stronger growth in employment and work hours in September. The employment index jumped 13 points to 18.8, its highest reading in nearly a year. This was the last of the regional Fed surveys for September. Here is a graph comparing the regional Fed surveys and the ISM manufacturing index:

FreightWaves Oil Report: Tough Times Out In The Oil Patch - The Dallas Federal Reserve Board's quarterly survey of conditions out in the oil patch is positive for the trucking sector only in one sense – production looks like it is going to continue to rise. But the trucking and transport sector has two relationships with the U.S.upstream oil sector. It consumes its product, but it also provides a significant amount of service to the industry's activities. The first part of that, according to the widely watched Dallas Fed survey, is positive for the industry – there will be plenty of production and prices are expected to stay low. The second part of that isn't as good. The sentiment on upstream activity – the kind that actually hires trucks – was decidedly negative in the survey. The Dallas Fed index is based on a scale where zero in a category means conditions are status quo, negative numbers mean things are getting worse and positive numbers signal an improving outlook. Its broadest benchmark, the business activity index, fell to a negative 7.4 in the third quarter. It was negative 0.6 in the second quarter. (The third quarter is not complete but the survey was taken in early September.) The outlook was particularly negative for oilfield service firms. The producing companies can look at the current stability or increase in output as at least one positive to take away from the current market. But oilfield service companies are dealing with low prices for their services and a declining rig count. (This week's Enverus rig count stood at 945, down from 954 a week ago. A year ago, it was 1,158.) The oilfield services index was positive in the second quarter; it's now down to negative 24, a drop of 27. The figure for "input costs" was down to 5.6 from 27.1 last quarter. And the prices received for services was down to negative 18.5 from negative 12.1, "suggesting a further decline in oilfield services prices." Operating margins were already negative in the second quarter at negative 24. In the third quarter, they were negative 32.8. One notable number concerned employment. When talking about the driver squeeze, one of the arguments for the difficulty in seating drivers in trucks was competition coming out of the oil patch. But the aggregate employment index in the report was negative 8, down from negative 2.5. And the aggregate hours worked dropped to negative 2.4 from positive 3.1. Not surprisingly, the index for aggregate wages and benefits dropped to 6.2 from 14.5. And yet, the industry is complaining it is having trouble attracting workers. In another part of the survey, respondents were asked what was the "main constraint…limiting near-term growth?" While the current price of oil and natural gas got 42 percent of the vote, "problems finding workers" came in second with just 3 percent.

 September Regional Fed Manufacturing Overview - Five out of the twelve Federal Reserve Regional Districts currently publish monthly data on regional manufacturing: Dallas, Kansas City, New York, Richmond, and Philadelphia. Regional manufacturing surveys are a measure of local economic health and are used as a representative for the larger national manufacturing health. They have been used as a signal for business uncertainty and economic activity as a whole. Manufacturing makes up 12% of the country's GDP.  The other 6 Federal Reserve Districts do not publish manufacturing data. For these, the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book offers a short summary of each districts’ manufacturing health. The Chicago Fed published their Midwest Manufacturing Index from July 1996 through December of 2013. According to their website, "The Chicago Fed Midwest Manufacturing Index (CFMMI) is undergoing a process of data and methodology revision. In December 2013, the monthly release of the CFMMI was suspended pending the release of updated benchmark data from the U.S. Census Bureau and a period of model verification. Significant revisions in the history of the CFMMI are anticipated."  Here is a three-month moving average overlay of each of the five indicators since 2001 (for those with data). The latest average of the five for September is 2.0, up from the previous month's 0.6. It is well below its all-time high of 25.1, set in May 2004.

Chicago PMI "Drifts to 47.1 in September", Lowest Quarter since 2009 - From the Chicago PMI: Chicago Business Barometer™ – Drifts to 47.1 in September The Chicago Business BarometerTM, produced with MNI, fell 3.3 points to 47.1 in September, following August’s rebound to 50.4. Business confidence dropped below the 50-mark to 47.3 in Q3, leaving the index at the lowest level on a quarterly basis since Q3 2009. The index fell 4.9 points compared to the previous quarter. ... Labor demand improved slightly to 45.6 in September, but the quarterly average fell to 44.1, recording the weakest quarter since Q4 2009. CR Note: This was below the consensus forecast, and is another weak reading.

 Services reading shows economy is weaker than expected amid slowdown fears - The services sector continued its expansion in September but at a considerably slower pace than expected, according to the ISM Non-Manufacturing Index released Thursday. The closely watched measure came in at 52.6, compared to an expected reading of 55.3 from economists surveyed by Dow Jones. It was the weakest reading since August 2016. Markets sold off sharply following the news, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 250 points after being only slightly lower earlier on. ISM officials said the overall weakness arose from fears over tariffs, labor resources and the general direction of the economy. The news comes just two days after the ISM’s companion manufacturing index also showed substantial weakness. “Net, net, look out below is what purchasing managers from services industries are shouting at the markets as the fears of recession continue to mount,” Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG, said in a note. “Stock investors don’t like that the doom and gloom in the manufacturing sector is starting to infect the bigger part of the economy that employs millions of workers in services industries including health care, retailing, business administration, accounting, computer services on and on.” Anything above 50 represents growth in the survey, which gauges the percentage of companies expecting to expand their businesses. A reading above 48.6 has been consistent with broader economic growth. The report comes amid worries that the U.S. economy faces a potential recession ahead as global growth slows and tariffs have put a dent in business plans to expand.

Markit Services PMI: "New business growth slides to lowest in survey history" - The August US Services Purchasing Managers' Index conducted by Markit came in at 50.9 percent, up 0.2 from the final August estimate of 50.7. The Investing.com consensus was for 50.9 percent. Markit's Services PMI is a diffusion index: A reading above 50 indicates expansion in the sector; below 50 indicates contraction. Here is the opening from the latest press release:Commenting on the PMI data, Chris Williamson, Chief Business Economist at IHS Markit said:“A disappointing service sector PMI follows news of lacklustre manufacturing and means the past two months have seen one of the weakest backto-back expansions of business activity since 2009, sending a signal of slower GDP growth in the third quarter. The surveys are consistent with the economy growing at a 1.5% annualised rate in the third quarter, with forward-looking indicators suggesting further momentum could be lost in the fourth quarter. In particular, inflows of new business have almost stalled, with September seeing the smallest increase since 2009, and business expectations about the year ahead remain stuck at one of the gloomiest levels since at least 2012. “In this environment, companies are taking an increasingly cost-conscious approach to payrolls, with September consequently seeing surveyed firms report a net drop in headcounts for the first time since 2010. This translates into non-farm payroll growth trending below 100,000.“Price pressures have also abated in line with the weak demand picture, suggesting official inflation gauges could likewise moderate in coming months.” [Press Release]Here is a snapshot of the series since mid-2012.

Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims increased to 219,000 -- The DOL reported: In the week ending September 28, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 219,000, an increase of 4,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 2,000 from 213,000 to 215,000. The 4-week moving average was 212,500, unchanged from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 500 from 212,000 to 212,500. The previous week was revised up. The following graph shows the 4-week moving average of weekly claims since 1971.

ADP: Private Employment increased 135,000 in September  --From ADP:Private sector employment increased by 135,000 jobs from August to Septemberaccording to the September ADP National Employment Report®. ... The report, which is derived from ADP’s actual payroll data, measures the change in total nonfarm private employment each month on a  seasonally-adjusted basis....“The job market has shown signs of a slowdown,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “The average monthly job growth for the past three months is 145,000, down from 214,000 for the same time period last year.”Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said, “Businesses have turned more cautious in their hiring. Small businesses have become especially hesitant. If businesses pull back any further, unemployment will begin to rise.” This was below the consensus forecast for 152,000 private sector jobs added in the ADP report.

First Look at September: ADP Says 135K New Nonfarm Private Jobs - Today we have the ADP September estimate of 135K new nonfarm private employment jobs, a decrease over the ADP revised August figure of 157K. The 135K estimate came in below the Investing.com consensus of 140K for the ADP number.The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is for 132K new nonfarm private jobs and the unemployment rate to remain at 3.7%. Their forecast for the September full nonfarm new jobs is (the PAYEMS number) 145K.Here is an excerpt from today's ADP report press release:“The job market has shown signs of a slowdown,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “The average monthly job growth for the past three months is 145,000, down from 214,000 for the same time period last year.”Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said, “Businesses have turned more cautious in their hiring. Small businesses have become especially hesitant. If businesses pull back any further, unemployment will begin to rise.”Here is a visualization of the two series over the previous twelve months.

A Closer Look at Today's ADP Employment Report -  In this morning's ADP employment report we got the September estimate of 135K new nonfarm private employment jobs from ADP, a decrease over August's revised 157K. The popular spin on this indicator is as a preview to the monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the ADP report includes a wealth of information that's worth exploring in more detail. Here is a snapshot of the monthly change in the ADP headline number since the company's earliest published data in April 2002. This is quite a volatile series, so we've plotted the monthly data points as dots along with a six-month moving average, which gives us a clearer sense of the trend. As we see in the chart above, the trend peaked 20 months before the last recession and went negative around the time that the NBER subsequently declared as the recession start. At present, the six-month moving average is at its lowest level since 2012. ADP also gives us a breakdown of Total Nonfarm Private Employment into two categories: Goods Producing and Services. Here is the same chart style illustrating the two. The US is predominantly a services economy, so it comes as no surprise that Services employment has shown stronger jobs growth. The trend in Goods Producing jobs went negative over a year before the last recession. For a sense of the relative size of Services over Goods Producing employment, the next chart shows the percentage of Services Jobs across the entire series. The latest data point is below the record high.There are a number of factors behind this trend. In addition to our increasing dependence of Services, Goods Production employment continues to be impacted by automation and offshoring. For a better sense of the components of the two Goods Producing and Service Providing cohorts, here is a snapshot of the five select industries tracked by ADP. The two things to note here are the relative sizes of the industries and the relative trends. Note that Construction and Manufacturing are Production industries whereas the other three are Service Providing.

September Employment Report: 136,000 Jobs Added, 3.5% Unemployment Rate --From the BLS: The unemployment rate declined to 3.5 percent in September, and total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 136,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment in health care and in professional and business services continued to trend up....Employment in government continued on an upward trend in September (+22,000). Federal hiring for the 2020 Census was negligible (+1,000)....The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised up by 7,000 from +159,000 to +166,000, and the change for August was revised up by 38,000 from +130,000 to +168,000.With these revisions, employment gains in July and August combined were 45,000 more than previously reported.... In September, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls, at $28.09, were little changed (-1 cent), after rising by 11 cents in August. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 2.9 percent. The first graph shows the monthly change in payroll jobs, ex-Census (meaning the impact of the decennial Census temporary hires and layoffs is removed - mostly in 2010 - to show the underlying payroll changes). Total payrolls increased by 135 thousand in September ex-Census (private payrolls increased 114 thousand). Payrolls for July and August were revised up 45 thousand combined. Year-over-year change employment. This graph shows the year-over-year change in total non-farm employment since 1968. In September, the year-over-year change was 2.147 million jobs. The third graph shows the employment population ratio and the participation rate. The Labor Force Participation Rate was unchanged in September at 63.2%. This is the percentage of the working age population in the labor force. A large portion of the recent decline in the participation rate is due to demographics and long term trends. The Employment-Population ratio increased to 61.0% (black line). The fourth graph shows the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate was declined in September to 3.5%. This is the lowest unemployment rate since 1969. This was below consensus expectations of 145,000 jobs added, however July and August were revised up by 45,000 combined.

U.S. Payrolls and Wages Miss Estimates in New Sign of Downshift - U.S. hiring missed projections in September and wage gains cooled, offering a warning that the record-long expansion is poised for further slowing even as the jobless rate fell to a half-century low. Private payrolls expanded by 114,000 after an upwardly revised 122,000 advance the prior month, according to a Labor Department report Friday that missed the median estimate of economists for a 130,000 gain. Total nonfarm payrolls climbed a below-forecast 136,000, which was boosted by 1,000 temporary government workers to prepare for the 2020 Census count. Average hourly earnings rose 2.9% from a year earlier, the weakest in more than a year and missing estimates. The jobless rate unexpectedly dropped to 3.5%, the lowest since December 1969, from 3.7%. Even with the shaky jobs and wage figures, traders of fed funds futures slightly reduced the amount of easing they expect from the U.S. central bank this year and marginally trimmed their expectations for an October cut amid a lower-than-expected unemployment rate. U.S. stocks rose and two-year Treasuries fell, while the dollar remained lower. “Overall it is a bit of a mixed bag,” Torsten Slok, Deutsche Bank Securities chief economist, said on Bloomberg Television. But the main payrolls number along with weakness in manufacturing add to signs that the trade war is putting “downward pressure both on hiring and the economy.” More broadly, the downbeat reading adds to signs President Donald Trump’s trade policy and weakness abroad pose an increasing threat to growth in the world’s largest economy. At the same time, the unemployment rate decline gave him a chance to boast, which he promptly did on Twitter minutes after the report, and was soon echoed by his economic adviser. “There’s a lot of good data out there, and there’s some soft data,” Larry Kudlow, the head of the National Economic Council, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “The headline number here is the 3.5% unemployment rate,” he said, citing gains by African Americans, Hispanics, and those without high school degrees. The jobs report caps a week of U.S. economic data that whipsawed stocks and sent already-low Treasury yields tumbling, led by a key manufacturing gauge that sank deeper into contraction with the worst reading in a decade. A slowdown also threatens Trump’s re-election prospects next year, with the president frequently staking his message on a strong economy. The data offer a contrast with characterizations by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues at recent meetings that job gains have been “solid,” though they may still have room to stick with that assessment. Late Thursday, Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida said the economy remains on solid footing and recession risks aren’t “particularly elevated under appropriate monetary policy.”

September Payrolls Miss- 136K Jobs Added As Wage Growth Crashes --It wasn't quite as bad as the whisper number, which saw September payrolls dropping below 100K, but it wasn't great either: moments ago the BLS reported that in September the US added 136K jobs, below the 145K expected, however the big story here was that the August number - as has become customary - was revised notably higher, from 130K to 168K, the mirror image of what happened at ADP, which scrambled to catch down to the original NFP print. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for July was revised up by 7,000 from +159,000 to +166,000, and the change for August was revised up by 38,000 from +130,000 to +168,000. With these revisions, employment gains in July and August combined were 45,000 more than previously reported.Of note: the three-month average of private payroll gains dropped to 119,000, the smallest since 2012, which however still remains above the organic growth in the labor force. If only it also helped raise wages. Stripping aside the volatile due to census hiring government workers series, the US added 114K private payrolls, which also missed the 130K expectation, and was below the upward revised 122K in August (up from 96K previously).Below the surface, there was some more bad news, as well as some good news.The good news is that the unemployment rate dropped again, sliding from 3.7% to 3.5%, below the expectation for an unchanged print, and the lowest since 1969... The bad, however, was that in a stark reversal to recent trends, the average hourly workweek missed badly, and was unchanged from August (when it rose 0.4% sequentially), missing expectations of a 0.2% increase. Digging into the number, wage growth actually declined sequentially, dropping by one cent from August On a Y/Y basis, earning grew 2.9%, far below the 3.2% in August, and also below the 3.2% expected. It was the weakest wage growth since July 2018. All this happened as the average weekly hours worked remained unchanged at 34.4. This is a big issue for two reasons: despite a near record low unemployment rate (and continued payroll growth), wages rose at the weakest pace in more than a year. Of course, the lack of wage growth means that the Fed can now go ahead and cut rates even more, which is why stocks are surging in kneejerk reaction to the jobs report.  Looking at the composition of the report, manufacturing fell by 2,000 jobs, while service providers added a four-month low 109,000 jobs; and while leisure and hospitality workers added 21,000 jobs, a six-month high, retailers cut jobs for an eighth consecutive months. Most notably, since reaching a peak in January 2017, retail trade has lost 197,000 jobs. Thanks Amazon.

September jobs report: excellent in coincident and lagging sectors, cautionary in leading sectors - HEADLINES:

• +136,000 jobs added (+135,000 ex-Census)
• U3 unemployment rate declined -0.2% from 3.7% to 3.5% (NEW LOW)
• U6 underemployment rate declined -0.3% from 7.2% to 6.9% (NEW LOW)
• the average manufacturing workweek declined -0.1 from 40.6 hours to 40.5 hours. This is one of the 10 components of the LEI and is negative.
• Manufacturing jobs declined by -2,000. YoY manufacturing is up 117,000, a deceleration from 2018’s pace.
• construction jobs rose by 7,000. YoY construction jobs are up 156,000, also a deceleration from summer 2018. Residential construction jobs, which are even more leading, rose by 500.
• temporary jobs rose by 10,200. (NOTE: July, which was originally reported at +10,500, is now shown at -2,200. August was revised down by -900 to +14,500).
• the number of people unemployed for 5 weeks or less declined by -339,000 from 2,207,000 to 1,868,000. (NEW EXPANSION LOW)
• Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now:  declined by -270,000 from 5.150 million to 4.880 million (NEW EXPANSION LOW)
• Part time for economic reasons: declined by -31,000 from 4.381 million to 4.350 million 
• Employment/population ratio ages 25-54:  rose +0.1% from 80.0% to 80.1%. 
• Average Hourly Earnings for Production and Nonsupervisory Personnel: rose $.04 to $23.65, up +3.5% YoY. This is still a slight decline from the recent YoY% change peak.  (Note: you may be reading different information about wages elsewhere. They are citing average wages for all private workers. I use wages for nonsupervisory personnel, to come closer to the situation for ordinary workers.) 
• Manufacturing jobs rose an average of +9,750/month in the past year vs. the last seven years of Obama's presidency in which an average of +10,300 manufacturing jobs were added each month.  
• Overtime was unchanged at 3.2  hours
• Professional and business employment (generally higher-paying jobs) rose by +34,000 and is up +437,000 YoY. 
• the index of aggregate hours worked for non-managerial workers rose by 0.1%
• the index of aggregate payrolls for non-managerial workers rose by 0.3%          
• the  alternate jobs number contained in the more volatile household survey rose by 371,000  jobs.  This represents an increase of 2,200,000 jobs YoY vs. 2,147,000 in the establishment survey. 
• Government jobs rose by 22,000 (21,000 ex-census).
• the overall employment to population ratio for all ages 16 and up rose 0.1% to 61.0% m/m and is up 0.6% YoY.    
• The labor force participation rate was unchanged at 63.2% and is up 0.5% YoY.

SUMMARY: This was a excellent report in almost all respects outside of the headline jobs number. New expansion lows were set for unemployment, underemployment, short term unemployment, and those who want a job now but have not looked. New expansion highs were set for prime age employment, participation, and aggregate hours and payrolls. Non-supervisory wages improved tepidly m/m, but growth remains at expansion highs YoY. The only fly in the ointment, aside from the headline number, was as I expected in the leading sectors of the establishment survey. Manufacturing hours fell, as did manufacturing employment. Construction employment rose slightly, especially as to the most leading residential construction sector. And while temporary employment rose “strongly,” August was revised down slightly, and July, which was originally reported up 2,200, is now shown as a decline of -10,500. In short, a great report in the coincident and lagging aspects, with some pronounced weakness in the leading aspects.

September jobs report: solid, slowing, and not yet at full employment - Jared Bernstein - Payrolls rose 136,000 last month and the unemployment rate dipped to 3.5 percent, its lowest rate since the late 1960s. Though the payroll number missed analysts’ expectations (~145,000), the more reliable 3-month average came in at a healthy 157,000, strong enough to put downward pressure on unemployment (the prior two months of payroll data were revised up by 45,000 jobs). Our monthly smoother takes 3, 6, and 12-month averages of monthly job gains to help pull out the underlying trend out of the noisier monthly data. Over the past 6 months, payroll gains have average 154,000, a deceleration from the 12-month number (179K), but such a pattern is expected in an economy closing in on—though not yet at—full employment. Wage growth for private-sector workers was up 2.9 percent over the past year, a slightly slower rate than in previous months. The wage pace was stronger for middle-wage workers (production, non-supervisors) at 3.5 percent, but in both cases, as the figures reveal (note especially the 6-month moving averages), the trend in wage growth is not accelerating, even given the low unemployment rate. For the “all” group (first figure), there’s even some evidence of decelerating wages, a possibility that is now on my watch list. I return to these important observations below.State and local government hiring was important in September, adding 24,000 jobs. Though analysts expected hiring for the decennial Census to be a factor in these data, that was not the case, as the BLS reported such hiring only accounted for 1,000 jobs last month. The factory sector is clearly stressed, with manufacturing losing 2,000 jobs in September. The GM strike is certainly in the mix here, but thus far this year, the factory sector has added an average of fewer than 5,000 jobs per month, compared to 22,000/month last year. That’s much more trade-war than strike.As noted, the Household survey showed greater signs of job-market strength last month. Along with unemployment at a 50 year low, the underemployment rate (the “u6” rate, which includes part-timers who want full-time work) fell to 6.9 percent, close to its all-time low of 6.8 in October of 2000 (this series only starts in 1994). The closely watched employment rate (“epop,” for employment-to-population ratio) for prime-age workers ticked up one-tenth for both men and women. Women’s prime-age epop–74 percent last month–has handily surpassed its 2007 peak, while men’s–86.4 percent–is still below their 2007 peak of 88 percent. However, as the next figure shows, since the 1970s, men’s epop’s have moved like a ratchet–highly cyclical, but never quite regaining prior peaks. One conclusion is that men (and women) respond to employment opportunities but, at least for the men, they’ve been losing more in the downturns than they’ve gained in the expansions. My analysis suggests that if the cycle persists, prime-age epop’s will regain their prior peak, pushing back on the long-term ratchet.

Where The September Jobs Were- Who Is Hiring And Who Isn't... And The Retail Apocalypse -  Whether today's payrolls report was "stagflationary" - as wage growth hit a brick wall, stagnating sequentially and posting the worst annual growth in one year, or simply lousy, is debatable, but with just 114K private payrolls created in September (government added 22K jobs) one thing is certain: this was the 5th lowest private jobs print in the past 3 years.  And yet, if one looks at the various job sectors, the emerging picture is hardly a dismal one, with 10 industries adding jobs, 3 losing, and one unchanged.  Some of the highlights: manufacturing fell by 2,000 jobs, the third consecutive drop, while service providers added a four-month low 109,000 jobs; and while leisure and hospitality workers added 21,000 jobs, a six-month high, retailers cut jobs for an eighth consecutive months. Most notably, since reaching a peak in January 2017, retail trade has lost 197,000 jobs. Separately, government added 22K jobs, "not great, not terrible", even though census hiring was a surprisingly low 1,000 jobs. The composition of job gains was not great, with low paying jobs in the education and health category were the top addition in September at 40,000; meanwhile Professional, Business and Service jobs added 23.8K (ex-temp).

• In September, health care added 39,000 jobs, in line with its average monthly gain over the prior 12 months. Ambulatory health care services (+29,000) and hospitals (+8,000) added jobs over the month.
• Employment in professional and business services continued to trend up in September (+34,000). The industry has added an average of 35,000 jobs per month thus far in 2019, compared with 47,000 jobs per month in 2018.  
• Employment in government continued on an upward trend in September (+22,000). Federal hiring for the 2020 Census was negligible (+1,000). Government has added 147,000 jobs over the past 12 months, largely in local government.
• Employment in transportation and warehousing edged up in September (+16,000). Within the industry, job growth occurred in transit and ground passenger transportation (+11,000) and in couriers and messengers (+4,000).
• Retail trade employment changed little in September (-11,000). Within the industry, clothing and clothing accessories stores lost 14,000 jobs, while food and beverage stores added 9,000 jobs. Since reaching a peak in January 2017, retail trade has lost 197,000 jobs.

Below is a visual breakdown of all the main categories:

Comments on September Employment Report  - McBride - The headline jobs number at 135 thousand for September ex-Census (136K total including temp Census hires) was below consensus expectations of 145 thousand, however the previous two months were revised up 45 thousand, combined. The unemployment rate declined to 3.5%; the lowest rate since 1969. Earlier: September Employment Report: 136,000 Jobs Added, 3.5% Unemployment Rate.  In September, the year-over-year employment change was 2.147 million jobs including Census hires (note: this will be revised down significantly in February with the benchmark revision). Wage growth was below expectations. From the BLS: "In September, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls, at $28.09, were little changed (-1 cent), after rising by 11 cents in August. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 2.9 percent." This graph is based on “Average Hourly Earnings” from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) (aka "Establishment") monthly employment report. Note: There are also two quarterly sources for earnings data: 1) “Hourly Compensation,” from the BLS’s Productivity and Costs; and 2) the Employment Cost Index which includes wage/salary and benefit compensation. The graph shows the nominal year-over-year change in "Average Hourly Earnings" for all private employees. Nominal wage growth was at 2.9% YoY in September. Wage growth had been generally trending up, but has weakened recently. Since the overall participation rate has declined due to cyclical (recession) and demographic (aging population, younger people staying in school) reasons, here is the employment-population ratio for the key working age group: 25 to 54 years old. In the earlier period the participation rate for this group was trending up as women joined the labor force. Since the early '90s, the participation rate moved more sideways, with a downward drift starting around '00 - and with ups and downs related to the business cycle. The 25 to 54 participation rate was unchanged in September at 82.6% from 82.6% in August, and the 25 to 54 employment population ratio was increased to 80.1% from 80.0%. From the BLS report: "The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged at 4.4 million in September. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs."  These workers are included in the alternate measure of labor underutilization (U-6) that increased to 6.9% in September. This is the lowest level for U-6 since 2000.  This graph shows the number of workers unemployed for 27 weeks or more. According to the BLS, there are 1.314 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks and still want a job. This was up from 1.243 million in August. Summary: The headline jobs number was below expectations, however the previous two months were revised up. The headline unemployment rate declined to 3.5%; the lowest since 1969. However, wage growth was below expectations. This was mixed jobs report. The economy added 1.419 million jobs through September 2019 ex-Census, down from 1.979 million jobs during the same period of 2018 (although 2018 will be revised down with benchmark revision to be released in February 2020). So job growth has slowed.

 Jeff Bezos’ Whole Foods slashes medical benefits for nearly 2,000 part-time workers - Amazon-owned grocery chain Whole Foods Market announced last month that it is eliminating medical benefits for nearly 2,000 part-time workers employed at its stores across the United States. The cuts come after the company announced in March that it would cut workers’ hours to between 20 and 30 hours per week. The cuts to healthcare benefits will go into effect January 1, 2020 and will affect approximately 1,900 workers. Whole Foods was bought by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion. The grocery chain employs more than 91,000 workers at 500 stores in the US, Canada and the UK. The healthcare cuts for his employees stands in sharp contrast with the vast wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who sits atop a personal fortune of $115 billion. Analysis provided by consumer tracking group Decision Data found that Bezos makes enough money in 2 to 6 hours to more than cover the cost of an entire year of benefits for all of the workers facing cuts. Justifying the benefits cut, Whole Foods stated it “made the change to better meet the needs of our business and create a more equitable and efficient scheduling model.” Translated, this means that the economic interests of workers are to be sacrificed by the profit considerations of Amazon, with the burden of skyrocketing of health care costs placed squarely on the backs of workers. Underlining this, the company stated that it is “working to help employees find resources for alternative health care options or to explore moving them to full-time positions offering health benefits.” In other words, Whole Foods fully intends to shift the cost of health care to workers. The costs of health insurance for workers are enormous. The slashing of insurance for Whole Foods workers follows the overall trend set by Obamacare, which shifted the burden of the rising cost of health insurance from corporations to workers. In 2017, only 56 per cent of workers acquired their health care coverage from their employers, down from 75 percent in 2008. According to figures published by the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR), the decline since 1979 in health care coverage for workers in the US is drastic. Between 1979 and 2008, employer-based coverage dropped 12.4 per cent. Presently, over 28 million workers, 8.8 percent of the population, have no insurance

GM workers livid over $250 strike pay, as UAW uses economic pressure to break resistance to concessions - After 15 days on strike, 48,000 General Motors workers began going to local union halls yesterday to collect their first strike checks from the United Auto Workers. Striking workers who are facing severe economic hardship were livid over the fact that they were being paid only $250 a week from the UAW, which is sitting on a strike fund worth over $800 million. While workers have sacrificed everything to fight GM’s demands for sweeping concessions, which will reshape the auto industry and class relations as a whole, the UAW’s bloated staff of corrupt officials continue to receive their full salaries. This includes UAW President Gary Jones—whose home was raided by the FBI in connection with the massive corruption scandal engulfing the UAW—and Terry Dittes, who is overseeing the supposed “negotiations” with GM. Jones is paid $260,243, or $5,004 per week, and Dittes is paid $235,873, or $4,536 per week. "One of my friends is stressing out about losing her house,” said a GM worker at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant who came to the UAW Local 22 hall Monday to collect her check. “I believe the company and the union are using economic hardships to make us give up.” “This $250 is nonsense,” another worker said. “The bill collectors haven’t stopped because we’re on strike.” A third said, “We can’t make ends meet. It’s just enough for a little gas and a little food. You can’t pay your bills.” Another worker said she was coming to the hall because local UAW officials had not recorded her time on the picket line correctly and didn’t pay her any strike benefits. “I’m not getting paid today at all. It’s very tight. Some people saved up, but others couldn’t. But the worst thing is we’re frustrated because we don’t know what’s going on. The union is keeping us out of the loop, and everything is hush-hush.” A tier-two worker said she was disgusted with both the UAW and GM. "The UAW needs to be investigated," she said, referring to the corruption scandal. “And the CEO pay,” she added, referring to Mary Barra's reported $22 million salary.

U.S. Inequality Reached Highest Level in 50 Years: Census — The gap between the haves and have-nots in the United States grew last year to its highest level in more than 50 years of tracking income inequality, according to Census Bureau figures. Income inequality in the United States expanded from 2017 to 2018, with several heartland states among the leaders of the increase, even though several wealthy coastal states still had the most inequality overall, according to figures released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. The nation’s Gini Index, which measures income inequality, has been rising steadily over the past five decades.The Gini Index grew from 0.482 in 2017 to 0.485 last year, according to the bureau’s 1-year American Community Survey data. The Gini Index is on a scale of 0 to 1; a score of “0” indicates perfect equality, while a score of “1” indicates perfect inequality, where one household has all the income.  The increase in income inequality comes as two Democratic presidential candidates, U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are pitching a“wealth tax” on the nation’s richest citizens as a way to reduce wealth disparities.The inequality expansion last year took place at the same time median household income nationwide increased to almost $62,000 last year, the highest ever measured by the American Community Survey. But the 0.8% income increase from 2017 to 2018 was much smaller compared to increases in the previous three years, according to the bureau. Even though household income increased, it was distributed unevenly, with the wealthiest helped out possibly by a tax cut passed by Congress in 2017, said Hector Sandoval, an economist at the University of Florida.

Nearly Half Of America's Homeless People Live In California - Not only do nearly half of America’s homeless people live in California, but four of the five American cities with the greatest incidences of unsheltered homelessness are in the Golden State. As California becomes a mecca for socialism, their quality of life diminishes along with it in a characteristic dystopian decline.  San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Rosa, and San Jose are four of the five cities with the highest amount of homelessness. Seattle joins the California municipalities in the top five. According to Market Watch, the rates of homelessness are the highest in Washington D.C. The District of Columbia’s homeless rate is at 5.8 times the United States rate. New York is next, followed by Hawaii, Oregon, and California. These five states together comprise 20% of the overall U.S. population but 45% of the country’s homeless population. All of these states are incredibly liberal with several already having instituted tight socialist policies.A White House report teased out certain trends in homelessness across the country. Communities along both coasts have much larger homeless populations than those in the middle of the country. One driver of this trend is likely the more notable rise in housing prices along the coasts than in much of the Midwest. The White House report identified local laws and policing practices as a potential differentiator. “Some [states] more than others engage in more stringent enforcement of quality of life issues like restrictions on the use of tents and encampments, loitering, and other related activities,” the report noted. –Market Watch The Trump administration has floated plans to fix the homeless crisis in liberal areas by deregulation. Many states and municipalities have zoning rules regarding the construction of both single-family and multi-family homes. These laws have impeded the builders’ ability to meet the demand for housing resulting in scarcity which has driven up prices. Experts and politicians across the political spectrum have suggested that relaxing such regulations could provide a boost to building activity. While that could work, the heavy tax burden on everything from property to income makes it difficult to afford anything even if more housing is built.

San Francisco is pulling out all the stops to fight homelessness – except actually making housing affordable​ - San Francisco is one of the wealthiest cities in the US, but its high housing prices and strict zoning have contributed to a homelessness crisis. The city has declared war on its rough sleepers – because housing them is too easy.​The latest offensive in the city’s “war on homelessness” is sidewalk boulders – giant rocks placed along the sidewalk to deter homeless encampments. San Franciscans in the Mission Dolores neighborhood raised $2,000 to line their sidewalk with 24 large boulders to stop the homeless from setting up camp, using and selling drugs, and otherwise lowering the quality of life. (video) ​The plan, so far, has made matters worse – the homeless set up tents anyway, forcing those who actually want to use the sidewalk for its intended purpose to walk on the street, and some locals have taken it upon themselves to remove the rocks – either by pushing them onto the street or (in the case of one enterprising woman) by listing them on Craigslist.​It’s easy to sympathize with the residents – forced to pool their resources to make their neighborhood safe because the government, for whatever reason, won’t take steps to clear out the undesirables. But one of the reasons it’s so expensive to live in San Francisco is the dire housing shortage, a problem that could easily be remedied if the government cleared the way for the construction of more housing by altering the rigid zoning laws that prevent the construction of high-rise apartments, leaving a growing population to play “musical chairs” with a static number of dwellings.

Thousands of children under age ten arrested every year in the United States - The recent arrests of two 6-year-old children at their elementary school in Orlando, Florida has shone light on the shocking number of child arrests and detainments in the United States. A report by ABC News on Monday noted that nearly 30,000 children under the age of 10 have been arrested just between 2013 and 2017. The arrest and detainment of children for the crime of acting their age will continue, and indeed increase, as social inequality worsens and the ruling class marches toward authoritarian rule. The FBI recently released its annual crime statistics for the year 2018. While the report boasts that the arrest of juveniles decreased by 11 percent from 2017, the number of arrests of individuals under 18 still stands at a staggering 718,962. This number includes 3,500 children under 10, more than 38,000 children between 10 and 12, and more than 355,000 children between the ages of 13 and 16. These statistics only account for 28 specific offenses, and the FBI’s website where this data is available notes, “The program does not collect data regarding police contact with a juvenile who has not committed an offense, nor does it collect data on situations in which police take a juvenile into custody for his or her protection.” It is not clear under what circumstances the police would make contact with juveniles who have not committed an offense, nor is it understandable in what situation a child should be arrested for “protection.” Thirty-four states have no minimum age for delinquency, meaning that any child can be held criminally responsible for their actions, and 24 states have no minimum age for charging a juvenile as an adult for alleged crimes. If it were not so sickening that tens of thousands of children have been forced to undergo the traumatic experience of arrest and detainment, the breakdown of crimes for which these children were arrested would be laughable. For example, in 2018, there were 155 arrests of children under 10 for carrying or possessing weapons; 340 arrests were made for “disorderly conduct;” nearly twenty arrests of children under 10 were made for motor vehicle-related infractions, including driving under the influence. For the felony charge of aggravated assault, which is defined as causing or attempting to cause bodily injury to another “purposefully, knowingly or recklessly, with an extreme indifference to the value of human life,” 145 children under 10 were arrested in 2018. The twisted irony of arresting a child for alleged “indifference to the value of human life” is further highlighted when some specific examples of these arrests are examined.

 School Districts Use Gaggle To Monitor Students' Free Speech And Social Media Posts - A recent article in The Tennessean reveals how the Williamson County School District (WCS) is monitoring students free speech and social media posts. The WCS recently implemented a "threat surveillance program" called Gaggle, that is so invasive and frightening one would be hard pressed not to call it a "gag" program that limits students free speech. When the WCS was asked to reveal specific details about what Gaggle and authorities are monitoring students speech for, they claimed they could not reveal any details "due to federal family protection laws."   The Tennessean was able to shed some light on what Gaggle monitors by saying it, "operates using a mathematical algorithm to identify high risk words and phrases when students are logged into the district’s server." Gaggle's video was a little more revealing, claiming that they monitor students social media posts 24/7 for things like:

• profanity
• insulting language
• hate speech
• provocative images
• pornography
• drug use
• alcohol use and much more

When school districts and private corporations start monitoring students for things like profanity and insulting language, we should all be worried because it will not end there. Parents think school districts have crossed the line with Gaggle.  "I'm concerned about the mining of all the other student-written text, regarding bullying, profanity, or anything offensive. Aren't kids going to be too nervous to write anything that's potentially controversial? What kind of education will they get if they're walking on eggshells not to offend the computer algorithm?” WCS parent Thomas Morgan said. Gaggle's "Safety Management Dashboard" allows school staff and law enforcement to identify and track individual students who have the highest number of incidents.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs raised their kids tech-free — and it should've been a red flag  -- Psychologists are learning how dangerous smartphones can be for teenage brains. The World Health Organization recently advised parents to limit screentime to just one hour a day for children under five. Thoughone large study found little correlation between screen-time and mental health impacts, other research has found that an eighth-grader's risk for depression jumps 27% when he or she frequently uses social media.  But the writing about smartphone risk might have been on the wall for roughly a decade, according to educators Joe Clement and Matt Miles, co-authors of the book "Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber." It should be telling, Clement and Miles argue, that the two biggest tech figures in recent history — Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — seldom let their kids play with the very products they helped create.   "What is it these wealthy tech executives know about their own products that their consumers don't?" the authors wrote.  Bill Gates, one of the most influential tech leaders in the world, limited how much technology his children could use at home.  Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft, implemented a cap on screen time when his daughter started developing an unhealthy attachment to a video game. He also didn't let his kids get cell phones until they turned 14.  Despite the fact he created the iPad, Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids use it.  Jobs, who was the CEO of Apple until his death in 2012, revealed in a 2011 New York Times interview that he prohibited his kids from using the newly-released iPad. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home," Jobs told reporter Nick Bilton. Other techies, like Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and Google's Sundar Pichai, limit their kids' screen time. Spiegel and his wife Miranda Kerr impose an hour and a half of screen time per week on their kids, he told the Financial Times. Young people use Snapchat more often than any other social media platform, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey. Pichai told the New York Times his 11-year-old son does not have a cell phone, and he keeps the television away to limit its use.

Chicago teachers vote overwhelmingly to authorize strike - This week, Chicago’s more than 20,000 teachers and support staff voted by 94 percent to authorize strike action. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which has sought to avoid a strike, said that a walkout could take place as early as October 7, but that any strike date will not be set until October 2. The teachers have been without a contract since July 1, and the strike authorization vote, which could have been taken at any point, is being referred to by CTU leaders as a way to “increase leverage at the bargaining table.” The Democratic city administration led by Mayor Lori Lightfoot wants teachers to accept wage increases that barely rise above the inflation rate, increased healthcare costs and more cuts to school services. Lower class sizes and an end to the firings of more senior, higher-paid teachers are major issues for CPS teachers. There is enormous determination among teachers to fight. Teachers, however, confront both the Democratic Party and the CTU, which has worked closely with the Democrats in imposing the conditions teachers confront. In the ruling class and the political establishment in Chicago, dominated by the Democratic Party, there is enormous fear over the implications of a strike by teachers, which could spark a wave of social unrest throughout the city. Just this month, more than 2,000 nurses at University of Chicago Medical Center were locked out and may strike again, having had none of their problems resolved. More than 2,300 Chicago Park District workers and seven thousand Chicago Public Schools staff have voted to strike. Campus bus drivers at Loyola University authorized a walkout by unanimous vote. College of DuPage faculty, just west of Chicago, are also in the midst of a contract fight in which the school administration has placed advertisements for large numbers of adjunct faculty to serve as strikebreakers. The strike authorization vote also takes place in the second week of a strike by 46,000 General Motors workers. The United Auto Workers union, mired in a massive federal corruption scandal, is deliberately isolating the strike by limiting it to GM.

 Chicago teachers, schools staff and parks district workers set joint October 17 strike date- The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) house of delegates has set a strike date of October 17 for its 25,000 member teachers and staff, coinciding with the strike date set for roughly 2,500 Chicago Parks District workers and about 7,500 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) staff members, both organized under the Service Employees International Union. The Democratic city administration led by Mayor Lori Lightfoot and CPS CEO Janice Jackson announced a plan to keep some schools and parks facilities open and staffed in the event of a walkout and is asking parents to register their children on the CPS website. The teachers’ contract expired June 30. Lightfoot wants teachers to accept wage increases that barely rise above the inflation rate along with increased healthcare costs and more cuts to school services. Large class sizes and the routine lay off of more senior, higher-paid teachers are major issues confronting CPS teachers. The joint strike announcement is aimed at creating substantially more time for CTU negotiations with the Chicago Democratic Party and mayor Lightfoot in order to avoid a strike and cut a concessions deal that the union can enforce on educators who are determined to fight for better wages and improved conditions in their schools. The earliest date Chicago teachers could legally walk out is October 7. CPS teachers face the very real danger of once again being betrayed by the CTU, which has agreed to every contract that has led to the intolerable conditions in the schools teachers are seeking to change. Union leaders have, over the last seven years of deepening attacks on public education and growing social anger, done everything possible to avoid a walkout since the Chicago teachers strike of 2012.

Judge Rules Harvard Can Keep Discriminating Against Asians Using 'Race-Conscious Admissions'  -- A federal judge has decided in favor of Harvard University, ruling that the college can continue using Obama-era "race-conscious" affirmative action policies designed "to promote diverse educational settings," according to NPR.   Federal District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs issued her decision Tuesday, saying, "Harvard's admission program passes constitutional muster," and that "ensuring diversity at Harvard relies, in part, on race conscious admissions." The plaintiff, advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, accused Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants. It argued the school considers race too much, forcing Asian-Americans to meet a higher bar to get in. –NPR The plaintiffs, Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA), are likely to appeal the case which may make it all the way to the Supreme Court. They have alleged that based on their analysis, Asian-American applicants receive Harvard's lowest subjective personal rating scores, while consistently achieving the highest academic and extracurricular ratings of any other racial group. The personal rating is in part based on teacher recommendations, personal essays and admissions interviews, according to Harvard.  Last August, the Department of Justice lent its support to SFFA - concluding that Harvard's use of a "personal rating" system violates the law, and that the college failed to demonstrate how its use of the system is narrowly tailored to suit a competing interest.  Harvard successfully argued that the lawsuit should be tossed because the case was founded on "invective, mischaracterizations and in some cases outright misrepresentations," adding that the judge should rule in their favor since the lawsuit is nothing but a "litigation vehicle" to advance the ideological objectives of the plaintiffs' group, led by Edward Blum.

Washington Lawmakers Approve Race-Preferences In College Admissions - After Voters Rejected It -  Washington state lawmakers overturned a 20-year-old ban on affirmative action in higher education earlier this year. Voters will get a chance to overturn their decision at the ballot box this fall, thanks to the efforts of a successful referendum campaign. Let People Vote told supporters that it set a state record by collecting more than 200,000 signatures to challenge the Legislature’s Initiative 1000. By voting to “reject” Referendum 88 on the November ballot, voters will preserve Washington’s ban on affirmative action.Just as Asian-American groups backed the unsuccessful lawsuit against Harvard University’s race preferences, they are also joining the campaign against the imposition of affirmative action in Washington.“We are launching a national alliance with our partner organizations to support their [R-88] campaign,” Wenyuan Wu, director of administration for the Asian American Coalition for Education, told The College Fix in an email.They consist of more than 260 partners, mostly grassroots Asian-American groups, including the Silicon Valley Chinese Association, Houston Chinese Alliance and Michigan Chinese Conservative Alliance. I-1000 is a direct threat to equal opportunity for Asian Americans in the United States, Wu said.It will “not advance the purported goal of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,’” she said: “Instead, promoting affirmative action by redefining preferential treatment in restricted terms will most likely result in racial discrimination against Asian Americans in Washington State without delivering the intended benefits.”

The Financialized Family - Parents today face something like a moral obligation to believe in the brightness of their children’s future. Because a college education has come to be understood as an economic imperative for success, they are encouraged to consider their children college-bound from an early age, far in advance of any evidence one way or the other. As Caitlin Zaloom explains in her important new book Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, “college investment programs like the 529 and prepaid tuition are premised in part on [the] notion that parents should believe; that they should hold children’s potential as sacred.” And if parents must believe in their children, then it follows that they must pay. But imagine trying to explain the various 529 plans and other byzantine methods of saving for college to a U.S. citizen of the 1950s. . The average cost of attendance at public, four-year universities has increased more than threefold since 1987, with much of that increase occurring after the year 2000. This has spawned a vast, all-consuming student finance industrial complex, replete with numerous financial products that emerged like rats from a trash heap to help families pay for their children’s education. In addition to 529s, there are direct private and federal parent PLUS loans. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which reaches down into a family’s private life and makes abstract judgments about their financial fitness, has become a routine obligation for all but the wealthiest college-bound students. FAFSA uses something called the Expected Family Contribution—a calculation enumerated in a thirty-six-page document—to dictate to families exactly how much they should spend on their children’s education. And Indebted reveals how FAFSA privileges nuclear families with stable incomes in first marriages—something that’s increasingly rare in the United States. All of this might be described as the financialization of the family. Zaloom argues that it began in the post-war era when the federal government, hoping to win the Cold War by goosing private ownership, made it a priority to get mortgages in the hands of newly middle-class home-seekers, which was great for consumer spending and even better for banks. Later, after wages began to stagnate in the early 1970s, the 401(k) introduced a new element of financial thinking to the family: retirement would no longer be managed by pension funds, but by individuals, who would now have to choose not only how much money to save for retirement, but when. Would they buy a house in a better neighborhood with better schools, or take their kids on vacation, or prudently save for retirement instead? The imperatives of finance, namely that investing today will bring exponential rewards tomorrow, fundamentally changed how families made decisions.

Democrats asked Betsy DeVos to cancel defrauded ITT Tech students' loans. She did — 'with extreme displeasure.' -- Democrats are actually happy with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for once.In a Monday tweet, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) delivered the result of an earlier letter she and fellow senators had written to DeVos asking her to cancel loans for defrauded ITT Technical Institute students. DeVos did grant the Democrats' request — but "with extreme displeasure," she added in the comments section.  The for-profit ITT Educational Services shuttered all of its 136 nationwide campuses in 2016, prompting the Department of Education to offer loan discharges for those who attended an ITT Tech school when it closed or shortly beforehand. But when students still had not seen those loans forgiven years later, Warren and three other Democratic senators wrote a letter to DeVos to follow up. They got their terse yet desired answer a few weeks later.

Student Loan Crisis Driving Racial Wealth Gap -- Credit Slips - Twenty years after taking out student loans, white borrowers have paid 94% of their debt (at the median.)  Black borrowers, on the other hand, have paid 5%. While a disturbing 20% of white borrowers defaulted on student loans at some point during twenty years, a catastrophic 50% of Black borrowers defaulted.  A new report from the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis collates NCES and other data on student borrowers beginning college in 1995-96 to paint a grim picture of student debt burden as a key contributor to the racial wealth gap. As today's students take on far greater debt than the 1990s cohorts, this pernicious effect can only magnify. Cancelling student loan debt could play an important role in closing the gap. Debt cancellation should be judged not by the dollar amounts of debt forgiven for various borrowers, but by the degree of debt burden relieved for borrowers at various income and asset levels, as explained by progressive economist Marshall Steinbaum.

Rural hospitals, already cut by Medicare, are about to get their Medicaid payments reduced, too; here’s a partial Kentucky list - Kentucky Health News -- Hospitals in Kentucky and across the nation are getting a reprieve, maybe a short one, from a new formula cutting the money the federal government gives them to care for poor people.The cuts in Medicaid were supposed to go into effect Oct. 1, but Congresspassed a continuing resolution to fund the federal government that, among other things, includes a provision to delay the cuts until Nov. 21. President Trump signed the resolution Friday. "We are hoping that it will be delayed permanently," Carl Herde, vice president of financial policy at the Kentucky Hospital Association, told Kentucky Health News.The cuts are for "disproportionate share hospitals," which care for a significant number of uninsured and Medicaid patients. DSH payments under Medicare are already being cut. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' final Medicaid DSH rule, issued Sept. 23, calls for payment reductions in fiscal years 2020-25, with a $4 billion cut in fiscal 2020 and $8 billion in each of the next four fiscal years. Federal fiscal years begin Oct. 1.Those figures mean Kentucky hospitals' DSH payments in 2021 would be $60 million, 75 percent less than the 2018 total of $227 million, according to the Kentucky Hospital Association.Rural hospitals in Kentucky would likely be hit hardest, since so many of their patients are on Medicare and Medicaid or have no health insurance. Almost one of every three Kentuckians is on Medicaid."The final method considers the rate of uninsured in each state, the number of Medicaid inpatients, the level of uncompensated care in the state and other budget-neutrality factors," Michael Brady reports for Modern Healthcare. "It also clarifies the definition of total hospital cost and specifies state data submission requirements. Lastly, it adjusts the weighting of certain factors required in the methodology by the Affordable Care Act."

Rural Hospital Closings Reach Crisis Stage, Leaving Millions Without Nearby Health Care -- Presidential candidates and other politicians have talked about the rural health crisis in the U.S., but they are not telling rural Americans anything new. Rural Americans know all too well what it feels like to have no hospital and emergency care when they break a leg, go into early labor, or have progressive chronic diseases, such as diabetes and congestive heart failure. More than 20% of our nation’s rural hospitals, or 430 hospitals across 43 states, are near collapse. This is despite the fact that rural hospitals are not only crucial for health care but also survival of their small rural communities. Since 2010, 113 rural hospitals across the country have closed, with 18% being in Texas, where we live. About 41% of rural hospitals nationally operate at a negative margin, meaning they lose more money than they earn from operations. Texas and Mississippi had the highest number of economically vulnerable facilities, according to a national health care finance report in 2016.    Each time a rural hospital closes, there are tragic consequences for the local community and surrounding counties. While the medical consequences are the most obvious, there is also loss of sales tax revenue, reduction in supporting businesses such as pharmacies and clinics. There are also fewer professionals, including doctors, nurses and pharmacists, and fewer students in local schools.The closing of a rural hospital often signals the beginning of progressive decline and deterioration of small rural towns and counties. Hospitals often serve as financial and professional anchors as well as source of pride for its small rural community. It also often means loss of other employers or inability to recruit new employers due to lack of nearby health care. When a rural hospital closes its doors, unemployment often rises, and average income drops.There are no nurses, doctors, pharmacists or ERs for local farmers, ranchers, growers and assorted men, women and children who love living and working in America’s vast rural regions. Rural communities and rural citizens are often left with no options for routine primary care,maternity care or emergency care. Even basic medical supplies are often hard to find. Residents in these communities have had to take their chances living in America’s heartland, finding alternative options for basic health care services.

Why Hospitals Are Getting Into the Housing Business - One patient at Denver Health, the city’s largest safety net hospital, occupied a bed for more than four years — a hospital record of 1,558 days.Another admitted for a hard-to-treat bacterial infection needed eight weeks of at-home IV antibiotics, but had no home.A third, with dementia, came to the hospital after being released from the Denver County Jail. His family refused to take him back.In the first half of this year alone, the hospital treated more than 100 long-term patients. All had a medical issue that led to their initial hospitalization. But none of the patients had a medical reason for remaining in the hospital for most of their stay.Legally and morally, hospitals cannot discharge patients if they have no safe place to go. So patients who are homeless, frail or live alone, or have unstable housing, can occupy hospital beds for weeks or months — long after their acute medical problem is resolved. For hospitals, it means losing money because a patient lingering in a bed without medical problems doesn’t generate much, if any, income. Meanwhile, acutely ill patients may wait days in the ER to be moved to a floor because a hospital’s beds are full.“Those people are, for lack of a better term, stranded in our hospital,” said Dr. Sarah Stella, a Denver Health physician.To address the problem, hospitals from Baltimore to St. Louis to Sacramento, Calif., are exploring ways to help patients find a home. With recent federal policy changes that encourage hospitals to allocate charity dollars for housing, many hospitals realize it’s cheaper to provide a month of housing than to keep patients for a single night.

These Sheriffs Release Sick Inmates to Avoid Paying Their Hospital Bills - Inmates suffering heart attacks, on the verge of diabetic comas and brutalized in jail beatings have been released so sheriffs wouldn’t have to pay for their medical care. Some were rearrested once they had recovered.Michael Tidwell’s blood sugar reading was at least 15 times his normal level when sheriff’s deputies took him to the hospital. But before they loaded the inmate into the back of a car, deputies propped up his slumping body and handed him a pen so he could sign a release from the Washington County Jail. Tidwell said that he didn’t know what he was signing at the time, and that he lost consciousness a short time later. The consequences of his signature only became clear in the weeks that followed the 2013 medical emergency. By signing the document, which freed him on bond from the small jail in south Alabama, Tidwell had in essence agreed that the Washington County Sheriff’s Office would not be responsible for his medical costs, which included the two days he spent in a diabetic coma in intensive care at Springhill Medical Center in Mobile. It’s unclear whether Tidwell, who was uninsured at the time and in poor health afterward, was billed for his care or if the medical providers wrote it off. Neither Tidwell’s attorneys nor the hospital was able to say, and Tidwell was unable to get answers when he and a reporter called the hospital’s billing department. What is clear is that the sheriff’s office avoided paying Tidwell’s hospital bills. Tidwell had been on the receiving end of a practice referred to by many in law enforcement as a “medical bond.” Sheriffs across Alabama are increasingly deploying the tactic to avoid having to pay when inmates face medical emergencies or require expensive procedures — even ones that are necessary only because an inmate received inadequate care while incarcerated. What’s more, once they recover, some inmates are quickly rearrested and booked back into the jail from which they were released.

Doctor gets 40 years in prison for prescribing over 500,000 opioid doses --A doctor who prosecutors said ran a medical practice in Virginia like an interstate drug distribution ring was sentenced on Wednesday to 40 years in prison for illegally prescribing opioids.Dr Joel Smithers was sentenced in US district court in Abingdon. Judge James Jones sentenced Smithers to 40 years. He faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years and a maximum of life.Smithers was convicted in May of more than 800 counts of illegally distributing opioids, including oxycodone and oxymorphone that caused the death of a West Virginia woman.  Authorities say Smithers prescribed more than 500,000 doses of opioids to patients from Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio and Tennessee while based in the small western Virginia town of Martinsville from 2015 to 2017. Martinsville has a population of roughly 13,000.

Sackler Family Received $13 Billion In Profits From Firm That Kick-Started Opioid Crisis -The Sackler family's profiteering from the opioid crisis that has gripped most of the US over the past decade was far more extensive than even the courts realized. Citing figures gleaned from several legal filings, WSJ reports that the Sacklers likely reaped profits in the range of $12 billion to $13 billion from Purdue Pharmaceuticals - though the time frame for these earnings was left unclear.The Sacklers and Purdue have taken a public relations beating over the firm's aggressive marketing practices for its "revolutionary" pain drug, OxyContin, which is widely blamed for kick-starting the opioid crisis as Doctors over-prescribed it to people outside of the typical patient pool, which mostly included cancer patients and those with terminal illnesses.This figure is much higher than the previous estimate of the family's earnings: The Massachusetts AG had tabulated that the Sackler family made $4 billion in total off Purdue between 2008 and 2016.Purdue and its lawyers have agreed to a $10 billion settlement that was intended to end the thousands of lawsuits facing Purdue, but it appears many of the state AGs who are suing the Connecticut-based pharmaceutical firm no longer wish to accept the settlement. Instead, lawyers for the plaintiffs are looking into ways to pierce Purdue's bankruptcy protection (it filed for Chapter 11 in New York state earlier this year to try and shield itself from the myriad claims stemming from the opioid crisis). The Sacklers have been widely criticized as evidence of the family's efforts to shield its money has leaked to the press. Last month, the office of the New York AG uncovered $1 billion in wire transfers tied to the Sacklers. Plaintiffs accused the family of trying to siphon money away from Purdue to try and protect it from the settlements as it tries to legally extend the protections that cover Purdue to the family's wealth as well. Even though not a single member of the Sackler family is employed at Purdue, nor do any of its members occupy board seats at the company.

Controversial Study Dismisses Public Health Risks of Meat Consumption - It has long been a public health truism that limiting meat consumption is better for your body. The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer and the World Cancer Research Fund both say red or processed meat can cause cancer, as Reuters noted. But a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine Tuesday argued that this might not be the case."Based on the research, we cannot say with any certainty that eating red or processed meat causes cancer, diabetes or heart disease," Bradley Johnson, an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Canada and a co-leader of the study, said, as Reuters reported.To reach this conclusion, a team of 14 researchers in seven countries spent three years reviewing studies of the link between the consumption of red or processed meat and heart disease or cancer, The New York Times explained.Their three reviews of the evidence covered randomized trials of 54,000 people and observational studies covering millions, according to The New York Times and Reuters. They concluded that the randomized trials showed no statistically significant link between meat consumption and diabetes, heart disease or cancer. The observational studies showed "a very small reduction in risk" for those who ate less red or processed meat, but observational studies are a weaker form of evidence than random trials, as The New York Times explained:At the heart of the debate is a dispute over nutritional research itself, and whether it's possible to ascertain the effects of just one component of the diet. The gold standard for medical evidence is the randomized clinical trial, in which one group of participants is assigned one drug or diet, and another is assigned a different intervention or a placebo.But asking people to stick to a diet assigned by a flip of a coin, and to stay with it long enough to know if it affects the risk for heart attack or cancer, is nearly impossible.The alternative is an observational study: Investigators ask people what they eat and look for links to health. But it can be hard to know what people really are eating, and people who eat a lot of meat are different in many other ways from those who eat little or none. The researchers concluded that adults could continue to consume red and processed meat at their current levels.

Meat’s Bad for You! No, It’s Not! How Experts See Different Things in the Data. -- The following originally appeared on The Upshot (copyright 2019, The New York Times Company)Researchers are in another fight about food.This week the Annals of Internal Medicine published studies arguing that eating red meat poses minimal health risks for most people, and that even our certainty about that link is weak. With these conclusions in hand, the authors offered a set of recommendations that most people could continue their current levels of meat consumption.Although not involved in the research, I co-authored an editorial for the journal summarizing the findings, arguing that our messaging about the harms of red meat may be falling on deaf ears. and then pointing out other messages that might work better to reduce consumption of it.The conclusions and the guideline recommendations, made by an international team led by Bradley Johnston, an epidemiologist at Dalhousie University, run counter to many by established health authorities. This week, a number of nutrition researchers wrote me to say they vehemently disagree with the publication of these papers, and feel that they could do real harm.They believe that red meat and processed meat consumption poses a health hazard to people, and that if people don’t reduce their consumption, they are putting themselves, and the planet, at risk.I agree with them on the environmental argument for eating less meat. You can read about that here.But readers may well be confused about the health risks. How can experts disagree so strongly?The following questions may help you understand why even researchers of good faith can land on different sides of a debate.

The Real Problem With Beef - The potentially unhealthful effects of eating red meat are so small that they may be of little clinical significance for many people. This finding, just released in multiple articles in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is sure to be controversial. It should certainly not be interpreted as license to eat as much meat as you like. But the scope of the work is expansive, and it confirms prior work that the evidence against meat isn’t nearly as solid as many seem to believe. (While I had no role in the new research, I co-wrote a commentary about it in the journal.)Red meat has been vilified more than almost any other food, yet studies have shown that while moderation is important, meat can certainly be part of a healthy diet.This doesn’t mean that there aren’t other reasons to eat less meat. Some point out that the ways in which cattle are raised and consumed are unethical. Others argue that eating red meat is terrible for the environment.Recently, meat substitutes have emerged as a possible solution, but the promise is much greater than the reality, at least so far. Burger King and other fast-food chains are trying out Impossible Foods burgers as a vegan answer to beef. Let’s dispense with the idea that this is “healthier” in any way. The Impossible Whopper has 630 calories (versus a traditional Whopper’s 660). It also contains similar amounts of saturated fat and protein, and more sodium and carbohydrates. No one should think they’re improving their health by making the switch. What about the environmental argument? Almost 30 percent of the world’s ice-free land is used to raise livestock. We grow a lot of crops to feed animals, and we cut down a lot of forests to do that. But beef, far more than pork or chicken, contributes to environmental harm, in part because it requires much more land.  Cows also put out an enormous amount of methane, causing almost 10 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and contributing to climate change. There has been a lot of hope that Beyond Meat’s pea protein or Impossible Burger’s soy could serve as beef burger substitutes, reducing the need for cows. That’s unlikely to happen, according to Sarah Taber, a crop scientist and food system specialist. Ground beef is not the problem; steak is.  If everyone gave up hamburgers tomorrow, the same number of cows would still be raised and need to be fed.”

Study predicts significant outbreaks of measles in Texas due to low vaccination rates - Last month, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a nine-month study of Texas public and private schools, which are poised for an explosive outbreak of measles due to a dramatic drop in vaccination rates.The study noted significant drops in vaccination rates in the large metropolitan areas of Dallas-Ft. Worth-Arlington, Austin-Round Rock, greater Houston, and another 21 metro statistical areas (MSAs) of Texas with an urban size of at least 50,000 persons.The University of Pittsburgh Public Health Dynamics Laboratory conducted the investigation at the request of the Texas Pediatric Society “to demonstrate the possibility of outbreaks in communities with low vaccination rates,” according to a press release by Pitt Health Sciences.Texas, the second most populous state, grants the greatest number of vaccine exemptions for personal philosophical and religious reasons of any state in the country. Between 2003 and 2018, the number of exemptions rose from 2,300 to 64,000, a 28-fold increase. Currently, 45 states issue non-medical exemptions for vaccinations required for attending school. Only California, Maine, Mississippi, New York, and West Virginia ban non-medical vaccine exemptions.

How anti-vaxxers target grieving moms and turn them into crusaders against vaccines - Fifteen miles west of Minneapolis, a billboard looms over a field of tall grass beside Highway 55. The sign features a photo of Evee Clobes, a baby girl with sparkling eyes, flushed cheeks and an expression frozen in wonder. Next to her face are the words, "HEALTHY BABIES DON'T JUST DIE." The web address of a group opposed to mandatory vaccinations is at the bottom.Since her death in March, Evee has served as a literal poster child for the anti-vaccination movement. Her face and chunky legs — adorned with Band-Aids from her shots — are featured on anti-vaccination websites and billboards. The story of her death is told at protests, read aloud at statehouses, and offered up by her mother and other activists as proof of the horror vaccines can bring.Evee's story, as her mother Catelin Clobes tells it, is of a healthy 6-month-old who died 36 hours after a checkup where she got several vaccinations. Clobes and an army of online activists now say the vaccines caused Evee's death. That belief, and Clobes' willingness to make Evee part of a national media campaign, have turned the grieving mom into a rising star in the anti-vaccination world. Her Facebook posts draw hundreds of thousands of views, and multiple fundraisers set up by anti-vaccination activists on her behalf have raised tens of thousands of dollars. She has become a champion of other anti-vaccination parents around the country.But there's a problem with the story at the heart of this crusade, and with Clobes' new role as an anti-vaccine heroine. Her local medical examiner has ruled that the evidence — collected in an autopsy and by first responders — shows Evee accidentally suffocated while co-sleeping with her mother.

Ebola Crisis Worsens, Threatening Tanzania, But New Vaccine Appears Effective - The most recent and ongoing devastating outbreak of Ebola in central Africa raging since August 2018 has claimed over 2000 lives and resulted in 3000 confirmed infections, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).  And perhaps most alarming are recent new reports of possible Ebola deaths in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania at the major international port there — a surprising development given the WHO did not even rank Tanzania as among the "most vulnerable" countries for an outbreak (those listed are Burundi, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Uganda based on reported cases near busy border crossings). This after in early summer it spread from worst hit Congo to neighboring Uganda, resulting in multiple deaths, including a child.  The latest reports out of Tanzania have resulted in rare travel advisories issued by the US and UK governments urging citizens to "be aware" of ‘probable’ Ebola-related deaths in the East African country. "The move follows an unusual statement from the WHO last weekend, which rebuked the Tanzanian government amid suspicion that cases of the devastating hemorrhagic disease were being covered up…", The Telegraph reported earlier this week. Despite what looks like a spillover outbreak in Tanzania from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, which is suffering what the WHO describes as the second largest Ebola outbreak in history, the United Nations is reporting a positive development, that 1000 people have survived believed due in large part to a new "highly effective vaccine".

CVS and Walgreens Stop Selling Zantac After Cancer-Causing Chemical Detected - Weeks after the popular heartburn drug ranitidine, known by the brand name Zantac, was found to contain a cancer-causing chemical, multiple drugstores have decided to no longer sell the medication. CVS and Walgreens will no longer sell Zantac and other ranitidine medications, as the heartburn drugs might contain substances that could cause cancer. Even though Zantac hasn't officially been recalled, CVS is currently offering customers who recently bought Zantac or another ranitidine drug a refund. The chain will continue to sell other over-the-counter heartburn medications, like Pepcid and Tagamet, which don't contain ranitidine. Although Sanofi, the company that owns Zantac, hasn't issued a recall, the drug companies Apotex Corp. and Sandoz Inc. announced they're voluntarily recalling all of their ranitidine-based products sold in the U.S. due to the risk. About two weeks ago, the FDA reported small amounts of a cancer-causing chemical called N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) were detected in several brand-name and generic heartburn medications. Even though the FDA identified the carcinogen, the organization isn't yet recommending people stop taking ranitidine products. This affects the many people who regularly use ranitidine medications to prevent and treat heartburn, ulcers and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). The FDA is investigating whether the low levels found in the ranitidine medicines create a health risk.

Bootleg Weed Vapes Found To Contain Cyanide  --While investigating a spate of mysterious deaths and hundreds of hospitalizations linked to vape pens, NBC News commissioned one of the nation's top cannabis testing facilities to sample 18 THC vape cartridges obtained from legal dispensaries and unlicensed dealers.  Three of the cartridges bought from legal dispensaries were found to contain no heavy metals, pesticides or residual solvents such as Vitamin E - which should not be inhaled. 10 out of 15 samples from black market dealers, however, contained pesticides containing myclobutanil - a fungicide that converts to hydrogen cyanide when burned. "You certainly don’t want to be smoking cyanide," said CannaSafe president of operations, Antonio Frazier. "I don’t think anyone would buy a cart that was labeled hydrogen cyanide on it." According to David Downs, California bureau chief for online marijuana publication Leafly, "This all starts in China where you can get the empty cartridges both for the THC market and the nicotine market, as well as the additives, flavorings, and thickeners that are being put into these cartridges alongside the THC oil." "It’s a very deep, mature, and advanced industry that starts in China and ends in our own backyard, he added. "I’ve been saying, ‘Look, if you buy a fake Gucci purse, it’s not going to give you a lung injury, but if you buy a fake vape cartridge, it just might.’"The findings are "very disturbing," according to NYU Winthrop Hospital pediatric pulmonologist, Dr. Melodi Pirzada, who said "it’s going to cause a very toxic effect on the lungs." The New York pulmonologist also expressed alarm about the presence of Vitamin E, which is also known to cause significant lung damage when inhaled, in the THC mixtures. "It should not be inhaled into your lungs," she said. Pirzada has treated four patients, all teenagers, suffering from vaping-related lung damage. She said testing conducted on the same vaping mixture used by one of her patients detected the presence of Vitamin E.

‘Toxic chemical fumes,’ not oils, may be causing vaping illness, Mayo Clinic researchers find -- Doctors researching the cause of a sudden respiratory illness that’s killed at least 16 people in the U.S. since July say a mix of “toxic chemical fumes,” not oils as previously expected, may be what’s making patients sick, according to a new study. Researchers from the Mayo Clinic examined lung biopsies from 17 patients suspected of having a perplexing vaping illness that’s sickened more than 805 people since April. Doctors have previously said it resembled a rare form of pneumonia caused by the accumulation of fatty substances known as lipids. However, none of the cases examined by the Mayo Clinic researchers showed any evidence of lipoid pneumonia, according to the study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. It’s the first formal study examining tissue samples of patients who have fallen ill from vaping. “It seems to be some kind of direct chemical injury, similar to what one might see with exposures to toxic chemical fumes, poisonous gases and toxic agents,” said Dr. Brandon Larsen, a surgical pathologist at Mayo Clinic Arizona and a lead author of the study. “Based on what we have seen in our study, we suspect that most cases involve chemical contaminants, toxic byproducts or other noxious agents within vape liquids.” The pathologists said research on lung injuries linked to vaping is still in its early stages and that the findings should be interpreted with caution. The vaping illness outbreak has now spread to 46 states and one territory, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public health officials in 13 states have reported deaths. The CDC has dispatched more than 100 doctors and investigators to identify the specific cause of the deadly illness. Early symptoms include coughing, shortness of breath, fatigue, chest pains, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

Vaping Lung Damage Compared to Chemical Weapon Burns in New Study -- People who develop respiratory illnesses after using e-cigarettes to vape nicotine and marijuana are showing symptoms akin to chemical burns in their lungs, according to new research by Mayo Clinic doctors.The illness is causing lung damage that resembles injuries from chemical weapons used in World War I such as mustard gas and those found in industrial workers after a toxic chemical spill, Dr. Brandon Larsen, an Arizona-based surgical pathologist at the Mayo Clinic and senior author of the study, told the New York Times.The doctors, who published their findings this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, examined biopsies from 17 of the more than 800 people around the country since April who have developed a deadly respiratory illness from vaping — including two who died from the illness."All 17 of our cases show a pattern of injury in the lung that looks like a toxic chemical exposure, a toxic chemical fume exposure, or a chemical burn injury," Larsen told the Times.The study marks the first formal research using lung tissue samples of patients with the mystery illness, and the first time toxic chemicals have been considered as the primary culprit.Previously, the prevailing theory was that oil additives in vape juice had been causing fatty acid to build up in the lungs, CNBC reported, but no cases in the Mayo Clinic study showed any evidence to that effect.Instead, the doctors observed tissue damage and cell death in the airways and lungs suggestive of pneumonia from inhaling "noxious chemical fumes." According to the New York Times, when the body tries to heal the damage, swelling tissue and fluid build up can make breathing even more difficult. "Based on what we have seen in our study, we suspect that most cases involve chemical contaminants, toxic byproducts or other noxious agents within vape liquids," Larsen said in a press release. Finding out exactly which chemicals are causing the illness will require additional research, Larsen told CNN, but researchers have begun to hone in on patterns across the cases that could eventually point to the cause.

Vaping illness outbreak surpasses 1,000 cases, 18 deaths with no sign of slowing, CDC says - The number of cases of a deadly vaping illness continues to rise “at a brisk pace” with 18 confirmed deaths and more than 1,000 cases throughout the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has identified 275 new cases over the last week and is investigating several other deaths that are suspected of being caused by vaping, Dr. Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principle deputy director, told reporters on a conference call Thursday. Schuchat called it a “very concerning outbreak” with no signs of abating. “We haven’t seen a measurable drop in the occurrences of new cases,” she said. “The data that we’ve seen doesn’t suggest it has peaked, it doesn’t suggest this is declining.” The CDC has confirmed 1,080 probable cases across 48 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands so far. Doctors still don’t know what’s making people sick, Schuchat said. Of the 578 cases where doctors know what patients were using, roughly 78% of them said they vaped THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, while 17% percent said they exclusively used nicotine, according to the CDC. “In light of the seriousness of this condition,” consumers should stop vaping, particularly THC and especially anything bought off the street, she said, or any substance not intended by the manufacturer. The number of confirmed fatalities jumped from 12 last week to 18 this week, the CDC said. It’s proving to be an especially deadly illness for older adults. “The fatalities that we’re seeing tend to be a bit older,” she said, adding that the median age among the deceased is close to 50 while the median age among all patients is 23.The CDC has dispatched more than 100 physicians and investigators since the lung disease started to emerge as a public health threat in July. Doctors initially said the illness resembled a rare form of pneumonia, caused by oil in the lungs, but new research casts doubt on that theory.

Even Small Spikes in Air Pollution Can Threaten Children’s Mental Health, Research Suggests -- Climate change is making air pollution worse and is exacerbating smog-related health risks such as heart and lung diseases, pregnancy complications and development issues. Now, a study by the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center has identified another health risk associated with rising air pollution: childhood psychiatric issues. According to the study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, short-term spikes in ambient air pollution are linked with an increase in hospital visits for childhood psychiatric issues. Also, children in low-income neighborhoods with poor access to healthcare appeared to be more susceptible to the mental health effects of air pollution.CNN reported that while previous research has shown an association between particulate matter pollution in the air and adult mental health issues, this is the first time researchers have looked into its effect on children.During the five-year study, researchers focused on a very small type of particulate matter called PM 2.5 — fossil fuel-powered vehicles and power plants, cooking, dust and brush fires are all sources — can be easily inhaled and end up in organs and the bloodstream, causing inflammation in the lungs or brain, and, in the long term, may trigger cancer and heart attacks.The researchers looked at more than 13,000 visits by children to Cincinnati Children's emergency psychiatric unit and compared it with data on the concentrations of PM 2.5 where they live. Results showed that spikes in PM 2.5 concentration were associated with increased childhood psychiatric visits one or two days later for adjustment disorder, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, while same-day visits were usually related to schizophrenia. All daily exposures to PM 2.5 in the study were below levels set in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency'sNational Ambient Air Quality Standards, researchers said. These spikes in air pollution increased the risk of hospitalization for suicidal thoughts by 44 percent overall, the Daily Mail reported, but the risk for children from disadvantaged areas was almost double that. These children were also 39 percent more likely to need treatment for anxiety.

A closer look at infant mortality in two of the most impoverished U.S. regions - “The most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born into.” That’s how global health researchers characterized the United States in a January 2018 report published in Health Affairs that sounded alarm bells about the country’s high infant mortality rate. U.S. babies, they found, were three times as likely to die of premature birth and 2.3 times as likely to die of sudden infant death syndrome than infants in comparably rich countries.Anne Driscoll, a demographer and statistician at the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, has been analyzing possible causes for years and has previously looked at maternal age, the rural-urban divide and other factors. Driscoll and her colleague Danielle Ely teamed up in a report released Wednesday to delve into infant mortality in two of the country’s most impoverished regions: Appalachia and the Mississippi River Delta region. The former includes 26 million people in 420 counties stretching from New York to Georgia, and the latter includes 9.8 million people in 252 counties in eight states in the South. Both have been hit hard by the epidemic of people addicted to opioid painkillers.Driscoll and Ely chose these areas because they are clearly defined (they are part of federal-state partnerships that encourage business development, infrastructure upgrades and otherwise try to jump-start the areas’ economies), and because they suspected, based on other studies about health outcomes there, that the regions might disproportionately suffer from infant mortality. They were right.In the study published Wednesday, they looked at the characteristics of mothers of the nearly 400,000 babies born in 2017 in the Delta and Appalachia regions and how their children fared. They found that women in the Delta were most likely to be teenagers, unmarried and not have a college degree — characteristics associated with poor infant outcomes. The infants born in the Delta were most likely to be born preterm, have a low birth weight, and die within the first 12 months. The infant mortality rate in the Delta was 8.17 deaths per 1,000 births, with a rate of 6.82 in Appalachia and 5.67 in the rest of the United States.

Teething gels can contain ‘potentially harmful ingredients’, dentists and researchers warn --Parents hoping to aid their children through the pain of teething could be using products that contain “potentially harmful ingredients”, dentists and researchers warn.A new study of 14 teething gels, including Anbesol, Dentinox, Calgel, Bonjela Junior and Boots own brand, found that two contained sucrose (table sugar), six contained alcohol and six contained an anaesthetic used to numb tissue called lidocaine.Nigel Monaghan, lead researcher from Public Health Wales (PHW), said there is little evidence that the products are actually effective in reducing teething pain.The British Dental Association (BDA) has agreed and is now urging parents to be aware of ingredients in teething products. Mick Armstrong, BDA chairman, said: “Parents buying teething powders to save infants from distress won’t always realise they’re offering their kids sugars, alcohol or lidocaine.

Oops! Gene editing not as precise as advertised -- Sometimes a headline gives you practically the entire story. Take this one: "Gene-Editing Unintentionally Adds Bovine DNA, Goat DNA, and Bacterial DNA, Mouse Researchers Find." The writer details how this happens, of course. And, there is an important subtext. The problem is chalked up by scientists and regulators to incompetence on the part of the company doing alterations to create cattle without horns. But the real news is this according the author: "[F]oreign DNA from surprising sources can routinely find its way into the genome of edited animals. This genetic material is not DNA that was put there on purpose, but rather, is a contaminant of standard editing procedures." [My emphasis.] At the risk of sounding like a broken record (remember records?), as Garrett Hardin, the author of the first law of ecology, reminds us, "we can never merely do one thing." Why is this truism so hard to accept, so hard that I feel compelled to refer to it in consecutive posts? The simple answer is that as long as there is profit in ignoring it and as long as it is possible to pass the bad consequences on to others, people will act as if Hardin's first law was never spoken. Unfortunately, we ignore Hardin in practically everything we do. For example, we discover the convenience of tough, clear plastics and create health damage with the chemical that makes them that way. We later discover that plastic degrades into very tiny particles that are now ubiquitous on the planet and in our bodies as well. In each case the damage is spread around as the profits mount for the makers. But even they can no longer escape their handiwork. The damage now makes its way into the corporate suites and penthouses. Any thinking person can understand the system we now have. Each company and its employees, even if they know they are degrading the environment and undermining the health of their customers with their products, focus on doing these anyway believing that somehow they can "get away with it." But when contaminated food, dangerous products and environmental damage are generated by competitors and practically every other business on the planet, no one can escape.

GMO Mosquitoes to Control the Spread of Disease Carries Unknown Risks - Every year, around one million people die of mosquito-borne diseases according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Consider, for example, dengue fever. This mosquito-borne virus is a leading cause of hospitalization and death among children and adults in several countries in Asia and Latin America. In 2016, member states in three of the six WHO regions reported 3.34 million cases. In the absence of an effective vaccine for dengue fever, Zika fever, chikungunya and other mosquito-borne diseases, researchers have developed genetic strategies to reduce mosquito populations. One such strategy involves the release into the wild of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes that express a lethal gene — a strategy believed to have little impact on the overall DNA of wild populations of mosquitoes. The transfer of new genes from GM organisms to wild or domesticated non-GM populations is a key criticism of GM crops like soybean and corn. There are concerns that the introduction of GM genes into non-target species could have negative consequences for both human and environmental health.  Oxitec, a company that spun out of research at Oxford University in the early 2000s, developed and trademarked GM Friendly™ mosquitoes (also known as strain OX513A of Aedes aegypti). These male GM mosquitoes have what the company describes as a "self-limiting" gene, which means that when these so-called friendly mosquitoes mate, their offspring inherit the self-limiting gene which is supposed to prevent them surviving into adulthood. In theory, when these mosquitoes are released in high numbers, a dramatic reduction in the mosquito population should follow.  According to research published by Oxitec researchers in 2015, field trials involving recurring releases of Friendly™ mosquitoes demonstrated a reduction of nearly 95 percent of target populations in Brazil. In these field trials, experiments were not performed to assess whether GM mosquitoes might persist in the wild. A recent study from the Powell lab at Yale University has since confirmed that some of the offspring of the GM mosquitoes didn't succumb to the self-limiting lethal gene and survived to adulthood. They were able to breed with native mosquitoes and thereby introduce some of their genes into the wild population.  The Yale researchers found that mosquitoes captured at six, 12 and up to 30 months post-release carried DNA from the GM mosquito population, thereby disproving "the claim that genes from the release strain would not get into the general population because offspring would die." Meanwhile, the impact of mosquitoes carrying these new genes remains largely unknown. One significant worry is that a new breed of mosquito might emerge that is more difficult to control. These new genes could also potentially alter evolutionary pressures on viruses carried by mosquitoes, like dengue fever, in unpredictable ways. This includes potentially increasing their virulence or changing their host-insect interactions. These are hypothetical risks that have been raised by scientists, and reflect the need for further study.

Science Catastrophe In South America Could Kill Millions - The releases of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) into the natural environment is having a catastrophic and irreversible impact on our planet. A company known as Oxitec, based out of the United Kingdom, which had announced plans to release genetically-engineered, or transgenic, mosquitoes into the wild.  Oxitec’s stated goal was to eradicate native mosquito populations carrying potentially deadly diseases like Zika by infiltrating their ranks with transgenic impostors. These impostor mosquitoes, we were told, do not have the ability to reproduce, and thus pose no risk of causing long-term changes to the natural ecosystem, according to a report by Natural News.  However, it appears that Oxitec was wrong about their GMO mosquitoes. As revealed in a new study, which was published in the esteemed journal Nature, Oxitec’s transgenic mosquitoes are not only able to reproduce, but their presence within native mosquito populations is actually causing super-mosquitoes to spawn. The world will have to face an onslaught of super-mosquitoes that are more resilient than the ones that previously existed in nature. “To summarize the findings of the study, this mad science GMO experiment managed to create a super mutant population of mosquitoes that now carry genes that are potentially tied to enhanced insecticide resistance, making them harder to kill than ever before,” Mike Adams wrote for Natural News. “The experiment utterly failed to achieve its promised outcome of wiping out mosquitoes, too.” Failure is an understatement. Since the goal was a decrease in the mosquito populations that carry infectious diseases, this quote from the conclusion of the study bears mentioning:The results of our tests of the infectivity of one strain each of the dengue and Zika viruses in females of the OX513A strain and the Jacobina natural population (before releases) indicate no significant differences (Fig. 3). –Nature The mosquitoes are still carrying infectious diseases at the same rate as before the GMO mosquitoes were released. The study states that this whole plan broke down because the natural female mosquitoes prefer to mate with male mosquitoes that were known to be fertile, and not the infertile GMO mosquitoes released by Oxitec.

Nestle Steps Up Coffee Bean Testing on Glyphosate Concerns -Nestle SA is increasing checks on the coffee it buys, after recent tests showed beans from some countries had levels of the weedkiller glyphosate that are close to a regulatory limit. The world’s largest coffee roaster has informed suppliers of Indonesian and certain Brazilian beans of the new procedures, which go into effect starting Oct. 1, according to memos seen by Bloomberg. The company says the new measures “should be temporary” until producing countries correct the application of glyphosate.  The move comes at a time when many countries have either banned or are seeking to prohibit the use of glyphosate, used in the Roundup weedkiller.Bayer AG, which spent $63 billion buying the product’s maker, Monsanto, is now facing billions of dollars worth of lawsuits claiming it causes cancer. “We actively monitor chemical residues, including glyphosate, in the green coffee that we purchase,” Switzerland-based Nestle said in a statement. “This monitoring program has shown that in some green coffee lots chemical residue levels are close to limits defined by regulations.”  The new measures have the potential to complicate global coffee trade-flows. The additional testing requirement is mostly for beans being shipped to factories in Europe, Australia and Malaysia, where legal limits on glyphosate are stricter than most other countries. The Brazilian memo was directed to suppliers of conilon, as the nation’s more bitter robusta beans are known.

Major Brands Source Palm Oil From Illegal Plantation Inside Orangutan Haven, Report - Major consumer brands including Nestlé, Kellogg's and The Hershey Company have been getting some of their palm oil from an illegal plantation inside a protected forest that holds the highest density of critically endangered orangutans anywhere on Earth, a new report says. The report is based on field investigations, interviews and transaction records analyzed by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). It shows that local brokers are buying palm fruit from oil palms planted illegally inside the nationally protected Rawa Singkil Wildlife Reserve in Indonesia's Aceh province. These brokers, the report says, are then supplying the fruit to processing mills located immediately next to areas of illegal encroachment in the Leuser Ecosystem, of which the wildlife reserve is a part. RAN reports that these mills then supply the processed palm oil to global traders, namely Singapore-listed Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) and Indonesia's Musim Mas Group. These companies, in turn, sell palm oil, directly or indirectly, to a who's who of household consumer brands, including Nestlé, Unilever, Mondelēz International, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars and The Hershey Company, according to RAN. All of these palm oil traders and brands have adopted policies committing them to "No Deforestation, No Peatlands, No Exploitation" (NDPE) in the sourcing of their raw ingredients. By contrast, the mills where the Rawa Singkil-sourced palm fruit is processed lack the necessary procedures to trace the provenance of the crop, RAN says.RAN's investigation also calls out global banks, including Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Dutch bank ABN Amro and Singapore's OCBC, for continuing to finance major palm oil traders, particularly GAR. "The authors of this report are demanding that companies caught contributing to this destruction stop buying palm oil sourced from the rogue mills identified here, or financing the culprits processing and shipping illegal palm oil to the global market, until transparent and verifiable monitoring, traceability and compliance systems are established to ensure they are only sourcing truly responsible palm oil," said RAN.

Palm Oil Is in Everything, and It’s Hurting More Than the Orangutans - We cook with it. We bathe with it. We use it for mood lighting. Palm oil is an ingredient in processed foods, cosmetics, hygiene products, biofuels and candles; experts estimate it's found in 50 percent of the items on grocery store shelves. Inexpensive to produce, palm oil contains no trans fats, and has a high melting point, making it versatile and easy to spread. The result: increasing demand. In 1996, global production totaled 16 million metric tons. By 2017, it was 60.7 million.But there's a problem. Palm oil may not cost much to produce, but it exacts a high price on the environment.   The story of palm oil begins with clearing tropical rainforests and peatlands for plantations of oil palm trees, which thrive on warmth, sunlight, and copious rainfall. The trees — native to West Africa — produce clusters of orange-red fruit year-round, and can be harvested every 10–14 days when mature. For the most part, oil palms don't need much help, but some farms do use herbicides and insecticides. Oil palms produce 3.8 metric tons of oil per hectare annually — eight times as much as soybeans (.5 t/ha), and almost five times the yield of canola (.8 t/ha).The U.S. Department of Agriculture says palm oil is the most consumed oil in the world, and its non-food uses are also increasing. India, China, Europe and Pakistan are the top importers, collectively using more than half of the global supply. In Asia, it's used in home cooking. In Europe and the U.S., most demand comes from manufacturers for everything from Oreos to toothpaste. You can find it in Silk soy milk, Secret deodorant, Nutella, Jergens lotion, instant noodles and Girl Scout cookies. Malaysian and Indonesian plantations make up about 85 percent of the industry, with Guatemala, Benin and Thailand among the other top producers. Areas with low wages and abundant labor often welcome palm plantations — despite the industry's history of slavery, child labor, and land-theft — because of their potential to lift workers out of poverty.  . During conventional cultivation, forests are cleared for plantations, bringing biodiversity loss, human-wildlife conflict, and habitat destruction affecting many species, notably the orangutan. A recent International Union for Conservation of Nature report notes that 50% of all deforestation on Borneo between 2005 and 2015 was driven by palm oil development. This deforestation also contributes to climate change; the conversion of forests to palm oil plantations releases carbon dioxide that had been absorbed by old-growth forests. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated in 2013 that 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation.

Beekeepers Seek to Save Honeybees From a Colony-Invading Pest - Last January, California’s beekeepers were worried they wouldn’t have enough bees to pollinate the almond bloom, their biggest money-making event of the year. Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper and the former president of the American Beekeeping Federation, said winter losses were “as bad or worse than I believe it’s been.” It turns out he was right. It was another grim year for America’s beekeepers, already reeling from more than a decade of colony losses that threaten the commercial honeybee industry. An annual survey released in June by the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP), a nonprofit collaboration of leading research labs and universities, found that beekeepers lost 38 percent of their colonies last winter, the highest winter figure since the survey began 13 years ago. Managed honeybees play a crucial role in the nation’s food production, contributing an estimated $15 billion to the U.S. economy each year by helping to pollinate at least 90 crops.   Virtually everyone in the beekeeping business will tell you that the biggest threat facing honeybees isn’t pesticides, starvation, or even the mysterious affliction known as colony collapse disorder that made big news a dozen years ago. Instead, they’ll blame Varroa destructor, a parasitic Asian mite that snuck into the country more than 30 years ago. When asked to cite the three biggest risks to honeybees, Susan Cobey, a renowned expert on bee breeding at Washington State University, says, “Varroa, Varroa, Varroa.”

Microbes in warm soils released more carbon than those in cooler soils - As one descends a mountain, the temperature steadily increases. A new study by a team including Andrew Nottingham, a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, took advantage of this principle to predict what would happen as tropical soils warm. The team discovered that warmer tropical soils released more car-bon, the species of soil microbes changed and microbial activity increased. A major cause for concern associated with global warming is the possibility that as soils warm, additional carbon stored in soil organic material may be released into the atmosphere. This would con-tribute to climate warming and warm the soil even more, a 'positive feedback loop,' because global warming is caused by the accumulation of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere that traps heat from the sun on the Earth's surface. "If one accepts the current projections of a 4 to 8 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures during the next century, tropical soils could cause roughly a 9% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide this century," Nottingham said. "The fate of soil carbon in response to global heating remains one of the greatest sources of un-certainty in our predictions of future climate," "Tropical soils have a particularly large influence on the global carbon cycle and are home to unique biodiversity, but their response to warming remains poorly understood."

Turkish Scientist Sentenced to Prison for Publishing Paper Linking Pollution to Cancer - A Turkish food engineer, columnist and human rights advocate was sentenced to 15 months in prison last week for publishing an environmental paper that linked pollution to a high incidence of cancer in Western Turkey, according to Science Magazine. The court in Istanbul found that Bülent Şık, former deputy director of the Food Safety and Agricultural Research Center at Akdeniz University, had disclosed classified information when he published the results of his study in a Turkish newspaper in April 2018. Amnesty International described the sentence as "a travesty of justice," as Agence-France Presse reported and Phys.org published."  Bülent Şık fulfilled his duty as a citizen and a scientist and he used his right to freedom of expression," his lawyer, Can Atalay, said in his closing statement, as Science reported.Şık carried out his study with several other scientists from 2011 to 2015 to test whether soil toxicity, water pollution and food had a link to the high rates of cancer in Western Turkey. The study, which was commissioned by Turkey's Ministry of Health, found dangerous levels of pesticides and heavy metals in various food and water samples from several provinces in western Turkey. Water in a few residential areas also tested positive for unsafe levels of lead, aluminum, chrome and arsenic pollution, according to Science. Şık published his findings in the newspaper Cumhuriyet after three years of lobbying the government to take action, but realizing his pleas were falling on deaf ears. The study "clearly revealed the extent to which water resources were contaminated by toxic materials," said Şık to reporters after the verdict, as AFP reported. "The court ruling shows that the results of a study that directly concerns public health can be hidden. This is unacceptable."

Google and NASA campuses sit on a hazardous waste site with contaminated soil. It's part of a toxic legacy across Silicon Valley. In 2012, Google moved 1,000 employees to a campus in Mountain View, California, about 3 miles from its Silicon Valley headquarters. The site formerly housed a Fairchild manufacturing plant that produced semiconductors — an element in computer chips. To clean these parts, the factory relied on a colorless liquid called trichloroethylene (TCE), a chemical now understood to be cancerous to humans. There's also evidence that TCE increases the risk of miscarriages, birth defects, and developmental issues in children. The chemical was widely used by factories in the area from the 1950s to the 1990s, resulting in extensive contamination across Silicon Valley. In 1989, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated the Fairchild plant a Superfund site — a label given to hazardous waste sites that pose a risk to human health or the environment. In total, Santa Clara County, where the Google complex is located, has 23 active Superfund sites — more than any other county in the US. Decades later, the pollution is still a concern for local workers. From the 50s on, Silicon Valley was overrun by factories like the Fairchild plant that produced computer parts. For decades, TCE either leaked from those factories or was dumped into the environment by manufacturers. From there, it seeped into soil and groundwater. Other Superfund sites in the area used to hold Intel and Raytheon facilities involved in semiconductor manufacturing. Together, these sites form a massive Superfund area known as Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman (MEW). TCE from these plants also migrated through the ground toward NASA's nearby Ames Research Center. That land had already been contaminated with TCE from another source, though: Before NASA took over the facility in 1994, it was a military base known as the Moffett Naval Air Station. Military operations there likely used the chemical to clean engines or other aircraft parts. A 2008 report identified TCE as the "principal contaminant" at the base, which is now its own Superfund site. The EPA has worked with the Navy, NASA, and various Silicon Valley computer-hardware manufacturers to clean the area's contaminated groundwater.In the 1990s, the EPA oversaw the treatment of groundwater at NASA's Ames campus, which it continues to monitor. The agency has also removed over 76,000 pounds of contaminants from groundwater at the MEW site.

Toxic 'Forever Chemicals' Detected in California Drinking Water - Toxic synthetic chemicals, known as "forever chemicals" for their extreme hardiness to resist degradation once they are released into the environment have been detected in 74 California water sources that deliver water to more than 7.5 million people, according to new research from the Environmental Working Group (EWG).  These chemical per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), are marked by their bonds of fluorine and carbon, which are extremely persistent once they enter our bodies or the soil. In very low doses, they have been linked to a host of health problems, including increased cholesterol level, low infant birth weight, a weakened immune system, thyroid issues and even some cancers, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as CNN reported. PFAS detections in the California water systems exceeded one part per trillion (ppt), which the EWG deems unsafe. It is worth noting that the EWG's threshold for PFAS in water is a fraction of what the 70 ppt that the EPA considers the threshold for adverse health impacts. However, it is worth noting, there is not an actual legal limit for PFAs in water.However, EWG did find that 40 percent of water systems it tested had samples that exceeded the EPA's 70 ppt limit, which leads to lifetime health advisories. In fact, some of them were several times the EPA limit, including a well that serves the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. That well had concentrations of 820 ppt for several different PFAS, according to the EWG.  Camp Pendleton officials stopped using that well after the test, spokesman Capt. David Mancilla said, as the AP reported. "The drinking water at MCB Camp Pendleton is safe to drink and meets or exceeds all regulated standards," he said. Other areas that had high levels of "forever chemicals" were in Corona, Oroville, Rosemont and the area around Sacramento.

EPA Carries out Trump Threat, Cites San Francisco for Water Pollution Linked to Homeless Crisis -- The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cited San Francisco for violating the Clean Water Act by allowing used needles to spill into the ocean. The violation notice executes a threat Trump laid out a few weeks ago and ratchets up California's environmental policies feud with the White House, according to the AP.A couple of weeks ago Trump claimed that waste from storm drains, especially needles, near San Francisco's homeless encampments was running into the ocean. The city officials disputed Trump's inaccurate claim that water pollution was linked to the city's homeless crisis. Yet, without citing evidence of Trump's claim or Trump's threat, EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler accused the city of improperly discharging waste into the bay, as The Guardian reported.Instead, the EPA's letter, which is addressed to Harlan Kelly, Jr., general manager of the city's Public Utilities Commission, states that the city's sewage and storm water systems have failed to trap pollutants like heavy metals and bacteria, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported.The letter said that the data showed "it discharging approximately one and a half billion gallons of combined sewage annually onto beaches and other sensitive areas, including areas where recreation takes place," according to The Guardian. "The failure to properly operate and maintain the city's sewage collection and treatment facilities" caused force main and pump station failures "that have diverted substantial volumes of raw and partially-treated sewage to flow across beaches and into the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean," the letter said.

Majority of West Virginia counties rank worst in US for water quality  - Nearly two-thirds of all counties in West Virginia have among the worst one-third of water systems in terms of drinking water quality and record of compliance in the United States, a new study finds.  “Watered Down Justice,” an analysis published September 24 by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Coming Clean and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance focuses on the concentration of water quality violations in areas with sizeable racial, ethnic and linguistic minority populations. The report uses the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) violation records. The report maps counties by severity and length of time in violation as well as the racial composition of affected populations. Virtually every urban area and most of the Southwest US are rated as severely impacted by poor water quality. The environmental justice groups designate minority populations in terms of the World Health Organization’s definition of “vulnerability,” a condition measured by “the degree to which a population, individual, or organization is unable to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impacts of disasters.” The data in the NRDC report is a staggering documentation of widespread water quality problems across every region of the United States. Between June 1, 2016 and May 31, 2019, the report found 170,959 violations of the SDWA by 24,133 water systems. Nearly 40 percent of the American population—129,907,275 people—were found to be obtaining water from these systems. The health threats associated with these violations include “cancer, impaired brain development, decreased kidney function, and potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal disease.” The report cites Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 19.5 million Americans are sickened each year from E. coli and other pathogens contaminating public water systems.  Additionally, the report found 5,634 water systems serving 44,980,846 people that had racked up 23,040 of the most severe health-based violations. These violations are strongly associated with cancers and other fatal conditions, birth defects, and compromised fertility. As bad as these figures are, the report stresses that it is “likely that the full scope of the problem is much bigger,” since samples were taken only at the “point of entry” into the distribution systems, not in the pipes where other contaminants can enter.

Drought threatens drinking water supplies in Southern WV counties - By the time an unusually dry September drew to a close, moderate drought had spread across the southern half of West Virginia, leaving water flow in some streams at volumes more than 75 percent below long-term median flow.All official climate monitoring sites in the state recorded less than 1 inch of rain during September and, as of Monday, Huntington, Beckley and Clarksburg were on track to set new historic rainfall records for the month.The drought left the Greenbrier River at Durbin flowing at a rate of 3.06 cubic feet per second on Monday, compared to its long-term median rate of 30.0, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Downstream at Hilldale, in Summers County, Monday’s volume of 43.7 cubic feet per second was about one-fourth the median flow rate for the site.Greenbrier County’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management posted notices on its Facebook page Sunday and Monday cautioning residents to “do your part to conserve our drinking water” to avoid the possible imposition of mandatory conservation measures. “Just look at the status of the Greenbrier River and its headwaters in Pocahontas County to see the current impact.”Last week, the Lewisburg Municipal Water System urged its customers not to use water for non-essential purposes, like washing cars, watering lawns or gardens, filling swimming pools or operating pressure washers, since “the Greenbrier River is extremely low.” The National Weather Service late last week elevated many counties in Southern West Virginia from a D0 “abnormally dry” rating to D1, “moderate drought.” The D1 designation indicates that streams, reservoirs and wells will run low and water shortages are developing or imminent.

Collapse of desert bird populations likely due to heat stress from climate change - As temperatures rise, desert birds need more water to cool off at the same time as deserts are becoming drier, setting some species up for a severe crash, if not extinction, according to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley. The team that last year documented a collapse of bird communities in Mojave Desert over the last century—29 percent of the 135 bird species that were present 100 years ago are less common and less widespread today—has now identified a likely cause: heat stress associated with climate change. The researchers' latest findings, part of UC Berkeley's Grinnell Resurvey Project, come from comparing levels of species declines to computer simulations of how "virtual birds" must deal with heat on an average hot day in Death Valley, which can be in the 30s Celsius—90s Fahrenheit—with low humidity. These temperatures are, on average, 2 C (3.6 F) hotter than 100 years ago. The birds that the model predicted would require the most extra water today, compared to a 100 years ago, were the species that had declined the most in the Mojave Desert over the past century. The desert straddles the border between California and Nevada. The most threatened turn out to be larger birds, and those that have an insect or animal diet. "We often think that climate change may cause a mass mortality event in the future, but this study tells us that the change in climate that has already occurred is too hot, and in certain areas, animals can't tolerate the warming and drying that has already occurred,"

7 Elephants Dead of Suspected Poisoning in Sri Lanka - Seven elephants have been reported dead of suspected poisoning near a protected habitat refuge in Sri Lanka. "Since Friday, we have found the remains of seven cow elephants, including a tusker," police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekera told the Agence-France Presse (AFP). The elephants were discovered at Sinharaja Forest Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site encompassing the "last extensive patch of primary lowland forest" in the nation. The region is afforded the highest level of legal protection under national lawsFour carcasses were discovered on Friday, including a pregnant female, and another three the following day. It is believed that all seven elephants belong to the same herd, the BBC reports. The publication adds that another elephant was found dead on Monday from a gunshot wound, but it is not yet clear whether the deaths are related.   Every year, the AFP reports that nearly 200 elephants are killed, many by farmers protecting their crops. On the other hand, elephants kill roughly 50 people annually when they come into growing villages encroaching near their habitat. As food and water become scarce, the animals will often feed on agricultural products, leading to conflict between the humans and elephants.

First Wolf Sighted in Belgium in 100 Years Was Likely Shot With Her Cubs -Naya made wildlife history when she became the first wolf to be spotted in Belgium for more than 100 years in January 2018. But the wolf, who was carrying cubs, has not been seen since May. Belgium's Nature and Forest Agency (ANB) says it is "virtually certain" she has been killed, according to The Guardian."The death of the wolf and her pups is a shame for Belgium," the Belgian office of WWF said in a statement reported by AFP.The evidence that Naya was killed illegally by hunters is extensive. For one thing, her mate, August, who joined her in the country in August 2018, is now acting like a lone wolf."He hunts less, walks in different directions. It is clear that he no longer has to deal with his partner or his children," Jan Loos of WelkomWolf (Welcome Wolf) told the Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper, as The Telegraph reported. Furthermore, female wolves do not die in childbirth or move away from a territory after giving birth, Sil Janssen of the Natuurhulpcentrum animal shelter in Oudsbergen, near Naya's Eastern Flemish territory, said. And if she had been hit by a car, it would have been discovered.

41% of UK Species Have Declined Since 1970, Major Report Finds - Brexit may have dominated the headlines in recent weeks, but another crisis is underway in the UK: One in seven of its wildlife species face extinction, and 41 percent have declined since 1970. Those figures are from the most recent State of Nature report, released Friday. It is the "most detailed report ever" on the state of the UK's wildlife, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). It looked at nearly 7,000 species and drew on the expertise of more than 70 organizations, BBC News reported.  "We know more about the UK's wildlife than any other country on the planet, and what it is telling us should make us sit up and listen," lead report author and RSPB scientist Daniel Hayhow said, as BBC News reported.  Here are some of the report's key messages, according to BBC News, The Guardian and The Natural History Museum:

• More than one quarter of UK mammals face extinction.
• Almost one half of its bird species are at risk.
• Nearly one-fifth of plant species, 15 percent of fungi and lichens, 40 percent of vertebrates and 12 percent of invertebrates also face extinction.
• One quarter of moths and almost one fifth of butterflies have already gone extinct.
• In total, 133 of the species assessed have gone extinct since the 1500s.
• Sixty percent of so-called "priority species" have declined since 1970.
• The most threatened mammals are the Scottish wildcat and the black rat.
• Since the 1950s, hedgehogs have declined by 95 percent, turtle doves by 98 percent and common toads by 68 percent.
• Ninety-three percent of beached northern fulmar seabirds had eaten plastic.
• In three Crown Dependencies and 14 Overseas Territories, which include important oceanecosystems, 40 percent of sharks and rays, 36 percent of reptiles and amphibians, 11 percent of mammals and eight percent of birds are threatened.
• In positive news, one quarter of species have increased, including the bittern and the large blue butterfly.

The report builds on other alarming findings. A 2018 study found that a fifth of UK mammals could be extinct within 10 years. The last State of Nature report, in 2016, found that the UK was "among the most nature depleted countries in the world," according to The Guardian.  The major drivers of biodiversity loss are agriculture, the climate crisis, urbanization, pollution, hydrological change, invasive species and woodland management, the report said.

Illegal Wildlife Trade Thrives on Facebook, Internet Forums - The lizards are frantic and the turtles plodding, but both scrabble to escape the perspex containers that hold them. The reptiles, some in small boxes and fetching prices of up to thousands of euros, are on sale at the Terraristika — Europe's largest reptile trade fair and a suspected wildlife-trafficking hub. Thousands of enthusiasts descend on the German city of Hamm four times a year to buy exotic creatures ranging from coin-sized glass frogs to tarantulas and venomous snakes. In the wild, some of these animals are becoming dangerously scarce. As well as the physical marketplace, the Terraristika is a center of a global online community of reptile traders and hobbyists. Customers browse animals on the web and collect them at the fair, sometimes on the unsupervised fringes of the event. Sellers arrange pickups via Facebook groups, owners share care tips on internet forums and YouTubers post videos of themselves "unboxing" animals bought at fairs.In Germany, live reptiles make up the majority of wildlife traded online, a report into wildlife cybercrime byconservation group International Fund for Animal Welfare found in 2018.The researchers found most adverts in internet forums, not social media, but they also saw closed Facebook groups with names suggesting they are used to trade reptiles.DW also found endangered reptiles for sale in Facebook groups such as 'Terraristika Hamm — "MARKTPLATZ"' and 'Hamm and Houten Reptile Classifieds.' Some of the species on offer are listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), an agreement signed by 183 countries that restricts trade in threatened wildlife. The animals were not necessarily poached — specimens of endangered species are often bred in captivity — but conservation groups fear that, because online trade is so difficult to regulate, endangered animals are being trafficked online.

More than 2 million animals perish in Bolivia wildfires - More than two million wild animals, including jaguars, pumas and llamas, have perished in weeks of wildfires that devastated huge swaths of Bolivian forest and grassland, environmental experts said Wednesday. The fires devastated the Chiquitania tropical savanna in the east of the country. "We have consulted the biologists of Chiquitania and we have exceeded the estimate of more than 2.3 million missing animals in many protected areas," Professor Sandra Quiroga of Santa Cruz University told AFP. Latin American ocelots, and other wild cats like pumas and jaguars, as well as deer, llamas—and smaller forest animals like anteaters, badgers, lizards, tapirs and rodents—were victims of the fires, according to biologists investigating the scale of the damage. Local media showed images of charred animal carcasses in the smouldering forests and birds fleeing to zones spared by the flames. The fires, which have devastated more than four million hectares (10 million acres) since August, has completely destroyed the "primary forest" extending over 100 hectares in the Tucavaca reserve in the eastern Santa Cruz department. "The forest is totally charred and the damage is irreversible. It will never get back to normal," said Quiroga. The eastern department of Santa Cruz has been the hardest hit of Bolivia's nine departments since the fires began in May and intensified in late August Bolivia in August enlisted special firefighting planes, a Supertanker Boeing 747 and a Russian Ilyushin, as well as helicopters, 5,000 firefighters, soldiers and police but the fires have still not been extinguished. Environmentalists blame laws enacted under leftist President Evo Morales, who has encouraged burning of forest and pasture land to expand agricultural production. The government attributes the blazes to dry weather and flame-fanning winds.

Amazon Fires: Bolivia experiences worst wildfires in living memory - Wildfires are still raging in the Amazon rainforest.Twelve million hectares have burnt so far, three times more than last year. This means an area nearly the size of Greece.Brazil paid the hardest price, but the flames are ravaging also some other of the nine countries the Amazon spans to. In Bolivia, 5,000 people are fighting the blaze, but it is still out of control.It has been dubbed as the worst fires in living memory. Since January, 5 million hectares of forest and savanna were lost in Bolivia, two million just in the past two months. The flames are threatening 1,200 species. As a result, Amazon’s indigenous communities say this is an ‘environmental genocide’.Euronews’s Monica Pinna reported from the Community of Tierra Hermosa in Bolivia:“We’ve had flames up to thirty meters high. On the side of the Community of Tierra Hermosa, we had 20 water discharges, and still, the fire couldn’t be stamped out. On this other side, we had 120 discharges, and each helicopter was carrying 2500 litres. But still, the fire went on”.The department of Santa Cruz, its Chiquitania dry forest region was the worst affected. Local authorities say around 40 fires are still active and the flames have expanded also new areas. Many locals are still actively involved in putting out fires, like Gregorio Nuñez, a cattle breeder in the community of Guadalupe.“The first day I came here by myself. I was worried that my pasture could burn, if so, what would my cattle eat? Then we organised some groups and we came by eight, ten, twenty people to put out the fires”.Experts say one of the causes of the fires is the ancestral practice of ‘chaqueo’, consisting of slash and burn the forest for farming. It is said to have got out of hand this year because of strong winds and high temperatures. Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales, has been accused by environmentalists and locals of encouraging the blazes by signing a decree last July that legalised the burning in order to turn forests into pastures. Morales, who is running for a controversial fourth term, has requested the EU intervention after massive protests calling for International support. 

 South America's Second-Largest Forest Is Also Burning — and 'Environmentally Friendly' Charcoal Is Subsidizing Its Destruction - The fires raging across the Brazilian Amazon have captured the world's attention. Meanwhile, South America's second-largest forest, the Gran Chaco, is disappearing in plain sight. The Gran Chaco, which spans from Bolivia and Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina, is extremely bio-diverse, with more than 3,400 plant and 900 animal species — including quebracho blanco trees, tapirs and jaguars. It is also home to at least 30 indigenous peoples, including the Ayoreo, some of whom live in voluntary isolation in their historic homelands as well Mennonite colonies. Now, due to the some of the fastest deforestation in the world, this once enormous ecosystem may soon be gone outside of protected areas. Since 2001, more than 31,000 square miles of forest were felled to make way for agriculture and cattle ranching in the Gran Chaco. More than half of that deforestation took place in Paraguay, a small South American country of 7 million. As in the Amazon to the north, cattle ranching and farming are the primary drivers of deforestation in Paraguay's Gran Chaco. But beyond beef and soy, the cleared land of the Gran Chaco produces some pretty unexpected stuff, too — everyday products that are exported and sold abroad to consumers who may never know their purchases contribute to the destruction of South America's second largest forest.  Paraguay, the eighth largest exporter of beef globally, sells 350,000 tons of beef each year to Russia, Israel, Chile and beyond. There are at least 14 million head of cattle in the Paraguayan Chaco and over 4 million hectares of land devoted to cattle ranching — an area larger than Belgium.  Paraguay's beef industry is based on grazing, rather than the feedlot model prevalent in the U.S. To clear forest land for grazing, both legally and illegally, Paraguayan cattle ranchers use what's called "chaining." That means leveling the forest with tractors that drag heavy chains. Then they burn the fallen trees.. Rather than just incinerating the wood in their fields, some Paraguayan ranchers turn it into carbón — or charcoal, in English.  Across the Paraguayan Chaco, large brick kilns located off of main roads slowly bake the wood cleared from nearby forests, transforming it into charcoal that fuels weekend cookouts worldwide. That charcoal is then stacked high on trucks that carry it to Paraguayan exporters, who ship it to Europe, the Middle East and the United States, among other major markets.  Paraguayan charcoal is often labeled it as "natural" or "environmentally certified", suggesting that they are sustainable.

Man-Made Rain Helps Lower Indonesia’s Hotspots by 90%: Ministry - Artificial rain created to deal with Indonesia’s massive wildfires has helped significantly lower the number of hotspots across the archipelago, authorities said. The number was down to 136 on Saturday, compared with 1,374 last Monday, according to the country’s Environment and Forestry Ministry. Since Friday, Indonesian agencies have scattered more than 200,000 kilograms of salt for cloud seeding and 317 million liters of water to put out the forest fires plaguing the country, the ministry said. As many as 32 forest fire hotspots were still detected in the Kalimantan region, mostly in mining-rich East Kalimantan, while the number in Sumatra had dropped to 22, it added. The blazes are largely caused by illegal slash-and-burn methods some Indonesian farmers use to clear farmland for cash crops, despite government efforts to stamp out the practice over the years. The resulting haze from the fires has disrupted air travel, prompted the closing of schools, and also affected Indonesia’s neighboring countries, including Malaysia and Singapore.

 ‘Why is the climate changing like this?’ - Wayanad is no longer the cold, misty place it once was. From a maximum of 25 degrees Celsius by early March, temperatures here now easily cross 30 degrees by that time of the year. And the number of warmer days has more than doubled in Vadakil’s lifetime. In 1960, the year he was born, “the Wayanad area could expect about 29 days per year to reach at least 32 degrees [Celsius]” says a calculation from an interactive tool on climate and global warming posted online by the New York Times this July. “Today the Wayanad area can expect 59 days at or above 32 degrees per year, on average.” The changing weather patterns, Vadakil says, hurt heat-sensitive and vulnerable crops like pepper and orange trees that were once abundant in this district in the Western Ghats at the southern tip of the Deccan Plateau. Vadakil and his wife Valsa own a four-acre farm in Cherukottur village in Mananthavady taluk. His family left Kottayam for Wayanad around 80 years ago to try their luck in the booming cash crop economy here. But over time, the boom seems to have gone bust. “If the rains prove to be erratic, like they have been in the last year, then the [organic Robusta] coffee we grow is doomed,” says Vadakil. “Coffee is profitable, but the weather is the biggest problem in its growth. Heat and erratic rainfall ruin it,” adds Valsa. The ideal temperature to grow [Robusta] coffee is between 23-28 degrees Celsius, say those working in the sector. All of Wayanad’s coffee, which is of the stronger-in-body Robusta family (a tropical evergreen shrub), is cultivated between December and late March. The coffee plant needs its first rain by late February or early March – and starts to flower a week later. It is crucial that there are no rains for a week after the first shower as that destroys the delicate flowers. The second shower is needed a week after the first one for the coffee fruit or ‘cherries’ to start growing.’ Once the flowers bloom and fall off the tree, the cherries that contain the beans begin to mature.

Record-breaking snowstorm unleashes feet of snow, hinders travel in parts of northern Rockies - The first big snowstorm of the season blasted the northern Rockies over the weekend. The early season storm unloaded up to 3-4 feet of snow in spots, caused blizzard conditions and set several new daily snowfall records across Montana. "The combination of a storm from the Pacific Ocean, a fresh injection of cold air from northern Canada, moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and a northeast-ascending flow that squeezed extra moisture from the atmosphere produced the amazing snowfall," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said Blizzard conditions were reported across the northern and southern Rocky Mountain front. They were also confirmed at the Cut Bank, Montana, Airport Sunday where observations reported moderate to heavy snowfall with one-quarter to one-half mile visibility and sustained winds around 30 mph.  Montana Gov. Steve Bullock issued an executive order declaring a winter storm emergency in the state on Sunday. "The storm brought heavy, wet snow with accumulation amounts up to three feet in some locations. High winds have downed trees and power lines resulting in road closures, emergency travel conditions, intermittent cellular service and power outages," the governor's office said in a press release.The storm was winding down early Monday, but many roads remained snow covered and icy. Forecasters also cautioned against an additional threat once the snow subsided.In the wake of the storm, unseasonably cold conditions will delay snowmelt in some areas and bring the end of the growing season for some agricultural producers.The hard freeze could bring additional agricultural impacts to farmers who already were dealing snow-covered fields.Winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories were in effect for parts of the northern Rockies, Cascades and Sierra Nevada early on Sunday morning as snow continued to fall. Most of those warnings and advisories were canceled by Monday morning. The magnitude and timing of the storm prompted the National Weather Service to declare it as "historic" last week.  The highest snowfall amount as of Sunday night was 48 inches, in Browning, Montana. Browning Public Schools announced they would be closed on Monday.

 Scientists Race to Stop ‘Ebola’ of Coral Diseases From Spreading in U.S. Virgin Islands - Scientists are racing to save coral reefs off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands from a virulent, deadly disease, Reuters reported Thursday, taking the unusual step of removing infected coral from the reef. Stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD) was first discovered in Florida in 2014. It begins as white patches that take over the coral, killing 66 to 100 percent of the species it infects. Between 2013 and 2018, it led to a coral decline in Florida's Upper Keys of more than 40 percent."I have never seen anything that affects so many species, so quickly and so viciously—and it just continues," Marilyn Brandt of the University of the Virgin Islands told Reuters. "All the diseases I've studied in the past could be considered like the flu. They come every year, seasonally, and sometimes there are worse outbreaks. This thing is more like Ebola. It's a killer, and we don't know how to stop it."The disease was first spotted close to the U.S. Virgin Islands in early 2019, The BVI Beacon reported Tuesday.  Once it infects a coral, it spreads quickly, at a rate of a couple of centimeters per day. "Within a month, you'll have the entire coral head gone," Association of Reef Keepers Director Dr. Shannon Gore told The BVI Beacon.   Between corals, it moves at a rate of about five kilometers (approximately three miles) per month. Since its discovery in Florida in 2014, it has impacted more than 96,000 acres of reef and spread 250 miles down the Florida coast. SCTLD has also been spotted off the coasts of St. Maarten, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Jamaica. In Florida, it has impacted half of the stony corals that make up the Florida Reef Tract, including five endangered species, Newsweek reported.

Why Are Hurricanes Like Dorian Stalling, and Is Global Warming Involved? - Hurricane Dorian's slow, destructive track through the Bahamas fits a pattern scientists have been seeing over recent decades, and one they expect to continue as the planet warms: hurricanes stalling over coastal areas and bringing extreme rainfall.  Dorian made landfall in the northern Bahamas on Sept. 1 as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, then battered the islands for hours on end with heavy rain, a storm surge of up to 23 feet and sustained wind speeds reaching 185 miles per hour. The storm's slow forward motion—at times only 1 mile per hour—is one of the reasons forecasters were having a hard time pinpointing its exact future path toward the U.S. coast.  Recent research shows that more North Atlantic hurricanes have been stalling as Dorian did, leading to more extreme rainfall. Their average forward speed has also decreased by 17 percent—from 11.5 mph, to 9.6 mph—from 1944 to 2017, according to a study published in June by federal scientists at NASA and NOAA. The researchers don't understand exactly why tropical storms are stalling more, but they think it's caused by a general slowdown of atmospheric circulation (global winds), both in the tropics, where the systems form, and in the mid-latitudes, where they hit land and cause damage.  Hurricanes are steered and carried by large-scale wind flows, "like a cork in a stream," said Tim Hall, a hurricane researcher with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and author of the study. So, if those winds slow down or shift direction, it affects how fast hurricanes move forward and where they end up.  NOAA hurricane expert Jim Kossin, co-author of the June study, said scientists suspect the overall slowing of winds is at least partly due to rapid warming of the Arctic. The temperature contrast between the Arctic and the equator is a main driver of wind. Since the Arctic is warming faster than lower latitudes, the contrast is decreasing, and so are wind speeds.

 Record-Breaking Hurricane Lorenzo Becomes the Second Category 5 Storm This Year - Hurricane Lorenzo strengthened to a Category 5 storm Saturday night, becoming the strongest storm ever recorded so far north and east in the Atlantic, CNN reported. It has since weakened to a Category 2 storm, but is still expected to be a "large and powerful hurricane" when it passes near the Azores early Wednesday, according to the most recent advisory from the National Hurricane Center (NHC). The NHC has issued a hurricane watch for the islands of Flores, Corvo, Faial, Pico, São Jorge, Graciosa and Terceira and a tropical storm watch for São Miguel and Santa Maria. The storm is expected to dump two to four inches of rain over the western Azores, which could cause "life-threatening flash flooding," the NHC warned. It is unusual for hurricanes to reach the Azores, according to The Weather Channel. Since the mid-nineteenth century, only seven hurricanes Category 2 or higher have blown within 200 nautical miles of the islands. Those include Ophelia in 2017, which knocked down a few trees and caused some flooding when it passed south of the Azores, and a 1926 hurricane that passed over São Miguel. Per NOAA's historical database, only 7 Cat. 2+ #hurricanes have tracked within 200 nautical miles of the #Azores. We'll see if #Lorenzo will maintain at least that intensity next week.pic.twitter.com/oY4vSOJy7S    Lorenzo could also join Ophelia in being the rare former hurricane to impact the UK. Its weakened winds could veer northwest and lash Ireland, CNN meteorologist Haley Brink said. "Ophelia did the same thing and impacted the region in 2017, bringing with it very strong winds," Brink told CNN. While Lorenzo is unusual for its intensity so far east, The Weather Channel noted that it is also part of a growing trend of hurricanes impacting the eastern Atlantic. Hurricane Leslie almost reached Portugal in 2018, and Hurricane Alex hit the Azores with a freak January strike in 2016.

Hurricane Lorenzo Blasts the Azores, Sets Its Sights on Ireland -- Hurricane Lorenzo, the weirdest storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, struck the Azores on Wednesday and is forecast to continue its jaunt across the eastern Atlantic toward Ireland. It could make a rare landfall there with hurricane-force winds and crippling surf.The freak hurricane rapidly intensified into a Category 5 monster over the weekend, setting a record as the strongest hurricane to ever form that far north or east in the Atlantic basin. It has since dwindled back down to a solid Category 1 storm, and it hit the westernmost Azores islands on Wednesday with winds of up to 90 mph. Rain and pounding surf also affected the islands with the local weather agency warning that waves could swell as high as 70 feet. The storm has reportedly caused power outages on a number of the islands as well.All told, Lorenzo marks the fifteenth tropical cyclone (the generic name from tropical storms and hurricanes) to come within 200 nautical miles of the Azores since the 1840s, according to a database kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The last to brush the island chain was 2016's Alex, which passed by as a tropical storm. With winds of up to 90 mph, Lorenzo is among the strongest storms on record to pass over the islands.The National Hurricane Center expects Lorenzo to transition to an extratropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds in the next day or so. Extratropical cyclones are one of the many flavors of swirling storms. What differentiates them from the tropical variety is that extratropical cyclones have cold air at their core (tropical cyclones have a warm core). They also tend to latch onto other weather patterns as they head poleward.In Lorenzo’s case, it will latch onto the jet stream in the coming days, which will accelerate its migration to the east. It’s expected to slam into Ireland by Thursday evening with powerful winds of up to 80 mph and what Met Éireann, the Irish weather service, calls “squally rain.” Most trees still have their leaves, and soil is saturated from recent rains, which the agency said could lead to downed branches and trees. In addition, Met Éireann is also calling for waves of up to 12 meters (40 feet) to hammer the coast. If this whole thing sounds eerily familiar, may I point you to 2017's Hurricane Ophelia. That storm reached Category 3 status, and until Lorenzo, it held the title of the fiercest northerly hurricane. It also plowed into Ireland, leaving more than 120,000 people without power and generally wreaking havoc.

Hurricane Lorenzo heads for Britain as 80mph gales hit Ireland - A powerful storm hit Ireland as it hurtled towards the British Isles.Although it has now been downgraded to a storm, ex-Hurricane Lorenzo whipped up frighteningly powerful winds of 165mph as it blasted its way across the north Atlantic.People on the west of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland battened down the hatches as the storm neared.Met Eireann has warned that winds will reach mean speeds of 50mph, with individual gusts hitting 80mph.Five counties across the country have been issued with Status Orange wind warnings as coastal regions brace for flooding.It is predicted that Lorenzo will hit mainland Britain tomorrow.There are eight flood warnings in force in England today - and two in Wales - ahead of Lorenzo crashing into the UK.The Environment Agency has also issued 36 flood alerts for England - and one for Wales - meaning flooding is also possible in these areas.The organisation has warned of flooding in England’s north-west and Midlands - and in the south-west and north-east of Wales.A large search and rescue operation was launched in Ireland yesterday after a surfer went missing in the storm. A spokesperson for the Irish Coast Guard told The Irish Independent: “The kite surfer came down hard in the storm and broke his leg. Ambulance services called in the Coast Guard to rescue him and then the [air and sea] helicopter to evacuate him.” Hurricane #Lorenzo had decreased in strength to an extra-tropical storm by the time it reached the west coast of #Ireland on Thursday, October 3. One resident in the western county of Mayo recorded the high storm waves at Blacksod Lighthouse. pic.twitter.com/QMqlfe1UzK — WeatherNation (@WeatherNation) October 3, 2019

Rising Seas Threaten Hundreds of Native American Heritage Sites Along Florida’s Gulf Coast - Native North Americans first arrived in Florida approximately 14,550 years ago. Evidence for these stone-tool-wielding, megafauna-hunting peoples can be found at the bottom of numerous limestone freshwater sinkholes in Florida's Panhandle and along the ancient shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico. Specialized archaeologists using scuba gear, remote sensing equipment or submersibles can study underwater sites if they are not deeply buried or destroyed by erosion. This is important because Florida's archaeological resources face significant threats due to sea level rise driven by climate change. According to a new UN report, global sea levels could increase by over 3 feet by the year 2100. Archaeological sites contain evidence of what people ate in the past, what kinds of houses they built, how they buried their dead and what they did to memorialize stories, leadership and community. These places literally embody human lives, and are the only records we have of prehistoric indigenous peoples of the New World. Between the years 1500 and 1850, 2.5 million Europeans migrated to the New World. As a consequence of their arrival, 50 million indigenous people died from disease, massacres and slavery.As scholars who study anthropology and archaeology, we believe that the genocide of these oral historical and literate societies, native to North, South and Central America, makes it even more important to preserve their ancient sites. Without them, we may never be able to learn the history of the first peoples of this land.

Bye-Bye Beaches: How Parts of SoCal's Iconic Coast Could Disappear in Our Lifetime -- The stretch of coast from Santa Monica to Malibu is iconic and quintessentially Californian. It's also ridiculously beautiful — and it's clear, based on the latest science, it could be unrecognizable by the end of the century. As the planet warms, sea levels will continue to rise, threatening some of our most beloved stretches of coastline.  A few feet of sea level rise might not sound very alarming, but every vertical foot could mean roughly 20 feet farther that the ocean encroaches inland (depending on a lot of factors, like the slope of the coastline), according to Patrick Barnard, a research scientist at the US Geological Survey.  The state's 2018 sea level rise guidance laid out different scenarios based on how much we curb our greenhouse gas emissions.

• Low emissions: 66% chance of between 0.9 and 2.3 feet of rise in Santa Monica by 2100, and similar rise in other parts of Southern California.
• High emissions: 66% chance of between 1.5 and 3.3 feet of rise, with a .5% probability we'll see 6.8 feet.

As a precaution, the report recommends that state officials anticipate 10 feet of rise when building crucial infrastructure along the coast. Keep in mind some researchers think we've been underestimating just how bad things could get. According to a paper co-authored by Barnard, SoCal could lose between 31% - 67% of its beaches by 2100. And areas like Malibu could be threatened in the coming decades."I mean these are very, very narrow beaches. They're already having lots of issues, and just a bit of sea level rise and they're going to be completely gone," said Barnard, adding that Malibu could see a major loss of its beaches in the coming decades.

Could Massive Storm Surge Barriers End the Hudson River’s Revival? - Two months earlier, Lipscomb told me, American Rivers had named the Hudson the second most endangered waterway in the nation. It wasn’t pollution that put the river on the conservation group’s 2019 watchlist, though parts of it are, in fact, polluted. Nor was the river particularly imperiled by diversions or urban sprawl, like others on the list. For the first time in its history, American Rivers had singled out a waterway solely on the possibility that massive in-river storm surge barriers could rise in its lower reaches, representing an existential threat to a river in the midst of much-heralded ecological recovery.Plans to build barriers in New York Harbor were set in motion by Superstorm Sandy, which in 2012 barreled up the East Coast, killing 72 people in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast and causing $65 billion in damage. To protect the metro area’s people and property from future Sandys, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has devised five possible schemes for erecting walls to hold back the sea during future catastrophic storms. But environmental advocates say such storm surge barriers will do nothing to shield against expected sea level rise from climate change and — judging by the impact of barriers elsewhere — may even destroy the ecological integrity of harbors they’re meant to protect. The most extreme of the proposed alternatives is a five-mile-long barrier that stretches from New Jersey to Long Island. Bracing against the wake of a passing ferry, Lipscomb unfurled a harbor map and showed me where the Army Corps proposes to build. He started with the most extreme of its proposed alternatives: a five-mile-long concrete and steel barrier that stretches from New Jersey’s Sandy Hook to Long Island’s Rockaway Peninsula. This outer harbor barrier, which could potentially be topped with a multi-lane toll road, would have 300-foot-wide lift gates and two pairs of curved gates that pivot together to form a wall that rises 30 feet above the sea’s surface. “And don’t forget there’s 10 miles of shoreline fortifications attached to each end of the barrier,” Lipscomb said. A second giant barrier would close off the western outlet of Long Island Sound, where it meets the East River estuary.

Antarctica Just Lost a 347 Billion Ton Iceberg, but This Time the Climate Crisis Is Not to Blame - A 315 billion tonne (approximately 347 billion U.S. ton) iceberg has broken off of Antarctica's third largest ice shelf, BBC News reported Monday. It is the biggest berg to calve from the Amery Ice Shelf in more than 50 years.  The iceberg is 1,636 square kilometers (approximately 632 square miles), roughly the size of Scoltand's Isle of Skye and slightly larger than the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu. It is so large that it will have to be carefully observed because it could pose a risk to shipping. But scientists were quick to reassure the public that it was part of the ice shelf's normal calving cycle, and not a sign of the climate crisis."While there is much to be concerned about in Antarctica, there is no cause for alarm yet for this particular ice shelf," professor Helen Fricker from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told BBC News.  A 1600 km² iceberg broke off Amery Ice Shelf, as seen in @CopernicusEU Sentinel-1 radar images. This part, coined the "Loose Tooth" by @helenafricker and colleagues, has been hanging by a thread since 2002 (https://t.co/IUhXDCWOFF) and finally gave way last week.@sentinel_hub pic.twitter.com/GG60Sk52GB — Bert Wouters (@bert_polar) September 30, 2019    The calving was caught on U.S. and European satellites between Sept. 24 and 25, AFP News reported. Scientists had long been expecting a piece of the Amery Ice Shelf — known as "Loose Tooth" because of its resemblance to a child's tooth — to break away, according to BBC News. Fricker predicted in 2002 that it would calve between 2010 and 2015. She was off, slightly, both about when and where the iceberg would detach. Instead of finally losing its tooth, the ice shelf lost a larger piece of ice slightly to the west, which scientists are calling D28.

Ice sheet melting: it’s not just about sea level rise --You’ve probably heard that climate change is melting the polar ice caps – but what does this actually mean? It refers to the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets, which are large systems of interconnected glaciers, kilometres thick. They are formed by snow falling on land, which compacts into ice and slowly flows downhill towards the ocean. When the ice sheets come into contact with a warming atmosphere or ocean, they begin to melt faster than new ice can form. This releases cold, fresh meltwater into the surrounding ocean. The most well-known consequence of this process is sea-level rise, as the volume of the ocean increases. Unfortunately, there are other side effects beyond sea level rise.The oceans around Greenland and Antarctica are unusual because they are the only regions of the world’s oceans with significant vertical mixing. Everywhere else, the ocean is stratified, forming layers of water organised by density, with the lightest water at the surface and the heaviest water at the seafloor. The layers don’t interact with each other very much. But in a few locations around the coast of Antarctica, as well as in the North Atlantic Ocean near Greenland, surface water becomes cold and salty enough to sink into the deep ocean. Then it slowly travels around the world for about a thousand years, like a deep-ocean conveyor belt, before resurfacing. This process of “deep water formation”, occurring in just a few regions, affects deep ocean currents which transport heat around the world and influence climate patterns worldwide. But what happens when ice sheetmeltwater is released into these deep water formation regions? How are the ocean currents and climate patterns affected?  In our simulations, ice sheet melting slowed down the rate of nearby deep water formation. The fresh meltwater reduced the density of the surface ocean, making it more difficult for surface waters to sink. In the North Atlantic, this reduction in deep water formation altered the pathways of nearby ocean currents. The Gulf Stream, which travels up the east coast of North America, and its extension the North Atlantic Drift, which cuts across the Atlantic towards Europe, were redirected such that less heat was transported from North America to Europe. While both locations still warmed (due to climate change), eastern North America experienced a bit of extra warming, while in Europe some of the warmings were canceled out. Furthermore, temperatures became more variable in many regions, indicating a greater prevalence of extreme weather.

How climate change is melting, drying and flooding Earth — in pictures -  Nature’s pick of the best science images is this month dedicated to climate change — and the researchers who study it.

Cutting air pollution would not cause ‘near-term spike’ in global warming -- A reduction in air pollution brought about by shifting away from fossil fuels would not inadvertently cause a short-term acceleration of global warming, a new study says.Earlier modelling work using scenarios where fossil-fuel burning ends instantaneously had suggested that a rapid decline in aerosol emissions could remove their cooling impact on the climate and cause a spike in warming.However, the new study, published in Nature, finds that “even the most aggressive” shift from fossil fuels to clean alternatives to limit warming to 1.5C “provides benefits for climate change mitigation and air quality” at all timescales.  The study makes the “clear and important point” that “aerosol cooling is no reason not to mitigate our emissions”, another scientist tells Carbon Brief, but “we need to be mindful of the potential regional climate implications of rapid removal of air pollution”.In addition to emitting greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and methane, burning fossil fuels also releases tiny particles known as aerosols. They typically linger in the atmosphere for three to five days.Sulphur dioxide, for example, is emitted from power stations and vehicle exhausts. It reacts in the atmosphere to form sulphate aerosols.Aerosols have a mixed influence on the climate, explains co-author Dr Chris Smith, a research fellow at the University of Leeds. He tells Carbon Brief:“Their presence [directly] reflects more incoming sunlight back to space, cooling the atmosphere, but they also have effects on changing the reflectivity and lifetimes of clouds, which may have larger and more uncertain effects.” The impact of these cloud changes depends on their type, says Smith: “Low clouds are generally cooling and high clouds generally warming, but evidence suggests that low clouds win out and cloud effects due to aerosols generally cool the climate.”

From Antarctica to the Oceans, Climate Change Damage Is About to Get a Lot Worse, IPCC Warns -- As the planet warms, diverse ecosystems—from mountain glaciers to the icy Arctic to the oceans—are already seeing dangerous effects fromclimate change. Future warming will threaten food supplies, force the migration of countless species and dramatically change the icy regions of the world. The changes are coming. How much is up to us, scientists warn in a new report released Wednesday by the United Nations. The changes are happening faster than many scientists expected to see, and they're often intricately connected, with cascading effects that can ripple through ecosystems. As global temperatures rise, time is running out. The cryosphere—areas of the planet that are frozen—is shrinking as glaciers and sea ice melt, snowpack declines and permafrost thaws. At the same time, oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat and about a quarter of the carbon dioxide from human activities, leading to greater acidification that harms shellfish and corals and lowers oxygen levels in the water. "The world's oceans and cryosphere have been taking the heat for climate change for decades," said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produced the report on climate change's impact on the oceans and cryosphere. "The consequences for nature and humanity are sweeping and severe."Just how severe the impacts will become—whether sea level rise stops at 1 to 2 feet by 2100 or continues to rise as high as 3.5 feet; whether the planet sees 20 times more marine heat waves or 50 times more—depends on how, and how quickly, humanity responds to the crisis, the report found.The report brought together 104 scientists from 36 countries with a variety of expertise. As they reviewed the existing research, the diverse group found interconnections and a magnitude of change that hadn't been as clear before. "What's at stake is the health of ecosystems, wildlife and, importantly, the world we leave our children," Barrett said.

EIA projects global energy-related CO2 emissions will increase through 2050 - The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy-related sources will continue to grow in the coming decades. EIA’s International Energy Outlook 2019 (IEO2019) projects that global energy-related CO2 emissions will grow 0.6% per year from 2018 to 2050 in its Reference case. However, future growth in energy-related CO2 emissions is not evenly distributed across the world: relatively developed economies collectively have no emissions growth, so all of the future growth in energy-related CO2 emissions is among the group of countries outside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).Countries outside of the OECD collectively have more population, a larger gross domestic product, more energy consumption, and higher energy-related CO2 emissions compared with aggregated values from OECD countries. In IEO2019, growth rates for these data series are also higher for non-OECD countries than for OECD countries. As non-OECD countries continue to grow, so does their demand for air conditioning, electronics, personal vehicles, and other energy services. These countries also have relatively energy-intensive industries, primarily because energy-intensive industrial processes often shift to non-OECD countries. Energy consumption in non-OECD countries increases by 1.6% per year from 2018 to 2050, and energy-related CO2 emissions increase by 1.0% per year. EIA projects that coal-related CO2 emissions in non-OECD countries, especially China, will grow at the slowest rate among fossil fuels as natural gas replaces coal in power generation and in industrial applications. China emits the most energy-related CO2 emissions in the world, and EIA projects that it will remain in that position through 2050. Although India’s coal-related CO2 emissions increase 2.8% annually from 2018 to 2050—the highest among the eight countries in EIA’s international outlook—China remains the single largest emitter of coal-related CO2 emissions in the world.

Humans Release 40 to 100x More CO2 Than Volcanoes, Major Study Reveals = Scientists have done the math, and human activities like burning fossil fuels and clearing forests generate as much as 100 times the carbon emissions of volcanic eruptions every year, AFP reported Tuesday. The findings are part of a 10-year study by the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), a global team of around 500 scientists. In a series of papers released in the journal Elements on Tuesday, the team produced an in-depth account of the Earth's carbon.While volcanoes and other natural processes release 0.28 to 0.36 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year, DCO said, human activity released more than 37 gigatonnes in 2018 alone, according to AFP. In total, annual human emissions are 40 to 100 times greater than those of volcanoes, DCO explained in a press release."Climate sceptics really jump on volcanoes as a possible contender for top CO2 emissions but it's simply not the case," The studies didn't just focus on anthropogenic carbon releases. They provided a general account of where all of the Earth's carbon is stored and how it moves through the environment, as BBC News explained. What they found is that the vast majority of Earth's 1.85 billion gigatonnes of carbon is below ground, with two thirds in the core. Only 43,500 billion tonnes (approximately 47,951 U.S. tons) are above ground in the oceans, land and atmosphere. This represents just two-tenths of one percent of Earth's carbon.

7.6 Million Join Week of Global Climate Strikes - More than 7.6 million people worldwide participated in the global climate strike between Sept. 20 and 27, according to the current tally reported by 350.org. That number could grow as counting continues, but the week of strikes is confirmed as one of the largest global protests in history. For comparison, the massive 2003 protest against the Iraq War drew between six and 11 million."This week was a demonstration of the power of our movement. People power is more powerful than the people in power. It was the biggest ever climate mobilization, and it's only the beginning. The momentum is on our side and we are not going anywhere," Fridays For Future International said.Four million people participated in the first round of strikes on Friday, Sept. 20, making it the largest climate mobilization in history. But that number grew with strikes on Sept. 27. Large turnouts on the 27th were reported in New Zealand, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Canada, according to The Guardian and BBC News.The day began in New Zealand, where more than 3.5 percent of the country participated, The Guardian reported. Demonstrators delivered a letter signed by 11,000 people to the country's parliament asking it to declare a climate emergency, according to another Guardian report."Our representatives need to show us meaningful and immediate action that safeguards our futures on this planet," School Strike 4 Climate national coordinator Raven Maeder said, as The Guardian reported. "Nothing else will matter if we cannot look after the Earth for current and future generations. This is our home." Organizers counted 170,000 people through a combination of speaking to people on the ground, talking to councils and police and viewing drone footage, New Zealand's Stuff reported. It's a number of historic proportions, In Italy, meanwhile, more than one million people participated, according to ANSA.  "There are 200,000 people in Rome, which attracted the biggest crowd, followed by 150,000 in Milan," Gianfranco Mascia of Fridays For Future said. "There are around 80,000 in Naples, 50,000 in Florence, 20,000 in Turin and Bologna and 10,000 in Palermo and Bari."

It’s Kids vs. the World in a Landmark Climate Complaint —On Monday, Greta Thunberg and 15 other young people filed a potentially world-changing climate complaint. On an abnormally steamy day in New York, when sweat built on the brows of the dark-suited diplomats funneling into the United Nations for a major climate summit, the group of teens cranked up the heat even further. They announced that they’re suing five of the world’s major carbon polluters on the grounds that the countries are violating their rights as children. If the suit is successful, the United Nations would classify the climate crisis as a children’s rights crisis. And more importantly, it would compel Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey—the five countries named in the suit—to work with other nations to forge binding emissions’ reduction targets, a sharp change from current international efforts that have so far basically rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic.  “This is all wrong, I shouldn’t be up here,” Thunberg said, addressing the General Assembly and shaking with rage. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. You have stolen my dreams, my childhood with your empty words. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line.”  The youth climate activism movement has over the past year exploded prior notions of what’s possible in the realm of climate politics. Greta Thunberg’s solitary strike outside the Swedish parliament every Friday starting last August has spawned a global movement. This past Friday, an estimated 4 million young adults and their supporters took to the streets around the world to demand climate action. “Young people above all—young people are providing solutions, insisting on accountability, and demanding urgent action,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said opening the Climate Action Summit. “They are right.”

Teens seek emergency climate declaration in New Mexico - (AP) — Student activists including several Native American high school students urged New Mexico’s Democratic governor Monday to take more aggressive action to address climate change, insisting that her targets for reducing pollution from vehicles, power plants and oil rigs are not ambitious enough. About 20 climate activists — mostly high school students — urged Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to declare a climate emergency and set aside state income from the oil and gas industries to pay for the transition to an economy without greenhouse gas emissions. “In the last year, we have seen increased oil and gas production from our state and do not believe we are on track to meet carbon reduction goals nor end our dependence on fossil fuel revenues,” said a letter from two climate action groups, including Youth Unified for Climate Crisis Action. State government and school districts in New Mexico rely heavily on income from oil and natural gas production amid a surge in petroleum production in the Permian Basin that underlays parts of southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. The governor’s chief of staff, John Bingaman, met briefly with the protesters, promising to take their concerns into consideration and highlighting the governor’s commitment to a long list of initiatives and alliances to address climate change. Lujan Grisham was attending indigenous feast day events at the Taos Pueblo community of Native Americans and sent a letter expressing solidarity with protesters.

'Thousands' expected for Greta Thunberg's Iowa City visit - — Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg’s visit in support of student climate strikers Friday is expected to draw thousands of people to downtown Iowa City, according to a release from the city. The rally with Thunberg and other activists has been moved to the intersection of Dubuque Street and Iowa Avenue, beginning at noon Friday. The speakers are expected to finish around 1 p.m. Thunberg, 16, has drawn international attention for her climate change protests and advocacy and spoke to the United Nations last week. Thunberg will join a local movement of students and activists led by two 13-year-old boys who started walking out of school in March and whose activism has led to action from the Iowa City school board and the Iowa City Council. They are now pressuring the University of Iowa to stop burning coal. The city is planning road closures and parking bans in anticipation of the visit. Road closures are Dubuque Street from East Jefferson Street to East Washington Street and Iowa Avenue from South Linn Street to North Clinton Street. Roads will be closed from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday, and vehicles parked in that area will be towed between 2 and 6 a.m. Friday. Vehicles can be moved to a downtown parking ramp or to on-street parking spaces outside the towing area. Several bus routes will be detoured during the event, and some bus stops will be closed.

Jeremy Clarkson called Greta Thunberg a 'spoilt brat' but his daughter shut him down -- Jeremy Clarkson has become the latest over-privileged white middle-aged man to come for a 16-year-old child trying to save the planet and it's barely news because this is the world we live in now. He decided to dedicate his entire column for The Sun to calling Greta Thunberg a "spoilt brat" and basically suggesting she should be grateful to his generation for... Well, it's unclear exactly what. Being in the army and inventing iPhones, by the sounds of it. Pause for a moment to consider how soundly you sleep at night, knowing that adults are building and servicing and flying Sweden’s fighter planes to keep you safe. We gave you mobile phones and laptops and the internet. We created the social media you use every day and we run the banks that pay for it all. Luckily, irrational bullying of teenagers doesn't run in the family, and Clarkson's daughter Emily wasn't having it.  She very visibly subtweeted her dad, wishing all "middle aged blokes" could speak about Thunberg as positively as comedian John Bishop.The family feud of Twitter dreams didn't stop there - Jeremy decided to weigh in and got dragged. And it doesn't stop there, Emily expertly shut down the rest of the inexplicably angry boomer dudes trying to come for her. (see twitter embeds)

Greta Thunberg Changes Her Twitter Bio to Mock Putin After He Criticised Her UN Speech - Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a session at an energy forum in Moscow, when he addressed teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg's impassioned and powerful speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit.At the summit, Greta accused world leaders and politicians of being apathetic towards climate change and also destroying her childhood with their empty words and promises.At the session, Putin said that Greta Thunberg may have had good intentions and was sincere, but was poorly informed and has little or no idea about conditions in developing countries. He also said that adults must do everything they can so as to avoid dragging kids into extreme situations.A few days ago, Greta had changed her Twitter bio to "A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future", after US President Donald Trump's sarcastic comments. Now, after Putin's statements, she's changed it to "A kind but poorly informed teenager".  

Climate protesters spray 1,800 liters of 'fake blood' over UK Treasury building - Climate change activist group Extinction Rebellion has used a fire engine to spray fake blood over the steps and entrance to the U.K. Treasury building in Westminster, London. The group live-streamed the event on Facebook, which showed police officers now guarding the entrance. The organization also posted an image on Twitter which shows the fire engine covered in part with a banner that read “Stop funding climate death.” The group’s website said 1,800 liters of fake blood had been sprayed. It added that the ‘blood’ is made from water colored with food dye that can be washed off the building. It added that the protest is being held to “highlight the inconsistency between the U.K. Government’s insistence that the U.K. is a world leader in tackling climate breakdown, while pouring vast sums of money into fossil exploration and carbon-intensive projects” Speaking on U.K. radio on Thursday, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said he had sympathy over the right to protests and that the world did face a climate emergency. Khan warned, however, that police resources to contain public disorder was strained and that anyone who wanted to protest “must do it lawfully and peacefully.”

Drastic Climate Action Needed Now... Let's Ban Private Jets! - As the din of climate hysteria grows ever louder, the eco-pious and super-rich call for immediate and drastic action on climate change. Justin Trudeau, still licking his wounds from being outed for his multiple episodes of blackface and brownface, took more heat today as he’s criss-crossing the country ahead of the forthcoming federal election with not one, but two private jets.  Calls for immediate climate action are accelerating, in fact we’ve seen numerous trial balloons floated from a complicit mainsteam media (or as Canada’a reigning Liberals call it “Approved Media”).These trial balloons / admonitions include:

• Eating less meat, or no meat, or perhaps eat maggots or eat people, to reduce carbon output.
• Driving less, fewer cars on the road, ban on gas powered vehicles, to reduce carbon output.
• Have less children, or no children, to reduce carbon output.
• And of course: Fly less. Let’s have fewer planes in the air, to reduce carbon output.

These guidelines are understandably hard sells for Joe Public, as many common people like to eat meat, or need a car to get to-and-from work, and children, as demanding as they can be, eventually grow up and can mow our lawns and do chores around the house. So if we’re serious about drastic climate action, right now, before the world ends, we need to do something that has maximum bang for the buck, while disrupting as few lives as possible. This way, the rabble masses will see that our leaders and elites are serious and they have the will to take whatever action necessary to make this happen. According to The Independent, the most popular private jet is the Cessna Citation XLS, which I believe climate alarmist Leonardo Di Caprio may be boarding in the picture below, having been shunted to the runway via a private helicopter… It’s back-of-the-napkin, but let’s say a typical jet does 4 legs per week, at 3 hour legs. We get: 17,947 jets X  6,030 kg CO2/flight X 4 flights/week  X 52 weeks = 22,509,845,280 kilograms of Co2.  Over 22 billion kilos of C02. Per year. But if we banned private jets, with immediate effect, no exceptions, very few working class and middle class people would be affected.

The Zombie Climate of Civilization -- Why did the mainstream climate movement fail? To understand this we first need to understand what this movement was, where it came from, why it was confected, what it was really trying to accomplish.Look in the corporate media and its “alt” followers and you’ll see a new surge of interest and excitement around the climate-industrial movement. With Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion we have a new injection, a new brand, a new chic. This seeming rejuvenation of the hoary mainstream comes at the same time as new ideas are rising, as a small but growing movement of writers, activists, and scientists is saying that the mainstream movement has failed, that its ideology and goals were all wrong in the first place, that its forecasts always have been grossly distorted to the linear and optimist side which is why its forecasts so consistently are outstripped by events, and that the prescriptions of the mainstream are absurdly insufficient to meet the crisis as well as destructive in themselves.From the perspective of ecological fact and all of modern history, what’s happening is nothing but the attempted resurrection and zombification of a corpse. Thunberg is being used as figurehead for the same old lineup of corporate NGOs while Extinction Rebellion, for all its direct action, is dedicated to kettling all action within the capitalist framework and the framework of making “demands” on the very governments driving the destruction as fast as they can as hard as they can. Indeed a modern government can be defined pretty well as a way to organize a society for the maximum destruction of the Earth. So there’s our two big movements of the moment, both sheep-herders on behalf of the destroyers of the Earth. It’s clear that we have here yet another manifestation of the “reform” faction within the organized crime framework. Reformed ecocide, green ecocide.  It’s all based on the lie propagated by the IPCC that civilization still has a “carbon budget” (such capitalist-technocratic verbiage) to work with, when in fact civilization has been deep into the red for many years now. The debt keeps mounting and the bill is about to come due in full.

Understanding Why the Green New Deal Won’t Really Work - Gail Tverberg, aka Gail the Actuary - The reasons why the Green New Deal won’t really work are fairly subtle. A person really has to look into the details to see what goes wrong. In this post, I try to explain at least a few of the issues involved.

• [1] None of the new renewables can easily be relied upon to produce enough energy in winter.  The world’s energy needs vary, depending on location. In locations near the poles, there will be a significant need for light and heat during the winter months. Energy needs will be relatively more equal throughout the year near the equator. Solar energy is particularly a problem in winter. In northern latitudes, if utilities want to use solar energy to provide electricity in winter, they will likely need to build several times the amount of solar generation capacity required for summer to have enough electricity available for winter.Wind energy (Figure 3) comes closest to being suitable for matching the winter consumption needs of the economy. In at least some parts of the world, wind energy seems to continue at a reasonable level during winter.
• [2] Depending upon burned biomass in winter is an option, but we already know that this path is likely to lead to massive deforestation.
• [3] Battery backup for renewables is very expensive. Because of their high cost, batteries tend to be used only for very short time periods. There seem to be several related costs associated with the use of batteries:
  • The cost of replacements, because batteries are typically not very long-lived compared to, say, solar panels
  • The cost of recycling the battery components rather than simply leaving the batteries to pollute the nearby surroundings
  • The loss of electric charge that occurs as the battery sits idle for a period of time and the loss related to electricity storage and retrieval
• At a 3-day storage level, batteries do nothing to smooth out season-to-season and year-to-year variation. We can get some idea of the cost of batteries from an analysis by Roger Andrews of a Tesla/Solar City system installed on the island of Ta’u. The island is in American Samoa, near the equator. This island received a grant that was used to add solar panels, plus 3-day battery backup, to provide electricity for the tiny island. Any outages longer than the battery capacity would continue to be handled by a diesel generator. The goal was to reduce the quantity of diesel used, not to eliminate its use completely. Based on Andrews’ analysis, adding a 3-day battery backup more than doubled the cost of the PV-alone system. (It added 1.6 times as much as the cost of the installed batteries.) The catch, as I pointed out above, is that the cost doesn’t stop with purchasing the initial batteries. At least one set of replacement batteries is likely to be needed during the lifetime of the system. And there are other costs that are more subtle and difficult to evaluate.

Big Tech's eco-pledges aren't slowing its pursuit of Big Oil - Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google into promising to slash their carbon emissions. But there’s another thing these tech giants aren’t cutting: Their growing business ties to the oil and gas industry. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were accelerating the oil companies’ greenhouse gas emissions. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms, in many cases supplying them not just with remote data storage but also artificial intelligence tools for pinpointing better drilling spots or speeding up refinery production. The oil and gas industry is spending roughly $20 billion each year on cloud services, which accounts for about 10% of the total cloud market, according to Vivek Chidambaram, a managing director of Accenture’s energy consultancy. It’s not yet clear whether the extraction industry is getting its money’s worth, although experts remain bullish about the application of advanced technology to oil and gas exploration.

Why Vladimir Putin Suddenly Believes in Global Warming - President Vladimir Putin needs to go green quickly to stop the permafrost from melting, so that Russian oil and gas companies can keep pumping the hydrocarbons that are warming the planet and making the permafrost melt. Even I’m struggling with the warped logic of that one, but it’s the conclusion I’ve reached from Russia’s sudden ratification of the Paris climate accord and from reading the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Until now, climate change has been seen as a “good thing” for Russia — at least in part. Warming waters have opened up the Northern Sea Route across the top of the country and made it practical, if not necessarily economic, to search for and exploit oil and gas resources beneath the Arctic seas. Who remembers the Shtokman gas project?Yet the warming that is opening up the Arctic seas may be starting to have a less beneficial effect on the frozen landmass of northern Russia, the heartland of the country’s oil and gas development and production. “Permafrost is undergoing rapid change,” says the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate report adopted by the IPCC last week. The changes threaten the “structural stability and functional capacities” of oil industry infrastructure, the authors warn. The greatest risks occur in areas with high ground-ice content and frost-susceptible sediments. Russia’s Yamal Peninsula — home to two of Russia’s biggest new gas projects (Bovanenkovo and Yamal LNG) and the Novy Port oil development — fits that bill. The problem is bigger than those three projects, though. Some “45% of the oil and natural gas production fields in the Russian Arctic are located in the highest hazard zone,” according to the IPCC report. The top few meters of the permafrost, the so-called active layer, freezes and thaws as the seasons change, becoming unstable during warmer months. Developers account for this by making sure their foundations are deep enough to support their infrastructure: including roads, railways, houses, processing plants and pipelines. But climate change is causing that active layer to deepen, which means the ground loses its ability to support the things built upon it. The loss of bearing capacity is dramatic and it’s already well under way, as this chart shows:

Dutch Farmers In Mass Revolt Against Green Fascism - Thousands of Dutch farmers descended on the Netherlands capital to protest against onerous environmental restrictions that threaten their livelihoods. The demonstrations were sparked after the coalition government proposed that “Dutch livestock farming should be slashed to meet commitments on reducing nitrogen emissions,” reports Dutch News NL. Farmers traveled to the Hague in their tractors, causing tailbacks in excess of 620 miles and huge traffic jams around and in the city. Farmers are protesting in the Netherlands and it is now the biggest traffic jam we've ever seen, thousands of tractors are driving on the highways right now #boerenprotest is even worldwide trending on twitter right now pic.twitter.com/mIcWzq3BnS Some protesters also used their tractors to demolish fences that been put up by the government. Over 2000 dutch farmers are protesting. The government put up fenced to keep them out. Meanwhile: farmers drive over those fences with their tractors and cause around 1100km traffic jams around the big citiesWe love farmers. No farmers =no food#boerenprotest pic.twitter.com/efVkQw766o  The protests appear to have widespread support from the Dutch population. Populist leader Geert Wilders made an appearance at one of the protests.  The scenes were reminiscent of the early days of the Yellow Vest movement in France, which was also partly a rural backlash to environmental taxes.

Trump Officials Agree on Plan to Boost Ethanol, Biodiesel - The Trump administration has agreed to a new plan for boosting renewable fuels and offsetting waivers exempting oil refineries from mandates to use them, according to three people familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity before a formal announcement. The tentative agreement, which follows weeks of negotiations, would allow the Environmental Protection Agency to offset those waivers in response to criticism from industry advocates and Midwestern politicians that the exemptions have hurt demand for corn-based ethanol and soybean-based biodiesel. Under the deal, the EPA would factor recent waivers into new annual biofuel quotas, by adjusting the targets to reflect a three-year rolling average of exemptions. White House officials also rejected a bid by oil industry allies to prevent spikes in the prices of biofuel compliance credits refiners use to prove they have fulfilled the targets. The agreement reflects a deal pitched by farm-state senators to the president earlier this month. Ethanol producers surged on the news. Green Plains Inc., which had been trading below Monday’s closing price, rose as much as 2.5%. Pacific Ethanol Inc. jumped as much as 9.4%. Renewable Identification Numbers tracking 2019 conventional biofuel consumption targets jumped 12% to 19 cents a piece -- the steepest one-day gain since Sept. 16, according to broker data compiled by Bloomberg.

Big Oil Pushes Back Against Minnesota Clean Car Announcement -Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced last week that the state would be adopting a pair of clean car standards following California’s lead, even as the Trump administration tries to revoke California’s authority to set stricter standards under federal law. But Minnesota’s move is already prompting pushback from oil industry defenders and organizations tied to the Koch network, which is unsurprising given that fuel-efficient and electric vehicles are a clear threat to the profits of petroleum producers and refiners.It’s a fight that is playing out across the country — including in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Minnesota is now the fourteenth state to join California in developing stronger vehicle standards, a key policy pathway in the fight against climate change. In Minnesota and nationally, the transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Clean car standards are intended to reduce transportation-sector emissions. “Climate change threatens the very things that make Minnesota a great place to live, from our magnificent 10,000 lakes to our farmable land and clean air,” said Governor Walz. “If Washington won’t lead on climate, Minnesota will.”The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) will be implementing both a low emissions vehicle (LEV) standard and a zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) standard. The LEV standard requires new automobiles sold in the state to produce less pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, while the ZEV standard mandates that automakers provide more options for ultra-low and zero-emission vehicles including electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.  The two policies combined could reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by two million tons by 2030, according to apress release from the governor’s office. In addition to the climate benefits, the initiatives — dubbed Clean Cars Minnesota — are expected to improve public health while saving consumers money and increasing consumer choice.

Thousands of Ships Fitted With ‘Cheat Devices’ To Divert Poisonous Pollution Into Sea  -Global shipping companies have spent billions rigging vessels with “cheat devices” that circumvent new environmental legislation by dumping pollution into the sea instead of the air, The Independent can reveal.More than $12bn (£9.7bn) has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract sulphur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on heavy fuel oil.This means the vessels meet standards demanded by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) that kick in on 1 January.However, the sulphur emitted by the ships is simply re-routed from the exhaust and expelled into the water around the ships, which not only greatly increases the volume of pollutants being pumped into the sea, but also increases carbon dioxide emissions.The change could have a devastating effect on wildlife in British waters and around the world, experts have warned.A total of 3,756 ships, both in operation and under order, have already had scrubbers installed according to DNV GL, the world’s largest ship classification company. Only 23 of these vessels have had closed-loop scrubbers installed, a version of the device that does not discharge into the sea and stores the extracted sulphur in tanks before discharging it at a safe disposal facility in a port.

China’s Renewable Boom Hits The Wall -  When earlier this year China announced subsidies for 22.79 GW of new solar power capacity, those following the country’s renewable energy story must have started to worry. The capacity subsidized is half the amount approved in 2017, at 53 GW. And chances are that solar and wind additions will continue to fall.Subsidies are one reason. In January, Beijing said it will only approve solar power projects if they are cost-competitive with coal. Judging by the size of subsidies announced in July, more than 22 GW in projects can boast cost-competitiveness with coal.Yet there is another reason: curtailment. China-based journalist Michael Standaert wrote in a recent story for Yale Environment 360 that China’s solar and wind farms continue to produce electricity that is wasted because there is not enough transmission capacity.Renewable energy is a top priority for China as it fights one of the worst air pollution levels in the world while subject to an uncomfortably high degree of reliance on energy imports, namely oil and gas. At the same time, it is one of the biggest—if not the single biggest—driver of global energy demand as its middle class grows fast and with it, energy demand. Now, it seems, energy demand is taking the upper hand.China has substantially increased subsidies for shale gas exploration and methane separation from coal, Standaert writes. He also quotes a former IEA official as saying, “Though China is the largest clean energy market in the world, wind and solar only accounted for 5.2 percent and 2.5 percent of China’s national power generation in 2018.” What’s more, Kevin Tu, now a fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, tells Standaert that “Against the backdrop of an ongoing U.S.-China trade war and a slowing Chinese economy, political priority of climate change in China is unlikely to become very high in the near future, indicating great difficulties for Beijing to further upgrade its climate ambitions.”  In short, renewables won’t cut it when you need cheap power to feed growing energy demand.

Sark’s energy hits prices only billionaires can afford -- You might remember that earlier this year that Sark’s monopolistic energy company, Sark Electricity, had threatened to switch the electricity off entirely on the “dark sky” island after an independent price control commissioner had told the company to slash its high electricity prices. Although a temporary resolution to the crisis had been found, with the island’s government — “Chief Pleas” — agreeing to buy out the company within a few months, the islanders weren’t convinced this would translate into a permanent one. Indeed, they were sceptical that a mutual agreement on a fair price for the buy out could ever be reached. Well it seems like they were right: there has been no buyout and although there appears to have been some kind of truce over the summer, which is peak tourist season, the crisis is once again escalating.  On Friday, Sark Electricity, which brings in diesel on boats from Guernsey and then converts that into electricity, wrote to the island’s residents to inform them that electricity prices were going up still higher. It was a strange letter. Not just because it was dotted with typos — “Tis made it easier for you”; “we suggest you dimply set us up like any other payee” — but also because CEO David Gordon-Brown seemed to bury the lede. The punchline about customer electricity prices being hiked by 29 per cent from 66 to 85 pence per kilowatt-hour came only after an extended note about how the way customers pay their bills is changing. But when it was delivered, it was feisty to say the least: As many of my customers are much richer that my shareholders, we cannot continue this “Reversed Robin Hood” situation any longer, so effective with the beginning of this month I have to raising [sic] the price of electricity by 13.5p to let us break even, and a further 5.5p to try to recapture some of the losses from earlier this year. So your next bill will show your electricity price at 85p. The assertion that some of Sark Electricity’s customers are “much richer” than the shareholders (who, it should be noted, are Gordon-Brown’s own family members) is not without justification.  But 85 pence per kwh is an eye-watering price even for billionaires. It’s more than six times higher than the 14 pence paid on average in the UK (which Sark is not part of). Freelance journalist Rob Byrne, who used to report on the Channel Islands for the BBC, has estimated that it’s also more than anyone pays for electricity anywhere on Earth (that is known of, anyway).

Northeast heating oil industry looks to biodiesel to reduce carbon emissions -The Northeast heating oil industry plans to begin pressing New England states to mandate certain standardized levels of biodiesel content in home heating oil. At an industry summit in Rhode Island on Sept. 19, member companies of the New England Fuel Institute and related companies voted unanimously in favor of a resolution to work toward a 15% reduction in carbon emissions by 2023, 40% by 2030, and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Sean Cota, president and chief executive of the Massachusetts-based organization, said they hope to reach these goals by dramatically boosting the use of biodiesel in home heating fuel. Biodiesel is a biodegradable fuel manufactured from vegetable oils, animal fats, recycled restaurant grease and other materials. Much of the heating oil used in New England already contains some biodiesel, but its use is not required in every state. “Some companies have been very aggressive. Others have been less aggressive,” Cota said. “We need to have some standards. Part of our future effort will be to have everyone at similar levels as quickly as possible.” Charles Uglietto, the owner of Cubby Oil in Somerville, started with 5% biodiesel — referred to as B5 in industry shorthand — and gradually upped the levels. Now he delivers a B40 blend to all of his customers. “This product has worked seamlessly both in old equipment and newer equipment,” he said. “And it burns cleaner than our ultra-low-sulfur heating oil.”

Philadelphia wants to ban highly polluting oils burned to heat buildings --Philadelphia lawmakers want to ban the dirtiest kinds of oils used for heating in some buildings. Experts say phasing out these heavy fuel oils is low-hanging fruit when it comes to reducing air pollution. “It will substantially improve air quality in Philadelphia,” said Joe Minott, director of the Clean Air Council. Heavier fuel oils — classified by numbers 6, 5, and 4 — are generally used in older commercial and residential furnaces and boilers. These oils contain about 300 times higher amounts of sulfur than lighter oils, and they release more pollutants, including particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, mercury, and nickel — linked to asthma, and heart and lung diseases. A bill introduced by Councilmember Blondell Reynolds Brown in September, and approved unanimously by the council’s Committee on the Environment Wednesday, proposes to phase out the use, sale, and storage of heavy fuel oils over the next five years. “It’s a very dirty fuel,” Minott said. “So the people that want to continue using oil will have the option of switching to a lower-sulfur oil or switching out from fossil fuel altogether, which obviously would be where the Clean Air Council would urge this whole process to go.” New York City passed a similar rule in 2011. About 10,000 structures, including 200 public schools, affected by the regulation were responsible for more than 85% of the soot pollution coming from buildings, as reported by The New York Times.

67 arrested at Bow power plant protest; largest NH green action since 1970s — Sixty-seven activists were arrested Saturday for trespassing at the Merrimack Station coal-burning power plant, in what organizers said was the largest environmental civil disobedience action since the Clamshell Alliance demonstrations against the Seabrook nuclear plant in the 1970s. The group had been planning the action for weeks, and the arrests were not unexpected. They chose the Bow plant on the Merrimack River because it has two coal-fired steam units, along with two kerosene-powered turbine units. The coal-fired units “serve as seasonal and peak demand resources,” according to the website for Granite Shore Power, which purchased the plant from Eversource in early 2018 as part of the state’s deregulation of the electric market. Those arrested were part of a group of about 300 people from across New England who attended a “No Coal, No Gas” rally held in the ballfield across from the plant. For three hours, folks of all ages sang, chanted and cheered as speakers called for action on climate change — starting with shutting down the nearby power plant. Lilly Tague-Bleau, 15, a sophomore at Manchester Central High School, told the crowd that climate change demands an immediate response. “As sea levels rise and events of extreme weather continue to occur at alarming rates, we are left with no choice but to take action and step in now,” she said. “We must work before this movement becomes nothing but damage control.” “It seems like our leaders only care about the short term, but ‘I’ll be dead when it matters’ does not apply to me and my children,” she said, as the crowd erupted in cheers.

FERC majority would have upheld contested ISO-NE capacity auction results — The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would have upheld contested results of the ISO New England's most recent forward capacity market auction that went into effect by operation of law, according to a joint statement released Friday by the agency's Republican majority. The auction, FCA 13, was held February 4 for the June 2022 through May 2023 commitment period, producing the lowest clearing price in six years at $3.80/kW-month. Those results were challenged by Vineyard Wind. An offshore wind developer formed through a joint venture between Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners K/S and Avangrid Renewables, Vineyard Wind specifically expressed frustration that it was unable to fully participate in the auction as a renewable energy resource (ER19-1166). FCA 13 was notably the first ISO-NE capacity market auction to run under "competitive auctions with sponsored policy resources," or CASPR, rules, a new two-step construct to accommodate state-subsidized and state-procured energy resources. CASPR's secondary substitution auction allows resources interested in retiring to transfer their capacity supply obligations to new state-sponsored resources that did not clear in the primary auction. The construct allowed the Vineyard Offshore Wind Project to successfully secure 54 MW in FCA 13's substitution auction, prompting consumer advocacy group Public Citizen to assert that FERC and the ISO-NE "botched" the auction. Full participation of the offshore wind project in the capacity auction would have lowered the clearing price paid to all resources by 66.7 cents/kW-month, or more than $270 million, the group argued. In a separate joint protest, a group of generators -- ArcLight Capital Holdings affiliate Great River Hydro, NRG Power Marketing subsidiary NRG Power Marketing, Carlyle Group subsidiary Cogentrix Energy Power Management, and Vistra Energy -- argued that the offer floor price appeared to be inconsistent with prevailing market conditions. They specifically questioned the grid operator's internal market monitor's approval of a unit-specific offer floor for NTE Energy's planned 647-MW natural gas-fired Killingly Energy Center project in Connecticut.

Judge's ruling on Jefferson County power plant could cost Ameren - A federal judge's ruling Monday on pollution at a Jefferson County power plant could cost electric utility Ameren Corp. hundreds of millions of dollars.The 157-page ruling, from Judge Rodney Sippel, ordered Ameren to install so-called "scrubber" technology at its Rush Island Energy Center in Festus to address pollution that he found in 2017 had violated the Clean Air Act.Implementing that technology, called flue-gas desulfurization, could cost $650 million to $960 million, the order said, citing estimates from engineering firms.It also ordered Ameren to install another technology, dry sorbent injection, at its Labadie, Missouri, plant, which could carry capital costs of $55 million and annual operating costs of $53 million. That was ordered to remedy for excess emissions at Rush Island.The case dealt with Ameren's decision not to seek a Clean Air Act permit for a rebuild of Rush Island, which was completed in phases in 2007 and 2010.Sippel wrote that Ameren should have obtained the permit and that his order would satisfy the purpose of the law, passed in 1970 and amended to deal with modified power plants in 1977. "We are reviewing the court's lengthy opinion regarding the case," Ameren Missouri Chairman Michael Moehn said. "As we have indicated previously, we believe the court has misapplied and misinterpreted both Missouri law and recent Supreme Court rulings regarding administrative law."

Georgia Power questioned on plan to add $200 annually to average bill - Georgia Power’s chief executive testified before state regulators Monday, urging approval of the company’s request to add about $200 a year to the average residential customer’s bills.Paul Bowers’ presence highlighted the $2.2. billion case’s importance for the state’s largest utility: It was the first time in his nine-year tenure as CEO that he faced questions and comments from the public as he testified before the Georgia Public Service Commission.“Our current rates are no longer sufficient to cover the costs of the business,” Bowers said. Still, under questioning from an attorney for the state, Bowers acknowledged that in three of the last five years the company has earned profits above a target band set by the PSC, topping out above 12%.Some members of the public who spoke at the hearing insisted Georgia Power bills would rise too high. And they said it would cover some costs — particularly for the cleanup of potentially toxic ash pits from coal plants — that the company should pick up itself rather than put on its 2.6 million customers.“The rate increase will cripple our community,” Gloria Woods of Atlanta told the PSC’s five elected commissioners. “We ask that you set aside any relationship you might have with Georgia Power and do what is right.”Typical Georgia residential customer bills would rise by $16.48 a month, once the proposed increases are fully phased in over three years, with the first of the hikes requested to take effect in January. And a bigger chunk of each bill would be in the form of higher fixed charges, nearly double the current $10 a month. That would mean consumers would have less ability to keep costs down by using less electricity.

Plant McIntosh continues coal ash cleanup - Georgia Power is moving forward with the planned cleanup of the ash pond at Plant McIntosh in Rincon. The company will begin the process of removing and cleaning up the water from the 24-acre ash pond this month. The mandated cleanup of the coal ash ponds across the state comes as Georgia Power is also seeking to increase rates in part to pay for that clean-up.  Georgia Power hired Pittsburgh-based Evoqua Water Technologies to perform the cleanup. Another third-party company is monitoring and reporting water quality data from the site and from an upstream and downstream location on the Savannah River. Reports, including analyses by an independent, accredited lab, will be publicly available on the Georgia Power website.  Coal ash is the residue that remains after coal is burned to produce electricity. It contains pollutants including arsenic, lead and mercury that have been linked to cancer, heart disease, reproductive damage and brain damage. The ash has been stored in unlined ponds on site at power plants, but that practice can allow pollutants to leak out over time or be washed out in flooding.  Georgia Power is in the process of closing 29 ash ponds at 11 current and former coal-fired power plants across the state. The dewatering process has already begun at five other Georgia Power plants: Bowen, McDonough, McManus, Branch and Yates.The company plans to completely excavate 19 ash ponds with the remaining 10 being closed in place. But a report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice released in January showed coal ash pollutants have been detected in groundwater at 11 power plants in Georgia, including Plant McIntosh, where arsenic and lithium were detected at triple the safe level.

Advocates banking on new Illinois coal ash law to protect rivers and wells - Amid federal uncertainty, two of the state’s most notorious coal ash storage sites will likely test new cleanup rules adopted this year.Two months ago, Illinois became the fourth state to pass new regulations on coal ash storage and cleanup, following North Carolina, Michigan and Virginia. Now environmental groups are invoking the law to ensure more stringent cleanup than might happen under federal coal ash rules being rolled back by the Trump administration. The first test cases appear to be two of the state’s most notorious coal ash repositories: the NRG-owned Lincoln Stone Quarry southwest of Chicago and a former Dynegy coal plant along the Vermilion River’s Middle Fork in central Illinois.Lincoln Stone Quarry and the Vermilion site are unlined, as are most of Illinois’ coal ash sites. Under federal rules adopted by the Obama administration, they must begin closure by October 2020, though that deadline could change given the Trump administration’s review. The Vermilion coal plant shut down in 2011, and the Joliet coal plant that long disposed of ash in Lincoln Stone Quarry was converted to natural gas in 2016. Both plants are going through the closure process under the federal coal ash rule, which includes a mandate to publicly post closure plans. The new Illinois law calls for state standards that are at least as strict as federal standards, and it requires a public process including the opportunity for public meetings. The new state statute orders the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to draft specific coal ash rules by March 2020, and, after public input, the Illinois Pollution Control Board must finalize the rules within a year. Environmental advocates and attorneys say that while the specifics of the state rule are still to be determined, the law is already in effect and should be taken into consideration as companies propose their closure plans.  “Even though the rulemaking will flesh out a lot of details about how these permitting programs are going to work, we know what the floor of the rules is — that they have to be at least as protective as the federal ones,” said Jenny Cassel, an attorney representing environmental and citizen groups in the Lincoln Stone Quarry proceeding. “We have an option to do better, and the rules will further define what that means.”

NC environmental groups concerned over EPA coal ash proposal - Several opponents of deregulating coal ash with North Carolina ties spoke at a public hearing in Northern Virginia Wednesday, urging the Environmental Protection Agency to reject a proposal that would loosen restrictions on how much coal ash can be used in construction projects and alter how piles of the material could be managed. “Until the government can prove that this coal ash is safe in our water, soil and air, and that it is not responsible for any cancers or illnesses in each of these towns across the country, environmental rollbacks should not even be considered,” said former Mooresville resident Susan Wind, whose teenage daughter was diagnosed with thyroid cancer more than two years ago. “Parents like me should not have the burden of proving coal ash is dangerous.” After her daughter Taylor’s diagnosis, Wind heard from parents across her community who were in similar situations. She said she discovered that coal ash “was treated like dirt throughout our area,” used under roads, homes and even as topsoil in landscaping. Wind raised more than $100,000 to fund a private study by Duke University scientists. Iredell County had cancer rates nearly double the statewide average from 2012 to 2016, and two southeastern and southwestern parts of the county had rates even higher, The Charlotte Observer reported previously. Wind and her family have moved to Florida because of health concerns, her husband Dave Wind said. Under current EPA rules, anyone asking to use of more than 12,400 tons of coal ash as environmental fill has to prove it won’t harm the environment. Under the proposed changes, that cap would be removed entirely in favor of site-specific criteria. Another proposed change would alter how temporary storage piles of ash are managed, requiring those at power plant sites and away from them to be handled the same. “EPA is trying right now to create as many loopholes as they can,” said Larissa Liebmann, a Waterkeeper Alliance staff attorney. “It’s a revision intended to benefit industry, and it comes directly out of industry comments and complaints.”

 Avner Vengosh: Duke prof heads to EPA hearing to fight proposal to loosen coal ash restrictions | abc11.com-- Nearly six years after a busted drainage pipe at a Duke Energy coal ash containment pond turned the Dan River into an oily sludge, the Trump administration is considering a move to roll back some of the Obama-era rules that ban the disposal of coal ash in soil or pits and landfills that aren't lined to protect the environment. At his Duke University lab, ABC11 caught up with the geochemistry professor headed to the EPA hearing about the issue scheduled for Wednesday morning. The EPA is considering amending the 2015 Obama-era coal ash rule to remove the safeguards like lined landfills as long as the ash is dumped or spread for a "beneficial use," like fill. Back in the labs at Duke, Vengosh and his team are running experiment after experiment -- suggesting that when coal ash interacts with water -- like it will if it's spread on soil or buried without protective liners -- the highly-toxic contaminants easily leach out of the ash, potentially into drinking water or the air.  His testimony to the EPA Wednesday about the rule changes: Don't do it.  "Basically, I think that those amendments to their own regulation is a setback to protection of the environment from coal ash." For Duke Energy's part, the company said the hearing is a non-issue for them.  The company is not attending the EPA hearing and said it did not submit comments.

As EPA preps coal ash rollback, study finds heightened risks of water, soil contamination -  With the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) poised to loosen coal ash rules for dry onsite storage and large fill projects, a new study from Duke University finds that leaving those contaminants exposed may significantly heighten the risk of toxic contamination to nearby soil and waterways.The research finds that health-threatening compounds "can be leached out from coal ash under oxidizing conditions, similar to what one would expect from uncontrolled placement of coal ash on soil, or even buried in soil," Duke Earth and Ocean Sciences Professor and author of the study Avner Vengosh said in testimony to the EPA on Wednesday, during a public hearing on the proposed new rules.Not only do the EPA's proposed rules heighten the risk of environmental exposure, the current monitoring requirements from the agency do not fully measure the mobility and leachability of coal ash, according to Vengosh, who said more extensive monitoring should be required.The risk of coal ash contaminating waterways has long been a concern for environmental groups, but the preliminary evidence of Vengosh's study suggests that the dangers associated with fly ash and water are more prominent than previously realized. Mixing the contaminant with water results in elevated levels of hexavalent chromium, a "highly toxic" carcinogen."  Uncontrolled disposal of coal ash to the environment and placement of coal ash on soil without liners or other barriers to water would create new sources of leached contaminants that will infiltrate into the subsurface, contaminating soil and water resources," Vengosh said in his testimony.   EPA's proposed rule would eliminate monitoring on large coal ash fill projects, except for sites with "geologic vulnerabilities." Industry has long used the material for "beneficial use," for example, as a structural fill for retaining walls, highways or to level ground for parking. Under the Obama-era coal combustion residual (CCR) rules, any project larger than 12,400 tons had to meet certain monitoring requirements to ensure the surrounding environment was not impacted by the toxins.

EPA Put on Notice Over Coal Ash Proposal: ‘See You in Court’ - Environmental advocates Oct. 2 claimed that EPA’s coal ash proposals are illegal because companies may be allowed to reuse this material without proper monitoring and public protections. Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans told the Environmental Protection Agency at a public hearing in Arlington, Va., that the coal ash proposals ignore scientific evidence that the byproduct from burning coal in power plants is hazardous waste. She said the proposal allows “unlimited volumes” of toxic ash to be placed in playgrounds as fill material, and near drinking water wells, “with no notice, no monitoring, no liners, no requirements whatsoever—even though coal ash fill projects contaminate groundwater, drinking water, soil, and air.” But Thomas H. Adams, executive director of the American Coal Ash Association, testified that there has been no evidence of environmental damage resulting from power plants stockpiling coal ash for reuse purposes. The hearing focused on the EPA’s proposed changes to the Obama-era-EPA’s 2015 coal ash disposal rule (RIN:2050-AG88), being made in two phases. The proposed changes include less stringent groundwater monitoring requirements, as well as discretion for states and coal-fired utilities to decide when substances leaking from coal ash ponds and landfills have to be cleaned up. They also include a demonstration or test to ensure coal ash that is stored in ponds or landfills without protective coverings could still be used “in an environmentally protective manner,” such as being used in landscaping or playgrounds and as structural fill for road construction. Coal ash pollutes groundwater and soil with toxic chemicals such as arsenic, mercury, hexavalent chromium, lead, and radium, Evans said.

Study: No coal ash in soccer field dirt near Kingston coal-fired plant - There is no coal ash in the top three inches of dirt under children’s feet at soccer fields in the Swan Pond community, a report reveals. The Tennessee Department of Health says testing by the Tennessee Valley Authority and state regulators ruled out the presence of coal ash — a toxic stew of chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive material — in the top three inches of dirt underneath the grass-covered soccer fields at the Swan Pond Sports Complex in Roane County. That same testing revealed the presence in the dirt of most of the ingredients in coal ash, though at levels considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. The health department report shows the dirt is particularly rich in two coal ash ingredients — arsenic and chromium — but also at levels considered safe by the EPA and typical of soil throughout Tennessee. “All metal and radionuclide levels in the soil were below levels that would be a health hazard,” the health department report stated. “Children recreating at these areas should not have health concerns.”

Coal has always been king in the South. Now that’s changing - Duke Energy Corp. is one of the largest coal burners in America. But the North Carolina-based utility’s coal fleet is running less and less, an E&E News review of federal data shows. In a sign of mounting economic distress, nine of the company’s 13 coal plants ran less than half the year in 2018. Eight of those facilities averaged annual run times of less than 50% between 2014 and 2018. Only two of the company’s coal facilities produced more electricity in 2018 than they did five years earlier. Duke has started to close more coal plants in response. On Monday, the utility filed a plan with North Carolina regulators that moved up the retirement dates of three coal units. That followed a release of its plan with Indiana regulators in June that advanced the closure of seven coal units there. More early retirements could be announced when the company’s second North Carolina subsidiary files its rate case with regulators in the coming weeks. “These unit retirement dates have been adjusted due to sustained, low gas prices making some of the older (and less efficient) units less competitive, especially at sites where we have no plans to add dual fuel or gas co-firing,” Erin Culbert, a Duke spokeswoman, wrote in an email this week. Duke is a central character in a wider story about coal plants in America. Coal facilities generally carry high fixed costs but are able to generate electricity relatively cheaply because they churn out large quantities of electrons around the clock. But as more natural gas and renewable power comes online, coal plants are running less. That undermines their economic viability. Yet utilities are not always quick to close those coal plants down, prompting charges from critics that they are saddling customers with additional costs and pumping millions of tons of additional carbon into the atmosphere. The story is particularly noticeable in the Southeast. A 2017 study by the Department of Energy found that coal retirements in the region lagged behind other parts of the country. But large Southern coal plants are increasingly huffing and puffing to stay alive, an E&E News review of generation data collected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows. Power plant run times, often referred to as capacity factors, are a key indicator of economic health, especially for coal plants, which are designed to run around the clock. DOE’s 2017 study found 70% of the plants that shut down between 2010 and 2016 posted a sub-50% capacity factor the year prior to their retirement. Seven of the Southeast’s 10 largest plants ran less than half of the year in 2018. Four of those averaged annual run times of less than 50% between 2014 and 2018. None produced more electricity in 2018 than they did five years earlier. Several of the country’s largest coal plants are flirting with the 50% threshold. Southern Co.’s Scherer and Bowen plants in Georgia are the largest and second-largest plants nationally in terms of capacity. In 2018, they reported capacity factors of 51% and 48%, respectively. The company’s Wansley plant, also in Georgia, posted a measly 18% for the year.

Interior Taps Former Ohio Regulator to Lead Mine Cleanup Program -

• Lanny Erdos, former Ohio mine reclamation boss, named to lead OSMRE
• Erdos, who has not been confirmed by Senate, becomes ‘principal deputy director’

Lanny Erdos, the former head of Ohio’s abandoned mine land program, was given the “functions, duties, and responsibilities” of the federal government’s mine reclamation agency Sept. 30.  In taking the job of principal deputy director of the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation, and Enforcement, Erdos assumes responsibility for managing the nation’s mine cleanup effort and overseeing state programs. He will also have to weigh in on the many unfolding reclamation disputes arising out of the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, where several big mines are now changing hands.   Erdos has not been confirmed by the Senate.

More closures likely at US met coal mines soon, analyst says - At least one analyst believes that more U.S. metallurgical coal mines are likely to shut down in the coming weeks and months following Murray Energy Corp.'s announcement that it is shutting down its Maple Eagle coal mine West Virginia. Due to soft demand for steelmaking coal around the world, Murray's decision to temporarily idle its metallurgical coal operation is likely only the beginning of an "accelerated number of mine shut-ins in the U.S." Seaport Global Securities LLC analyst Mark Levin wrote in a Sept. 30 note. While the sector has been slow to respond as prices dipped in the past, it is reacting with greater urgency to shut down mines that are losing money this time around, the analyst added. "At the end of the day, we think it's fair to say the market is in tough shape, and it's not abundantly clear to us why it would get a whole [lot] better any time soon," Levin wrote. Levin estimated that about 10 million tonnes of U.S. metallurgical coal could be at risk if prices do not meaningfully improve. At least a quarter of that production could come offline in the next 90 to 120 days, with higher-cost and lower-quality supply likely to be the first to go, Levin wrote. "Operators typically eliminate weekend and overtime shifts before idling mines, but we suspect pricing has gotten to the point where tougher decisions will have to be made," Levin wrote. Levin added that U.S. exports of thermal coal used to generate power are also likely "off a lot" in 2020. Aside from some success from Consol Energy Inc. partnering with coal marketer Xcoal Energy & Resources, very few thermal coal exports have been contracted for 2020, Levin wrote. "Not one industry player with whom we have chatted expects U.S. thermal exports to be down any less than 20% next year," Levin wrote.

U.S. Coal Giant That Pressed Trump for Bailout Faces Default - Murray Energy Corp., the U.S. coal giant that had pressed the Trump administration for help averting bankruptcy, may be headed toward default. The largest closely held coal miner in America failed to make multiple payments to lenders this week, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. Creditors have agreed not to take legal action until Oct. 14, buying Murray some time to figure out how to shore up its balance sheet, the St. Clairsville, Ohio-based firm said. Murray Energy is struggling to stay afloat, along with the rest of America’s coal miners, as cheap natural gas and renewable energy resources cut into coal’s share of the U.S. power market. At least four companies including Cloud Peak Energy Inc. and Blackjewel LLC have gone bankrupt this year, laying bare the decline of a fuel that once accounted for more than half of all U.S. power generation. Today it’s less than 25%. Prices for thermal coal -- the kind burned by power plants -- have slumped, which may have left Murray short on cash, said Lucas Pipes, a coal analyst with B Riley FBR Inc. “You can’t make payments out of thin air if the money isn’t in the bank,” he said. The company idled some of its mines in West Virginia last month, citing “severely depressed coal markets.” Murray’s potential default comes more than a year after the Trump administration’s efforts to subsidize struggling nuclear and coal-fired power plants -- particularly ones that Murray supplies -- failed, shot down by President Donald Trump’s own appointed energy regulators. Chief Executive Officer Bob Murray, an early Trump supporter and a big donor to his campaign, was instrumental in setting his energy agenda and has hosted multiple fundraisers for him.

Coal States Urge Trump Administration to Tackle Plant Closures – Bloomberg - Six coal states are pressing the Trump administration to wrap up an almost two-year inquiry into whether coal and nuclear plant retirements are threatening the electric grid. In letters to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which overseas U.S. power markets, utility commissioners from Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming warned that plant closures are accelerating and “bringing increased attention to grid resilience and fuel security.” The appeal comes almost two years after the commission rejected a Trump administration bid to bail out money-losing coal plants, dismissing the proposal as unlawful. But the agency left the door open to future action, by opening an inquiry into whether regulatory changes are needed to keep the lights on. More than 200 comments have been filed with the commission since then, and more than a dozen coal-fired power plants have been decommissioned. Now the states hardest hit by coal’s decline are asking the energy commission to finalize its review of the electric grid and, again, consider imposing market rules that could curb the closure of fossil-fuel generation. They may find a sympathetic ear in commission Chairman Neil Chatterjee, a Kentucky Republican and a longstanding champion of the coal industry who has faced criticism for pushing an ill-fated proposal to curb coal retirements by paying generators for having fuel on-site. Chatterjee has since said that the independent agency can’t put its thumb on the scale to favor any one source. Chatterjee said he would address the issue of grid resilience this fall and, on Oct. 21, will co-host a University of Kentucky energy forum in the heart of coal country. Speakers include Bob Murray, the chief executive officer of coal producer Murray Energy Corp., who has repeatedly called on the Trump administration to take steps to revive the domestic coal industry. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which represents coal producers, said it was time for the agency to take action to “help address concerns over grid resilience as a result of the continued retirement of fuel-secure coal units across the country.”

Rick Perry Stepping Down From Energy Department - Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who has aggressively championed fossil fuels and expressed skepticism that the climate crisis is man-made, will step down from his post by the end of the year, The New York Times reported. Perry is one of the few people in the Trump administration to remain despite unprecedented turnover, Twitter-storms and scandals. He has been a steadfast ally of the fossil fuel industry and appears to have avoided the president's ire. However, his ability to steer clear of scandal may have come to an end in the wake of the recent revelations of Trump's attempt to strong-arm the Ukrainian president into digging into Joe Biden's son, Hunter. That inquiry has called into question Perry's trip to Ukraine President's Volodymyr Zelensky's inauguration in May where he promoted Ukraine's oil and natural gas exports, according to The New York Times. However,POLITICO reported that two people familiar with Perry's plans said he had been planning to leave for several months, well before the recent scandal surfaced. So far, no evidence has emerged that Perry pressured Zelensky to investigate the Biden family, according toThe Washington Post. The Department of Energy would not confirm that Perry is planning to depart. "While the Beltway media has breathlessly reported on rumors of Secretary Perry's departure for months, he is still the Secretary of Energy and a proud member of President Trump's Cabinet," Energy Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes told CNN. "One day the media will be right. Today is not that day." Perry's time at the Department of Energy is notable for his resistance to renewable energy. He has fiercely promoted oil and gas exploration and touted coal and nuclear energy as the future of America's energy sector, even though he has tried and failed to prop up coal-fired and nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, he has also approved plans to reduce funding for wind, solar and other renewable energy sources, according to The New York Times.

Editorial: Can US still build complex projects? 2 SC nuclear failures demand changes -  Editorial - Is the United States losing its managerial and technical ability to build big, complex projects? Both the scuttled mixed-oxide fuel plant at the Savannah River Site near Aiken and the abandoned V.C. Summer nuclear reactors beg the question. The failed projects, both of which sucked billions of dollars into a black hole, should prompt some deep soul searching within the Department of Energy, as well as among leading engineering and construction firms in the private sector. After all, the French have been reprocessing spent reactor fuel since 1976 and, over the past decade, the Chinese have successfully completed four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors like the two for the failed V.C. Summer expansion. Politics no doubt played a big role in dooming MOX, but so did poor planning and lax oversight. Because what good is our scientific know-how if we can’t build what we conceive? MOX represented the first big U.S. nuclear project in decades, yet apparently no one sufficiently questioned the government’s ability to manage and complete such an ambitious project, despite the fact that nuclear physicists knew that processing weapons-grade plutonium into reactor fuel would be far more complicated and dangerous than reprocessing spent reactor fuel, as is done in France. But once the money started flowing and stockpiles of plutonium started arriving at SRS from around the world, the DOE began fielding a flurry of complaints from contractors about their inability to find and retain workers with exacting fabrication and construction skills, mistakes made in material purchases and an endless stream of uncoordinated design changes. Anne Harrington, put in charge of overseeing MOX for the National Nuclear Security Administration in 2010, summed it up this way: “The decision-makers at the time naively thought that U.S. capacity was sufficient to handle this kind of large nuclear project,” Harrington said. “This program helped bring back lost skills, but it brought them back at a huge cost.” The ultimate responsibility — and blame — for the failed project lies mainly with the DOE, which now must figure out a way to keep its promise to South Carolinians and move some 12 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium out of the state. That’s a big challenge in light of the United States still having no comprehensive policy for reusing or disposing of fissionable material. The Trump administration, however, is pushing the idea of reprocessing part of the plutonium into bomb cores, with the work split between SRS and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Federal Ruling Due In January On Management Of Seabrook Nuclear Plant’s Concrete - Watchdog groups and neighbors of the Seabrook nuclear power plant had what they called their day in court last week. A federal administrative hearing with a panel of judges wrapped up Friday. It focused on whether Seabrook owner NextEra has adequately studied the degrading concrete at the plant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved NextEra's concrete monitoring plan based on that study and relicensed the plant earlier this year. Seabrook is the only nuclear plant in the country known to be experiencing the chemical reaction that causes concrete to develop hairline cracks. "There aren't really the right protocols to figure out, for the NRC, guiding them to how to deal with this,” says Natalie Treat, executive director of the nonprofit, C-10. She spoke on NHPR’s The Exchange Monday. Treat’s group brought the complaint that resulted in last week's hearing. Their star witness was a national third-party expert on the type of concrete degradation Seabrook is experiencing. During the hearing, the judges of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board’s law panel questioned C-10, NextEra and the NRC on their views of the concrete issue and how it has been studied and is being overseen. The panel also took public comment at the start of the proceeding, which took place in Newburyport, Mass. In a statement as the hearing wrapped up, Seabrook spokeswoman Lindsay Robertson said NextEra welcomed this latest chance for “public dialogue.” She says their concrete monitoring program is effective and approved by regulators. Seabrook is one of two nuclear plants and three reactors still operating in New England. The region’s other nuclear facility is Millstone in Connecticut. Together, they supply about a third of the region’s electricity.

House Bill 6 ads: Are the Chinese taking over Ohio's energy grid? No, say the people who run the grid – You've heard it on the radio and while watching TV and seen it on hard-to-miss fliers in your mailbox: China and other foreign entities have invaded our energy grid. The claim is at the center of the campaign to block a repeal of House Bill 6, an energy bill passed in July that provides $150 million a year in ratepayer subsidies for two Ohio nuclear power plants. The latest ad, released last week, claims "foreign entities have infiltrated our energy grid." Have they? The people who run the grid say no. The grid refers to the production, transmission and distribution of power. Ohio gets its electricity from a 13-state regional transmission organization called PJM Interconnection, which is part of a larger Eastern Interconnection grid. PJM is the nation's largest power grid, supplying power for 65 million customers. Susan Buehler, PJM's chief communications officer, was adamant about the security of the grid. "We work very closely with our utility partners, our government agencies and entities, and are extremely vigilant about the safety and security of the grid," Buehler said. Buehler said PJM does not finance power plants nor monitor how they are funded and has not taken a position on House Bill 6.

Attorney general launches 'petition blocker' investigation — Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost on Monday said his office is gathering evidence into possible election fraud tied to physically aggressive “petition blockers” hired by supporters of Ohio’s nuclear bailout law.“My job as attorney general is to call balls and strikes like I see them, and this one is a wild pitch,” he said. “It’s time to knock it out.” In a letter to U.S. attorneys, the Republican attorney general said potential charges could be filed against someone found to have threatened or intimidated someone into not signing a petition to put House Bill 6 on the November, 2020, ballot. He said the investigation could overlap into federal jurisdiction. The bailout law, set to take effect Oct. 22, requires consumers to pay surcharges on their monthly electric bills — ranging from 85 cents for residential customers to $2,400 for big industrial factories — beginning in 2021 to fuel a $170 million-a-year fund, with the vast majority of that money going to rescue Ohio’s two nuclear power plants. Before the law’s passage, FirstEnergy Solutions had said it would begin decommissioning its Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Oak Harbor by May 31, 2020, and its Perry plant east of Cleveland a year later. The plants have been unable to compete in this age of cheap and abundant natural gas.Now a group opposed to the bailout is collecting signatures in an effort to subject the law to a voter referendum in November, 2020. The petition drive has drawn fiery TV ads from Ohioans for Energy Security that have painted a picture of a Chinese takeover of America’s energy grid and suggested that signing the petitions would hand personal information to the Chinese government. The position of Ohioans for Energy Security has been closely aligned with bankrupt FirstEnergy Solutions, its investors, and the nuclear plants, while the position of the law’s opponents is closely aligned with the competing natural gas industry..Since that ad began airing, people circulating the petitions have reported being harassed while they’re in the field by professional petition trackers. “I have read with great interest recent media and online reports of petition circulators being targeted, harassed and intimidated by individuals opposed to the referendum effort,” Mr. Yost wrote. “This activity must stop and I intend to use this Office’s resources to protect the integrity of the process.”

AG to investigate HB6 circulators—  Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is investigating new allegations that people circulating petitions for a statewide referendum on a controversial energy bill are being offered cash to quit the campaign and to sell signed petitions to the opposing side. It’s the latest chapter in a costly, contentious fight over House Bill 6, which was signed into law in July. It mandates Ohio’s 4.8 million utility customers pay monthly fees to bailout aging nuclear power plants owned by Akron-based FirstEnergy Solutions and two coal-fired plants owned by the Ohio Valley Electricity Corp. The bailouts add up to more than $1 billion.   Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, which faces an Oct. 21 deadline to collect 265,744 valid voter signatures, alleges that opponents of their campaign have offered their circulators as much as $10,000 to quit and one of their petition circulating vendors was offered $100,000 to pull out.On Saturday, opponents of the referendum went door to door at a Columbus hotel where petition circulators were staying and offered to buy petitions that had already been signed, according to Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts.Buying or selling a petition is a fifth degree felony, under state law.Opponents of the referendum said their employees aren’t engaged in such activity.Generation Now, a dark money group backing House Bill 6, hired FieldWorks to discourage voters from signing the pro-referendum petition.Another dark money group, Ohioans for Energy Security, is running more than $3-million in TV ads alleging the Chinese are behind the referendum effort and paying people to circulate an alternative petition that opposes ‘foreign ownership of our electric grid.’

Ohio firefighters kept in the dark on drilling and fracking chemicals - Companies injected trade secret chemicals into more than 1,400 wells in the state from 2013 to 2018, a report says. Ohio firefighters and emergency responders are being kept in the dark about potentially hazardous chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing. Oil and gas companies are using a “trade secret” exemption to avoid disclosing the full mix of chemicals used at drilling and well sites in the state. Critics say the secrecy threatens public safety by preventing first responders from preparing for incidents involving chemical fires, spills or releases. “We need a better system to ensure the safety of our first responders and residents in areas affected by oil and gas drilling,” said Miranda Leppla, vice president of energy policy for the Ohio Environmental Council. The problem was highlighted in a recent report by the Partnership for Policy Integrity, an energy policy advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. Ohio law requires drillers to report which chemicals they use in fracking, but some information can be kept secret from the public. Ohio’s laws and regulations call for companies to report drilling chemicals to the Ohio Department of Natural Gas within 60 days after a well is completed. Chemicals used for fracking must be reported to the department or to a multistate chemical disclosure registry known as FracFocus. However, both requirements let companies claim trade secrets for the ingredients of various chemicals, so the general public can’t get that information. The Department of Natural Gas generally can’t disclose it either, so first responders can’t get the information before an emergency situation comes up. Companies claimed trade secret protection for at least one chemical used at more than 1,400 Ohio oil and gas wells from 2013 to 2018, according to the September 2019 report from the Partnership for Policy Integrity. The report draws on data, mapping and analysis from the FracTracker Alliance, which has an Ohio office in Shaker Heights. Many of those chemicals could be toxic, said report author Dusty Horwitt. He based that conclusion on a review of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency records dealing with new chemicals proposed for drilling and fracking between 2003 and 2014.

EPA: An Ohio family suffers as enforcement stalls - Second in a series. Click here for the first part.— Jill Hunkler's home is a couple of miles from four oil and gas well pads that the Obama-era EPA cited in December 2016 for allegedly spewing organ-damaging air pollution. But nearly three years later — after Gulfport Energy Corp. asked EPA Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson for help — serious Clean Air Act violations at those wells and a dozen other Gulfport sites remain unresolved. EPA's ongoing inaction has potentially saved Gulfport millions of dollars yet left the residents of Barnesville at risk, former regulators and public health experts say. With the allegations against Gulfport in limbo, Hunkler became wary about staying with her daughter in their two-bedroom cottage along the shaded banks of Slope Creek. "If we got here and they were doing stuff on these close pads, we would leave," the 44-year-old single mother said, sitting on her front porch one August morning. Birds sang and bees buzzed over the faint hum of oil and gas production equipment in the distance. "Because if we didn't, we'd wake up," she said. "Like our throats would be burning and sinus and headaches — so we had symptoms definitely from the operations from Gulfport." Jean Backs and Patrick Hunker, Jill Hunkler's aunt and uncle, both worked for Ohio's natural resources agency and share her concerns about the lax oversight of the oil and gas development in the Buckeye State. Together, they are now battling powerful corporations that are both polluting and economically sustaining this southeastern Ohio village of just over 4,000 people. But EPA, they argue, has sided with the oil and gas industry.

Ohio slips in efficiency ranking as lawmakers gut state standards - Ohio’s ranking on ACEEE’s State Energy Efficiency Scorecard has more or less tracked changes in state policy. An energy efficiency advocacy group has further downgraded Ohio in its state rankings, thanks to a new law rolling back the state’s clean energy standards. Other experts are warning that ratepayers will soon feel the impacts more directly. Ohio was in 33rd place among states and the District of Columbia in the latest rankings released on Oct. 1 by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE. The organization’s rankings consider 33 measures across six policy areas, including state clean energy standards and building codes. House Bill 6, a law better known for adding charges to ratepayers’ bills to subsidize nuclear and coal power, played a significant role in Ohio’s ranking this year. “Certainly, HB 6 is one of the more damaging pieces of legislation we saw this year,” said Weston Berg, lead author for the report. ACEEE’s best practices call for states “having a stable, long-term energy efficiency resource standard,” he said. In contrast, HB 6 first lowers the existing standard from 22% to 17.5% energy efficiency savings. Then once that level is met, utilities won’t have authority to charge for efficiency programs that will provide a net financial benefit for ratepayers. HB 6 also expanded commercial and industrial opt-outs, reducing the total amount of energy efficiency called for under the law. Ohio did get credit for what it accomplished on the energy efficiency front in 2018, before HB 6 was passed. Recent improvements to Ohio’s building code for new construction were also viewed as a positive sign in the analysis. However, “barring any sort of change from whatever happens with the referendum, without really any programs in place, Ohio will continue to plummet in the scorecard,” Berg said. This year’s results reflect a trend in which Ohio’s ranking has risen or fallen as state policies have changed. The state’s top ranking of 18th place came in 2013, five years into the implementation of the original energy efficiency standard enacted in 2008. Since then, the standards have been in a state of uncertainty and flux, leading to them being temporarily frozen, weakened and eventually gutted.

Pa. Regulation Viewed As Among The Most Constructive For Energy Utilities - Regulatory Research Associates, a group within S&P Global Market Intelligence, ranks the regulatory climate in Pennsylvania as among the most constructive in the nation from an investor perspective, ranking the state at Above Average/2, the team's second-most investor-friendly ranking. While a change in the composition of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission is near at hand, RRA does not expect there to be a significant policy shift as a result. Commissioner Norman J. Kennard is serving beyond the end of a term that expired in April and may do so through the end of September, absent the confirmation of a successor. The last open meeting in which he is expected to participate is Sept. 19. Gov. Tom Wolf has nominated Ralph Yanora to succeed Kennard. Yanora is the CEO and founder of Pennsylvania Water Specialties Company, a subsidiary of Yanora Enterprises. The firm provides consulting and management services for gas and water distribution companies. Senate action on the nomination is expected in the near future. In a recent review of the political and regulatory climate in the state, RRA noted that most recent rate cases have been resolved by settlements that were silent with respect to rate of return and other traditional rate case parameters. However, in the only fully litigated rate case decided since 2012, an October 2018 decision for UGI Utilities' electric operations, the PUC authorized the company an ROE that was considerably above the average ROE authorized energy utilities nationwide that year. As most base rate cases are resolved by black box settlements that do not specify the underlying ROE, the commission has established the ROE to be used for the adjustment clauses in the context of its quarterly earnings reviews. The ROEs approved through this process in recent quarters have exceeded nationwide averages when established. Even though the PUC staff has supported much lower ROEs and authorized ROEs nationwide have been declining on average, the PUC majority has stressed the need to maintain authorized ROEs at a level that will attract capital and has approved increases in the returns used under this mechanism several times in recent periods.

USGS Estimates 214 trillion Cubic Feet of Natural Gas in Appalachian Basin Formations -- The Marcellus Shale and Point Pleasant-Utica Shale formations of the Appalachian Basin contain an estimated mean of 214 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable continuous resources of natural gas, according to new USGS assessments.“Watching our estimates for the Marcellus rise from 2 trillion to 84 trillion to 97 trillion in under 20 years demonstrates the effects American ingenuity and new technology can have,” said USGS Director Jim Reilly. “Knowing where these resources are located and how much exists is crucial to ensuring our nation’s energy independence.”  The Marcellus, Point Pleasant and Utica are extensive formations that cover parts of Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. This is a significant increase from the previous USGS assessments of both formations. In 2011, the USGS estimated a mean of 84 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale, and in 2012 the USGS estimated about 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Utica Shale. Significant amounts of natural gas have been produced from the Marcellus and Utica Shales since the previous USGS assessments. USGS assessments are for remaining resources and exclude known and produced oil and gas.The natural gas in these formations is classified as continuous, because it is spread throughout the assessed rock layers instead of being concentrated in discrete accumulations. Production techniques like directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing are required to produce these resources.  These assessments are for undiscovered, technically recoverable resources. Undiscovered resources are those that have been estimated to exist based on geology and other data, but have not yet been proven to exist by drilling or other means. Technically recoverable resources, meanwhile, are those that can be produced using today’s standard industry practices and technology. This is different from reserves, which are those quantities of oil and gas that are currently profitable to produce.

Shale gas off-ramp: Pa.’s fracking boom produces a glut of ethane that’s helping fuel plastics production overseas - At the top of a hillside on his 200-acre cattle farm in Greene County, southwestern Pennsylvania, George Watson peered over a well pad on his property. He counted out nine well-heads — each the terminus of a borehole that reaches a mile underground, then turns horizontally for several more miles, following a carbon-rich seam below the green hills here. On hilltops all around there are wellpads, equipment, and clearings that reveal a vast array of drilling infrastructure. “I’m making some money off these wells, not gonna lie to you about that,” Watson said. And he’s had some bad — he’s fought over royalties and dead cattle he blames on toxic spills, and over land subsidence and soil erosion he blames on drilling operations. Like others in this gas-heavy part of the state, Watson is at the head of a global supply chain. It begins on his farm and ends up as plastics and chemicals half a world away, as the plastics industry increasingly relies on dirt-cheap American shale gas to feed its chemical plants and the globe’s growing hunger for plastics. The nine wells on Watson’s property are producing over a billion cubic feet of gas a month, according to state records. Most of the gas coming out of Marcellus shale wells like these in Pennsylvania is methane — which is sent to fuel power plants, heat homes and power industrial equipment. But there are other gases coming out of these wells, including ethane, a common raw ingredient in petrochemicals and plastics. A few miles north, Shell is building a $6 billion chemical plant to convert some of the region’s ethane into plastic. But so much ethane is coming out of the ground in Pennsylvania, and other drilling hot spots around the country, that chemical plants in the U.S. can’t use it all. So companies are shipping American ethane all over the world, fueling a global boom in plastics that is expected to accelerate in the decades to come. A glut of ethane and other “natural gas liquids” — called that because they are sold in a compressed, liquified form — like propane (the tank in your backyard gas grill) or butane (Zippo lighters) are flooding American markets and have to go abroad, said Steve McGinn, an editor of chemicals for the trade publisher ICIS. “These barrels (of ethane) have to find a home,” McGinn said. “If we weren’t exporting ethane right now, they’d be giving it away for free.”

 How Fossil Fuel Companies Are Killing Plastic Recycling – -- So many things we buy come packaged in plastic containers or wrappers that are meant to be used once, thrown away and forgotten ― but they don’t break down and can linger in the environment long after we’re gone. It’s tempting to think that we can recycle this problem away, that if we’re more diligent about placing discarded bottles and bags into the curbside bin, we’ll somehow make up for all the trash overflowing landfills, choking waterways and killing marine life. For decades, big petrochemical companies responsible for extracting and processing the fossil fuels that make plastics have egged on consumers, reassuring them that recycling was the answer to our trash crisis. Just last month, Royal Dutch Shell executive Hilary Mercer told The New York Times that the production of new plastics was not the problem contributing to millions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and drifting in oceans. Instead, she suggested, the problem is one of improper waste disposal. Better recycling, she implied, is the solution. But plastic recycling is in trouble. Too much of the indestructible material exists in the world, more than our current recycling networks can handle. And the very same companies that say recycling is the answer are about to unleash a tidal wave of fresh plastics that will drown recyclers struggling to stay afloat.   “We’ve been trained [to think] that we can purchase endlessly and recycle everything,” said Genevieve Abedon, a policy associate who represents the Clean Seas Lobbying Coalition. “There is no way that recycling can keep up.”  Big oil, natural gas and chemical companies have poured an estimated $200 billion into more than 300 petrochemical expansion projects across America from 2010 to 2018, according to the American Chemistry Council. Fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil and Shell, as well as plastic makers like SABIC and Formosa Plastics, are building and expanding at least five ethane cracker plants in Appalachia and along the Gulf of Mexico. The facilities will turn ethane, a byproduct of natural gas fracking, into polyethylene pellets, which can be made into a variety of products, including milk jugs, shampoo bottles, food packaging and the air pillows that protect your Amazon orders.

Mariner East 2's Troubles Underscore Need For New Industry Approaches Toward Northeastern Population -- Less than an hour from the busy streets of Philadelphia in Southeastern Pennsylvania lies Chester County, PA.  Long known as relatively rural and wealthy, Chester County also is home to an immense amount of major oil and gas pipelines, with major transmission lines connecting from the South to the North through Chester County.   Last week, the District Attorney for Chester County announced that his office was preparing to file a civil public nuisance lawsuit against natural gas pipeline developer Sunoco LP over continued problems associated with the construction of the Mariner East 2 Pipeline.  Mariner East 2 travels from the Marcellus Shale gas fields near Pittsburgh to the Marcus Hook refinery south of Philadelphia on the Delaware River.  The press release from the office of D.A. Thomas Hogan cited to alleged problems along the construction path, including exposed underground pipes and leaks, or “inadvertent returns,” of drilling fluid, as the basis for the action.  The announcement of a civil lawsuit follows a prior announcement by the District Attorney last December that his office had begun a grand jury investigation into the pipeline and its owners and operators. To date, the only criminal charges that have been filed by his office have been against two men who allegedly used their status as state constables to work as security guards along the pipeline.  The status of the grand jury investigation remains unclear.  Still, last week’s action by the prosecutor’s office is the latest in a series of moves by officials in Chester County against Sunoco and its owner, Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas.  As much as any other project in the Marcellus region, the ongoing saga of Mariner East 2 exposes the potential and pitfalls of the shale gas revolution.

Bankrupt Philly refinery’s request to pay secret executive bonuses raises objections - Philadelphia Energy Solutions, which paid $4.6 million in bonuses to executives following a devastating June fire that led to its closure and bankruptcy, wants to pay out a new round of retention awards. But this time it wants to keep the recipients and the bonuses a secret. PES Holdings LLC asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross in Delaware to approve a key employee retention plan, though it wants to keep details of the awards confidential to reduce the “negative impact on employee morale” and also the chances that competitors could use the information to recruit and poach personnel. The company, whose 335,000-barrel-per-day South Philadelphia facility was the largest refining complex on the East Coast before it closed, filed the request Friday with Bankruptcy Court. PES laid off most of the company’s 1,100 employees while it works through the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process and looks for a buyer.“It’s infuriating,” said Ryan O’Callaghan, a spokesman for Steelworkers Local 10-1, which represents refinery workers. “It’s more of the same thievery from PES management. The refinery could be running now. Executives should not profit from their own failures.” O’Callaghan said the Steelworkers received a 60-day layoff notice on Tuesday for 17 of the remaining 83 unionized workers who remained at the refinery as “caretakers” after most of the workforce was let go on Aug. 25. He said the workers are assigned to work on the alkylation unit that was destroyed in the fire; clean-up of residual toxic hydrofluoric acid used in alkylation unit is nearly completed.

Trio of suits filed involving Columbia Gas, Welded Construction —Three lawsuits were filed in federal court involving Columbia Gas and Welded Construction and a motion to remand was filed in one of them. The three cases were filed in Wetzel Circuit Court in May before being removed to U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia in September.  Schmid Pipeline entered into a construction subcontract with Welded Construction wherein Schmid would provide labor, material and equipment in connection with the construction of the Mountaineer Xpress Pipeline project owned by Columbia Gas, according to the first case in the group.   Schmid has not been paid for its work to this day, according to the suit. Welded Construction filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Oct. 22, 2018, and Schmid filed a motion for relief with the bankruptcy court and the bankruptcy court granted Schmid's motion in April. Schmid is seeking judgment in the amount of $2,361,914 plus pre- and post-judgment interest. Third parties in the lawsuit include Earth Pipeline Services, HERC Services, CADD Enterprises, Sunbelt Tractor & Equipment Company, Ziegler Sunbelt Equipment Marketing, T&C Rentals, Newman Tractor and Ankura Consulting Group. The second lawsuit involves Ziegler Inc. suing Welded Construction and Columbia Gas Transmission.  That lawsuit alleges that the defendants hired Ziegler to provide rental equipment and machinery for pipeline maintenance.  Ziegler claims it provided the equipment between July 2018 and September 2018 and invoiced the defendants in the amount of $262,968.76. The defendants failed to submit the total amount due, according to the suit.  The third lawsuit was filed by Worldwide Machinery, alleging that it also supplied equipment to the defendants through Oct. 31, 2018, in a total amount of $55,028.58.

 Pipeline construction boom will boost property tax collections - Last year’s natural gas pipeline construction boom was the key factor in a $1.376 billion jump in the assessed value of property owned by public utility companies in West Virginia, according to a report Monday to the state Board of Public Works. If that assessment is approved by the board in December without revisions, it would mean a surge of more than $30 million in property tax collection for counties and municipalities, state Property Tax Division Director Jeff Amburgy said in the report to the board. “This increase is mainly attributable to a large increase in taxable capital investment being made in the pipeline industry,” he stated. “Many pipeline companies continue to invest in additional assets associated with compression and transportation of natural gas.” Amburgy didn’t get to present his report to the board during a surreal 2 minute, 20 second-long meeting chaired by Gov. Jim Justice. For each agenda item Monday, Justice called for a motion to approve, a second, and a passage vote in immediate succession — without ever calling for discussion of the motion. None of the members of the board — made up of the governor, secretary of state, auditor, treasurer, attorney general, agriculture commissioner and state superintendent of schools or their designees — challenged Justice. In fact, Amburgy had stood to give his presentation to the board, as he does each autumn, only to have Justice immediately call for a vote on the motion.

#NoASH: Fracking and Radium-226 (video) - April Pierson-Keating: I would add information about the radium-226 in the shale. This radionuclide is released by the salts that are released by the chemicals injected.Radium is a daughter element of uranium, along with lead and radon gas. These are all highly toxic to living things. What’s worst about radium-226 is it is water-soluble, has a half-life of 1600 years, and causes breast, bone, and blood cancers. Radium-226 is inherent in shale, and in shale gas and the liquids that are released after drilling as “flowback water.”Millions of gallons of this toxic radium-laden water have made their way onto our roads in water trucks that are not marked as hazardous because of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, aka the “Halliburton Loophole.” This loophole, authored by Dick Cheney when he was VP, after coming to that office from being CEO of Halliburton (gas drilling company), makes all liquids produced by gas drilling exempt from regulations such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and more. This means these liquids are regarded, even by our Office of Emergency Management, as “not technically hazardous.”This is a horrendous situation in which we find ourselves. Many third-party truckers will go off on a back road and dump this highly toxic water into small streams; sometimes it makes its way to injection wells where it then migrates into drinking water through the fissures created by the high pressure needed to inject these fluids underground. It has been found in Pittsburgh’s water, and ours.In fact, radium-226 may be one of the most common elements now found because of the unregulated fracking that’s been going on for over a decade. This is one of the greatest threats to our water, and the reason why it is so important to know and understand this fact, and to stop fracking. Another reason the plastics hub (the Appalachian Storage Hub/petrochemical complex) is a terrible idea (besides the toxification of our water, air, and soil for profit) is that the two biggest processors of recycled plastic, India and China, no longer take our plastic. We will soon be buried in it. Every piece of plastic ever produced since the 1950s is still with us, found in ocean creatures that move up the food chain to humans, and even kill thousands of sea creatures every year because they are mistaken for food.

'Raging Granny' locked to equipment at Mountain Valley Pipeline construction site - A "raging granny" has locked herself to equipment at a Mountain Valley Pipeline construction site in Montgomery County. According to Appalachians Against Pipelines, the self-identified "raging granny," 75-year-old Duff Benjamin, is attached to equipment under a banner reading "PIPELINES BLOW" on Cove Hollow Road near the tree sits outside Elliston. The activist group says Benjamin has shut down construction at the site. Below is a statement from Benjamin, sent out by the protest group: "The problem with pipelines is they always leak. What they leak are toxins into the land, then water and air. The other problem with pipelines is that they frequently explode, and when they do, it's the equivalent of a dirty bomb going off into poor Black and Latino neighborhoods- communities that pipelines are purposely routed through and near (never through wealthy white neighborhoods!). Because I see human kind as one huge family, and I am a member, I cannot sit back and watch this happen silently. I must voice my thoughts and feelings. I say NO! STOP IT!"

 Old oil spill hazard leaks into 2019 - The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) discovered gasoline-contaminated soil in the Town of New Paltz and issued a Notice of Violation to review the soil. The gasoline-contaminated soil is located behind the Department of Public Works (DPW) garage and is said to be related to a 1998 spill at the same location. “In 1998, the Town and Village jointly owned Gas and Diesel tanks that were behind the Village DPW,” said Town of New Paltz Buildings and Ground Supervisor, Chris Marx. “At some point one or both gas tanks started to leak and all three tanks were removed and the site was remediated and an all-clear was given to both the Town and Village.” In 2017, the Town and Village-owned separate underground heating oil tanks on that same site when the DEC found that there was an oil leak coming from the Village’s tank. The Village had its tank dug up and the ground beneath was cleaned and tested for further contaminants. The Town also had its tank dug up, despite it being in good condition, and installed above-ground tanks instead. “During remediation, gasoline-contaminated soils were detected and the DEC exercised their right to investigate the 1998 spill further,” said Town Supervisor Neil Bettez. The gasoline found in the soil by the DEC was ruled to be from the 1998 gasoline leak because the 2017 leak consisted of only heating oil. The DEC decided to file a new spill report for 2019 instead of reopening the report from 1998, as it had been considered remediated at the time.

Pipeline bans blamed for surge in gas tankers - — The energy policies of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration have come under criticism from both pro-development advocates and climate activists following an increase in shipping compressed natural gas by truck amid the state's refusal to allow the construction of industrial pipelines. Public highways are now being used as "virtual pipelines," with tractor-trailers taking CNG — compressed natural gas — from Pennsylvania production facilities to upstate transfer stations. A fatal Sept. 23 crash involving the rollover of a CNG tanker on Interstate 88 in Broome County raised new questions about the shipping method. Approximately 80 homes in a neighborhood near the crash site had to be evacuated when gas leaked from large container on the rig, and state emergency services workers spent several hours 'flaring off," or venting, the gas. Officials said the driver of the rig, Jeffrey Lind, 52, of Susquehanna County, Pa., was killed in the accident, caused when he attempted to avoid a deer that ran in front of the vehicle. In March, five homes near I-88 in Schoharie County after another CNG truck crashed on the highway. "There is a direct correlation between the fact that we have so many of these trucks on the road and the flawed energy policy in Albany," said state Sen. Fred Akshar, R-Broome County, a supporter of the pipeline projects that have been stopped by the Cuomo administration. However, climate activists argue the increased reliance on trucks to get gas to energy customers illustrates the need to wean the state from its reliance on fossil fuels altogether. They say they have warned the Cuomo administration of the dangers of moving compressed gas on the highways, and refer to the rigs as "bomb trucks" that pose a serious risk to public safety.

 Could it happen here?: Gas explosion in Merrimack Valley hangs over new pipeline efforts - Across Massachusetts people rely on natural gas to heat their homes and businesses, provide their electricity, cook meals every day, and for their hot water supply. Most of the time, natural gas, which is delivered to residents via local distribution lines, is relatively safe. But in rare cases, such as the Merrimack Valley explosions, which occurred more than a year ago and resulted in about $1 billion in damages, 25 injuries, an evacuation of 30,000 residents across three towns, and the death of 18-year old Lawrence teen Leonel Rondon, natural gas can cause widespread devastation. Western Massachusetts also has its fair share of gas leaks in communities across the area, which are worrying to local residents who fear that another gas explosion, like what took place a year ago in the Merrimack Valley, could possibly happen here. Meanwhile, there’s a set of proposed Tennessee Gas and other utility company pipeline projects that would impact seven different communities in the Pioneer Valley — Longmeadow, West Springfield, Agawam, Springfield, Northampton, Easthampton, and Holyoke. Local environmental activists are opposing the project, but some elected officials see the projects as beneficial maintenance for existing natural gas pipelines. The explosions in Merrimack Valley resulted in 80 fires with electricity going down, communications infrastructure failing, and smoke reducing visibility. In the months after the disaster, 44 miles of gas distribution pipelines and more than 5,000 service lines were replaced. According to a Nov. 15, 2018, report by the National Transportation Safety Board, human errors made during a nearby gas pipe replacement resulted in the gas system quickly collapsing after a control system designed to repressurize the gas system failed.

'It Has Been Hell': Lawrence Gas Leaks Bring Back Trauma For Residents, Business Owners - As Columbia Gas workers drilled through the asphalt Sunday afternoon, the inside of Kyara Boutique was deathly quiet. Miguel Chavira has owned the clothing store in the heart of South Lawrence for more than 20 years, but after a gas leak on Friday, he says he’s seriously considering leaving town. “Since the explosions last year, nobody wants to come to South Lawrence anymore,” Chavira said. “We are losing business both ways — by being closed, and because nobody wants to come around here anymore.” After a gas leak was reported in Lawrence early Friday morning, Chavira kept his shop closed for Friday and most of the weekend. “Hell. It has been hell,” Chavira said. According to National Grid, 150 homes and businesses were affected, and more than 1,300 customers in the area were without power until Saturday night. Though they eventually stated the leak was an isolated incident, Columbia Gas officials issued a warning to residents Friday morning to evacuate their homes and two schools — a warning that brought back the trauma of last year’s gas explosions for many local residents. “There is PTSD in this neighborhood,” said John Farrington, who grew up in Lawrence and has run his family’s business, Carleen’s Coffee Shoppe, for 21 years. “You get some of the older folks sitting around having coffee, and someone comes in and you get a smell of a diesel engine, or gasoline or something, and they panic. They want me to check my oven, they think there’s a gas leak, and you can see the sheer panic in their eyes.”

Pipeline rules adopted years after deadly explosion, spills (AP) — U.S. transportation officials on Tuesday adopted long-delayed measures that are meant to prevent pipeline spills and deadly gas explosions but don’t address recommended steps to lessen accidents once they occur. The new rules from the Department of Transportation apply to more than 500,000 miles of pipelines that carry natural gas, oil and other hazardous materials throughout the U.S. In the works for almost a decade, the rules came in response to a massive gas explosion in San Bruno, California, that killed eight people in 2010, and large oil spills into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010 and the Yellowstone River in Montana in 2011 and 2015. The rules require companies to more closely inspect underground pipelines, including in rural areas and after catastrophic weather events. They also require better record-keeping so companies can monitor lines in some cases installed decades ago. Left unaddressed were longstanding recommendations by safety officials to install valves that automatically shut down pipelines following accidents. Also absent were requirements for more advanced systems to detect pipeline ruptures.U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House transportation committee, said Tuesday’s rules were a step in the right direction. But the Oregon Democrat added that he was frustrated over “critical safety gaps” that remain in areas including leak detection technology and shut-off valves, which were mandated under pipeline safety legislation signed into law in 2011. Industry groups and safety advocates backed the adopted changes.

PUC consultants oppose approval of Granite Bridge pipeline - - Hired consultants from the state’s Public Utilities Commission are not recommending approval of the Granite Bridge gas pipeline, saying Liberty Utilities had not done enough analysis to demonstrate it was the best option for meeting future energy needs. The testimony from PUC consultants John Antonuk, John Adger and Dr. James Letzelter, of the Liberty Consulting Group, was filed earlier this month. It was joined by other written testimony from the New Hampshire Office of the Consumer Advocate, Pipe Line Awareness Network for the Northeast and the Conservation Law Foundation, all testifying against the project. The deadline for interveners to submit testimony to the PUC was Sept. 13. The only groups speaking in support were Liberty Utilities and the union representing its gas workers, who stated the project was the most economical way to meet New Hampshire’s future energy needs. Granite Bridge is a proposed 16-inch, 27-mile liquefied natural gas pipeline from Manchester to Exeter to be constructed by Liberty Utilities. As part of the project, Liberty wants to build a 150- to 170-foot high, 200-foot diameter LNG storage tank, capable of storing 2 billion cubic feet of LNG in an abandoned quarry in West Epping. The entire project’s cost is $414 million, according to Liberty’s estimates. The Granite Bridge application is under review by the PUC after it was first submitted in December 2017. Liberty Utilities officials anticipated PUC review to take a year, followed by another year-long review before the state Site Evaluation Committee before construction can begin pending SEC approval. According to a submission filed Sept. 13 by the contracted PUC consultants, Liberty Utilities would have to experience “sustained growth” of its customer base in New Hampshire for an LNG storage tank, proposed to be constructed in Epping, to produce “positive economic benefits” at its current estimated cost of $260 million. They said the consequences customers would face in the event of a potential drop in demand or cost escalations do not justify the construction of the LNG tank.

U.S. group forms to defend natural gas against anti-fossil fuel measures - (Reuters) - A group backed by anonymous donors launched a campaign on Monday to promote the benefits of cheap, abundant natural gas against what it called “radical” proposals like the Green New Deal that would phase out use of the fossil fuel. The Empowerment Alliance, or TEA, will fund advertising and research to advocate the use of natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal, in the runup to the U.S. presidential election in November of 2020, Terry Holt, a spokesman for the group, said on Monday. Most of Republican President Donald Trump’s challengers for the White House are pursuing aggressive policies to fight climate change. The nonprofit group would not disclose its donors, saying they prefer to remain anonymous because of fears they will be harassed by environmental activists. The group also declined to comment on its budget. TEA’s launch comes as environmentalists and some Democratic presidential candidates have called for urgent measures to reduce the nation’s reliance on natural gas, and move more quickly to renewable resources like solar and wind power. Several U.S. cities and states are also looking into ways of curbing natural gas consumption.

The Downward Slide Of Natural Gas Prices Continues As The New Week Begins --Natural gas prices made another leg lower in today's session, with the November contract (now prompt month) having fallen now more than 40 cents off its intra-day peak a couple of weeks ago, closing at $2.33 today, more than 7 cents off Friday's close. Prices tried to hold their own early this morning, down only a couple of cents, but with our analysis showing a weak overall picture, we were able to alert clients to the risk of more downside, taking on a "slightly bearish" stance in our morning update. Prices wound up declining another five cents over the balance of the day. Why the continued weakness? A few things stand out. One is that the big rally was never about supply / demand balances having tightened up, so the only thing the move to 2.70 really accomplished in the big picture was to actually loosen balances, with the evidence coming in the last couple of EIA reports. Two, we saw a move higher in production over the weekend, reaching a new all-time high, just under a staggering 94 bcf / day per our dataset. Finally, we are seeing a shift in the weather pattern toward below normal demand, as, despite some variability, the overall warmer than normal base state continues to hold in key areas of the nation for natural gas purposes, which is now becoming a bearish signal, as warmth will now mean more of a reduction in HDDs than any gain in CDDs as normal temperatures continue to decline. Total forecast Gas-Weighted Degree Days (GWDDs): Are we near a point where, as the saying goes, low prices will begin to cure low prices? Of course, as we move forward, Mother Nature will increasingly have more of a say in all of this, so we will be watching the pattern signals very closely, in tandem with the natural gas fundamentals scene.

November Natural Gas Futures Choppy After EIA Reports 112 Bcf Storage Build - The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported a 112 Bcf injection into storage inventories for the week ending Sept. 27, coming in on the high side of estimates and prompting some quick price shifts in and out of positive territory.The reported build compared with expectations ranging from 95 Bcf to a 118 Bcf build, and it was far above both last year’s 91 Bcf injection and the five-year average build for the week of 83 Bcf.Nymex futures traders struggled with how to price the November contract in the minutes after the EIA report was released. Early Thursday, the prompt month was up several cents as mid-October weather outlooks trended cooler. Shortly ahead of the 10:30 a.m. ET release, however, the November contract was trading fractionally lower at around $2.24.November then slipped to $2.229, down 1.8 cents, as the print hit the screen. By 11 a.m., the prompt month was back in positive territory, trading at $2.263, up 1.6 cents.“Obviously, it’s very bearish versus history, but in reality, the market probably anticipated to see a larger figure. Therefore, not so terrifying, after all,” BlueGold Research analyst Adrian Bakker said.BlueGold, which had projected a 110 Bcf injection, told analysts on energy chat room Enelyst that prices appeared to be bouncing off the support level near $2.210. A break above $2.300 would open the way toward $2.324 and then $2.363, “but getting to $2.300 should not be easy.”On the down side, another close support level was at $2.190, which represents a 76.4% Fibonacci level, an indicator of possible support and resistance levels, from an Aug. 5 low to Sept. 17 high. “I think it’s a pretty important level,” Bakker said.Broken down by region, the Midwest reported the largest week/week injection of 39 Bcf, while the East added 32 Bcf, according to EIA. South Central inventories rose by 31 Bcf, including 13 Bcf into salt facilities and 19 Bcf into nonsalts.Total working gas in storage as of Sept. 27 was 3,317 Bcf, 465 Bcf higher than last year and just 18 Bcf below the five-year average, EIA said.

National Park Service signs off on permit for a Columbia Gas pipeline - — The National Park Service (NPS) has signed off a permit after they completed a review on the proposed Columbia gas pipeline. According to a release, the park service signed a “finding of no significant impact for a right-of-way permit” request from Columbia Gas Transmission LLC. The permit would authorize Columbia Gas to run 553 feet of natural gas transmission pipeline under the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Historical Park. NPS findings were made based on the environmental assessment by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions. The permit was signed on Monday, September 23, by the acting National Capital Area Director. The proposed pipeline is part of Columbia Gas’s Eastern Panhandle Expansion Project, an approximately 3.37-mile natural gas transmission pipeline that runs through fulton county, Pennsylvania, Washington County, Maryland, and Morgan County, West Virginia. No other aspects of the overall proposal, except the portion of the pipe crossing under Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, are under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. In response to NPS signing off on the permit, Anne Havemann, General Counsel, CCAN, stated: “Columbia Gas has taken risk after risk with this pipeline, starting with its proposal to run it through unstable terrain under the Potomac River — the source of drinking water for 6 million people. Not to mention the risk of investing in fracked-gas infrastructure at a time when the science and public opinion are clear that we need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels in order to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Columbia would be taking a further risk if it begins to build this pipeline without access to all the land along the route. “We urge Columbia to listen to Maryland residents and elected officials and give up on this dangerous pipeline. At the same time, we will continue to pursue all legal avenues to stop the project.”

 SUPREME COURT: 4 pipeline fights to watch this term -- Monday, September 30, 2019 -- The Supreme Court could decide to wade into the natural gas pipeline wars this term.    As the court begins its 2019 session, energy experts are watching whether the justices will weigh in on federal permitting, eminent domain and state sovereignty issues around pipeline construction. So far, the justices have opportunities to consider the Forest Service's authority to permit the Atlantic Coast pipeline to cross the Appalachian Trail and to decide whether developers of the Mountain Valley project can lawfully seize private property before paying. Solicitor General Noel Francisco has urged the justices to hear the Atlantic Coast dispute, which significantly boosts the case's odds of review.  "Natural gas and oil pipeline infrastructure is not getting less controversial and the Supreme Court may find it appropriate to issue a ruling that definitively settles the matter," ClearView Energy Partners LLC wrote in a recent analysis. A third possible case involving state lands takings for the PennEast pipeline may also be brought before the Supreme Court. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is still mulling a request to reconsider its decision to block developers' access to New Jersey-owned acreage.Experts also expect that challenges over gas exports from pipelines could soon make their way to the nation's highest bench. Those exports are problematic, challengers say, because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's authority to delegate eminent domain power to pipeline builders is limited to projects in service of interstate commerce.Each potential Supreme Court slugfest carries varying degrees of significance for the build-out of energy infrastructure nationwide, court watchers say.Supreme Court petitioners face difficult odds: The justices review only about 1% of cases that come before the court. Acceptance of a case requires the vote of four justices, who prioritize issues of national importance and opportunities to resolve disagreements among federal appeals courts. The justices are expected to decide no later than next week whether they will review the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipeline cases.  Here are the pipeline battles to watch over the course of the Supreme Court's next term.

Trespass near a pipeline, go to prison for 6 years? It could happen in Wisconsin.  A bill that would make trespassing around oil and gas pipelines a felony, with up to six years in prison and $10,000 in fines, is working its way through the Wisconsin legislature. One of the bill’s cosponsors, State Representative Jason Fields, a Democrat from Milwaukee, said the bill is aimed at preventing damage to private property, though laws penalizing trespassing and damaging oil and gas infrastructure are already on the books. Invoking Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Greta Thunberg during a hearing on the bill late last week, Fields said that he supported peaceful protests, but “intentionally destroying property is never justifiable.” “I don’t like the Ku Klux Klan,” he said, “but I do not have the right or the option to go and destroy their property.” The bill is part of a wave of proposals across the country that raise penalties on protesters. At least eight other states have passed similar legislation, and few more have introduced such measures, according to the International Center for Not for-Profit Law, a group which has been tracking legislation criminalizing protest around the country. Many of the bills bear a striking resemblance to model legislation drafted by the American Legislation Exchange Council, a conservative think tank bankrolled by fossil fuel companies.

Husky Given Green Light To Rebuild Superior Refinery –- Husky Energy says it has received approval for its $400 million plans to rebuild the Superior oil refinery and plans to begin construction immediately. The explosion and series of fires in April of last year injured 36 people, caused a temporary evacuation and damaged the refinery’s equipment and storage tanks. Husky, which does business as Superior Refining Co., in Wisconsin, applied for a permit with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources earlier this year, which issued a letter of approval on Friday.As part of the rebuild, the refinery's fluid catalytic cracking unit reactor will be replaced and all downstream equipment that was damaged will be rebuilt. In addition, asphalt tanks damaged in the explosion will either be repaired or replaced. Husky will also install several new permanent pipelines that will run to the Enbridge terminal and Plains Midstream, which deal with transport and storage of petroleum products and natural gas liquids.

Minnesota Pollution Control Agency denies key permit for Enbridge - The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency on Friday denied a key water permit to Enbridge’s proposed Line 3 oil pipeline, requiring the Canadian oil company to satisfy several additional requirements before it can reapply for the permit.The agency issued a “denial without prejudice” for the proposed 340-mile long pipeline’s 401 certification, a permit awarded by a state’s regulators if the project’s impact on water falls within the state’s standards. Federal agencies cannot issue a federal permit or license without a state approving the 401 certification.In a news release Friday, the agency said it needs more information in three areas: “oil spill response modeling in the Lake Superior Watershed, a pre- and post-construction monitoring plan for aquatic resources, and a revised proposal for mitigating more than 400 acres of forested wetlands that will be impacted during construction.”“The MPCA informed the company that additional information is needed to determine if the Line 3 project would comply with state water quality standards,” the MPCA said. “The MPCA’s denial without prejudice does not prevent Enbridge from reapplying for 401 Certification in the future with the additional information required” The MPCA’s decision comes just days before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission on Oct. 1 will take up environmental impact statement for the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline replacement project and consider what additional hearings might be needed to revise the statement.The Minnesota Court of Appeals in June ruled the environmental review of the proposed pipeline project was “inadequate” because it did not consider the effects of an oil spill in Lake Superior’s watershed. But the court said many other points disputed in the final environmental impact statement, including the pipeline’s impact on tribal resources, met required standards.

Minnesota regulators restart Line 3 pipeline review process (AP) — State utility regulators on Tuesday unfroze the approval process for Enbridge Energy's plan to replace its aging Line 3 crude oil pipeline across northern Minnesota, directing a state agency to fix the deficiencies identified by a court in the project's environmental review.The Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously during a hearing that lasted just 12 minutes to ask the state Commerce Department to conduct a further analysis of the potential effects of oil spills in the Lake Superior watershed and report back within 60 days.The decision represented the first forward motion on the project in months while legal challenges by environmental and tribal groups played out in court. The Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld most of the environmental review in June except for the inadequacies regarding Lake Superior. The Minnesota Supreme Court declined last month to hear challenges by the opponents to the environmental review on other grounds. But further appeals from opponents are possible.Line 3, which was built in the 1960s and is increasingly subject to corrosion and cracking, runs from Alberta to Enbridge's terminal in Superior, Wisconsin, near Lake Superior. Calgary, Alberta-based Enbridge wants to replace the pipeline because it can run at only about half its original capacity.Environmental and tribal groups have been fighting the project, saying it would aggravate climate change and risk spills in pristine waters where Native Americans harvest wild rice.Enbridge has completed the new segments in Canada and Wisconsin, but has had to hold up construction of the $2.9 billion segment in North Dakota and Minnesota until it clears the final hurdles in Minnesota.

$8.5 billion natural gas liquefaction facility coming to Plaquemines Parish (WAFB) - The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has now authorized the building of the Venture Global Plaquemines LNG Facility, Governor John Bel Edwards announced Monday, Sept. 30. The governor’s office says Venture Global plans to invest $8.5 billion to build a natural gas liquefaction facility and LNG export terminal along the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish. The plant will be the second LNG facility in Louisiana. Click here for more information about the project, which is expected to be completed sometime in late 2023. FERC has also approved the affiliated Gator Express natural gas pipeline system, which will bring natural gas from existing pipelines to the new facility in Plaquemines Parish. “Venture Global has become an important participant in Louisiana’s growing LNG market. With multi-billion-dollar investments on both the eastern and western edges of coastal Louisiana, Venture Global is well-poised for success as the natural gas industry continues to expand here. The LNG industry is an ongoing success story for the Louisiana economy, generating tremendous investments and providing quality, permanent jobs for our skilled Louisiana workforce,” said Edwards. The governor’s office says the new facility will create 250 new direct jobs with an average annual salary of $70,000, plus benefits. Louisiana Economic Development (LED) says the project should result in another 728 indirect jobs, for a total of nearly 1,000 new jobs for the parish/region. The project is also anticipated to create about 2,200 construction jobs.

West Delta LNG Readies Deepwater Export Facility Offshore Louisiana - West Delta LNG LLC, an affiliate of Houston-based LNG 21, has applied for federal authorizations to build, own and operate a fixed-platform deepwater port in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) offshore Louisiana and onshore facilities to export liquefied natural gas (LNG).  According to a Federal Register notification published Thursday by the Maritime Administration (MARAD) and the U.S. Coast Guard, the deepwater port and marine components would include an LNG production and storage unit, a loading platform/marine berth unit and support facilities. Onshore components would include the proposed Venice Pretreatment Plan in Plaquemines Parish, LA, within the grounds of the existing Venice Gas Complex.The LNG production and storage unit would contain a gas arrival platform where liquefaction-ready gas would be supplied by the Venice Pretreatment Plant and a proposed 30-inch diameter subsea pipeline that would terminate at the platform.The production platform would include three LNG production platforms capable of accommodating a total of six liquefaction trains, each with a nameplate capacity of .833 million metric tons/year (mmty) with the potential of up to 1.02 mmty each, providing total optimal capacity of 6.1mmty of LNG, according to the company. Aluminum storage tanks at the facility would be capable of holding 300,000 cubic meters of gas for off-loading to LNG carriers.The Venice Pretreatment Plan would receive natural gas from GOM midstream pipelines and interstate pipeline feed gas from pipelines already interconnected with the Venice Gas Complex, according to the filing. The gas would be pre-treated and compressed onshore and sent to the offshore deepwater port.In the nominal case, the pretreatment plant would process about 750 million standard cubic feet per day (MMscf/d) for the proposed deepwater port, which in turn would produce 5 mmty of LNG for export. In the optimized case, the project would process about 900 MMscf/d of feed natural gas to produce about 6.1 mmty of LNG -- about 306 billion standard cubic feet/year. At the western end of the state, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff on Friday issued a draft supplemental environmental impact statement (DSEIS) for a production capacity amendment for the Magnolia LNG project in nearby Calcasieu Parish [CP19-19]. Magnolia has proposed increasing production capacity of the previously authorized project to 8.8 mmty from 8 mmty. The increased production capacity would be achieved by optimizing the project’s final design.

Permian Gas Pipeline Starts Up - The new Gulf Coast Express Pipeline (GCX) has begun full commercial service, delivering natural gas from the Permian Basin to the Texas Gulf Coast, a Kinder Morgan, Inc. (KMI) spokesperson confirmed to Rigzone Wednesday.According to a written statement Tuesday afternoon from KMI, GCX – fully subscribed under long-term contracts – carries gas from the Waha area in West Texas to Agua Dulce near Corpus Christi. The pipeline, which boasts approximately 2 billion cubic feet per day of capacity, will help to relieve Permian gas takeaway constraints and reduce flaring, noted KMI, whose Kinder Morgan Texas Pipeline subsidiary operates and owns a 34-percent interest in GCX.Other GCX owners include Altus Midstream, DCP Midstream and an affiliate of Targa Resources. KMI’s website states that committed GCX shippers include DCP and Targa as well as Apache Corp., Pioneer Natural Resources Co. and Exxon Mobil Corp. subsidiary XTO Energy.  When KMI and its partners took their final investment decision on GCX in late 2017, they had anticipated an in-service date for next month.Mody also noted that more than 3,000 contractors working more than 6 million contractor hours contributed to GCX’s construction with no major safety incident.“With natural gas supplies projected to rise over the next 20 years from supply basins such as the Permian, our strong network of pipelines provides the ability to connect this supply to the growing markets along the Gulf Coast,” said Mody. By the end of 2020, KMI expects to place into service another gas pipeline linking West Texas to the Gulf Coast: the Permian Highway Pipeline.

Hill Country Landowners Get Ready For Another Pipeline Fight - Charles Chaney Jr. is a month away from retirement, and Utopia is the name of the scenic Hill Country town where his family has lived for generations. He had planned to build a house on land he owns there near his brother and sister.Now, he’s not so sure.  About a month ago, he received a letter from Enterprise Products Partners, telling him it plans to run a 30-inch crude oil pipeline through the land and requesting access to conduct a survey. Chaney is one of many landowners along the pipeline's planned route from Midland to a point southeast of San Antonio.  Like Kinder Morgan’s Permian Highway natural gas pipeline, the project has sparked opposition from residents who think the Hill Country is not a good place for a pipeline. They worry about water quality and oppose the company’s use of eminent domain to take private property.  “We are all calmly going about our task to be stewards of the land, and out of the blue these letters started showing up,” said Merry Langlinais, president of the Bandera Canyonlands Alliance. “You can imagine that people were taken aback.” Langlinais says she has not seen a detailed plan for the route of the pipeline, and her group is piecing together a map based on letters Enterprise has sent to property owners.“We know that it's going to cross the Sabinal River several times," she said, "and before it can even get to our Canyonlands, it has to cross over the recharge zone for the Edwards Aquifer."The Rivard Report was the first nontrade news outlet to break news of the pipeline. It also published a copy of a presentation containing a map of the project it says comes from Enterprise.In an email to KUT, Enterprise’s vice president of public relations, Rick Rainey, called information in the Rivard Report “premature” and said the company is “looking at a number of different routes.”“It is highly unlikely that the route of the proposed pipeline would go through the recharge zone of the aquifer,” wrote Rainey, who declined KUT’s request for an interview.Bandera County Judge Richard Evans said Monday the company delivered the same copy of the presentation to his office.“The PowerPoint is very poor, as far as being able to tell where county lines are, but I can tell it’s at the very west end of our County,” he said.

For The Permian Basin, Getting Energy To Market Is The Difference Between Boom And Bust --There are few factors more influential on the Texas economy, and even on the way government works, than the price of a barrel of oil. A change of a few dollars either way in the price of West Texas Intermediate Crude has a massive effect on the state’s financial health.  But how long will the oil boom last, and at what cost? Mose Buchele, energy and environment reporter for KUT-Austin, says people across the state feel the impact of the energy-driven economic boom – both positive and negative. “One of the main ways that people are experiencing this outside of West Texas is pipeline construction … sometimes very controversial projects,” Buchele says. “Right here near Austin, we have the Permian Highway Pipeline that’s going to be natural gas – a lot of local opposition in some places to that – crude oil pipelines coming in, heading out to the Gulf Coast and then on the Gulf Coast, big shipping investments in petrochemicals.”  Buchele says that by some estimates there is enough natural gas in West Texas to power every home in the state. But because there is no infrastructure to transport it, the gas ends up being flared and ultimately contaminates the environment.“There’s a new pipeline that’s just opened up in Corpus Christi,” Buchele says. “This other Permian Highway Pipeline would take that natural gas and bring it to market. The argument in favor is that you’d get away from that waste.” But some groups of citizens living near pipelines oppose the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure because of climate and environmental concerns, Buchele says. Though some in Texas have suggested that economic boom conditions in Texas could be permanent, Buchele says industry experts are bracing for a possible bust, at the hands of Wall Street.“This whole thing has been funded by a lot of investment,” Buchele says. “But the people who made those Investments are not seeing the kinds of returns that they might like to see so far. There’s tons of oil coming out of the ground … but if that dries up, and it’s already starting to … then you might start seeing some real trouble.” A lot of the investments were made when the price of a barrel of crude oil was $100, but now that the price is down to about $50, a number of small companies are expected to declare bankruptcy, Buchele says.

Permian Oil and Gas to Support 93,000 Jobs in 2020 - The Permian Basin oil and gas sector is forecasted to support 5,578 more jobs next year.The Permian Basin oil and gas industry will support 93,201 jobs in 2020, according to the latest forecast from the Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association (TIPRO).This is 5,578 more jobs than the sector supported in the first half of 2019 and 12,209 more jobs than the sector supported last year, TIPRO revealed.“Based on TIPRO’s analysis, including production, pricing and employment trends, we forecast an increase of 5,500 net new oil and natural gas jobs in the Permian between 2019 – 2020,” TIPRO President Ed Longanecker told Rigzone.“Permian production and employment are expected to rise in the coming year as additional pipeline capacity comes online,” he added. The TIPRO head also warned, however, that employment growth will be dependent on several factors and could be negatively impacted by the escalating trade war with China and growing uncertainty in the market among investors and producers.

UT and Lone Star College partner to train energy employees - The Houston region is home to over 5,000 energy related firms, according to information from Governor Greg Abbott’s office, and the state of Texas is home to the largest petrochemical cluster in the world that employs approximately 100,000 workers. The oil, gas, and petrochemical industry is what literally fuels the Texas, and Houston area economies. So it only makes sense that the local higher education facilities would partner with these industries. It was this mindset that helped create the collaboration between Lone Star College and the University of Texas at Austin Engineering Executive Education, Petroleum Extension, made official on Sept. 26. University of Texas at Austin is one of four colleges in the state with petroleum refining and chemical products education program. “Lone Star College is the preeminent workforce training institution in the greater Houston area,” said Stephen C. Head, LSC chancellor in a release. “We look forward to working with UT-PETEX in this new endeavor to help companies maintain a trained workforce.”   For over 10 years UT-PETEX, a unit of The Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, leased space on the LSC North Harris campus. But until recently that was the extent of the relationship. For a while UT-PETEX moved to a new location and the leasing relationship stopped. But they’ve found their way back and the new collaboration was formed. “We got connected to University of Texas PETEX again through the International Association of Drilling Contractors,” Head said. “They wanted us to collaborate on putting together programs at various levels for oil and gas field workers, and included a multitude of different occupational areas.”

Texas wakes up to series of earthquakes - From the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to the edge of the Panhandle, the Lone Star State woke up to a series of three earthquakes. The U.S. Geological Survey reported a 4.0-magnitude earthquake hit in a rural area about 12 miles north of Snyder in Scurry County just after 2 a.m. Tuesday. A 3.2-magnitude earthquake was recorded about 6.5 miles southwest of the Fort Worth suburb of Mansfield just before 3:30 a.m. Tuesday. USGS officials reported that a 2.5-magnitude earthquake was recorded about 13 miles north of Snyder just before 6:30 a.m. Tuesday. There were no immediate reports of damage but the 4.0-magnitude earthquake near Snyder tied with a Monday afternoon earthquake in the same area as the strongest earthquake in Texas so far this year, data from the Austin-based TexNet Seismic Monitoring Program shows. Environmentalists blame the tremors on saltwater disposal wells, which inject wastewater generated in the hydraulic fracturing process and other oil and natural gas activities deep underground. Past scientific studies from Southern Methodist University and the U.S. Geological Survery have confirmed that some of the earthquakes were man made, but oil & gas industry experts dispute those findings. Sharon Wilson, a Dallas-based organizer with environmental group Earthworks, said in a tweet that stronger earthquakes can crack walls and foundations. "No telling what it will do the bore pipe on all the wells out there," Wilson said.

Methane sensors put on planes, trucks in oil production zone — Methane sensors will be put on planes, trucks and atop towers in the West Texas and southeastern New Mexico desert in a new effort to gauge the extent of greenhouse gas emissions from surging oil and natural gas production, advocates with the Environmental Defense Fund announced Wednesday. The yearlong project in the Permian Basin petroleum production region involves researchers from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wyoming, and low-flying planes from a Colorado-based atmospheric research company. The new methods will be used because traditional estimates of methane emissions have not kept up with the rapid expansion petroleum exploration in the area spanning roughly 85,000 square miles (220,000 square miles), said Environmental Defense Fund Regulatory Affairs Director Jon Goldstein. The Permian Basin is by many measures the country’s most active basin for oil and gas development, he said. “What we don’t have is a tremendous amount of information about is what that means in terms of emissions and waste,” Goldstein said. Data from the study organized by the Defense Fund will be made public while research is still in progress. Results will include a map of emissions across the region. Organizers expect scientific work to be submitted for peer review. The goal is to produce useful measurements for the oil and gas industry as it strives to reduce waste as well as for regulators and observers who are concerned about climate pollutants, Goldstein said. Methane, the main component of natural gas, frequently leaks or is intentionally released during drilling operations. It traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, doing 25 times the damage over the long term despite surviving for less time, according to the EPA.

2 women indicted for federal counts in pipeline (AP) — Two women accused of damaging valves and setting fire to construction equipment along an oil pipeline that crosses Iowa and three other states have been indicted on federal charges in the case, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.A grand jury on Sept. 19 indicted Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, both of Des Moines, on nine counts each, U.S. Attorney for Iowa Marc Krickbaum said in a news release. The two face federal charges of conspiracy to damage an energy facility, four counts of use of fire in the commission of a felony, and four counts of malicious use of fire.The women are accused of damaging the valves and setting fire to earth-moving equipment at different times from 2016 into 2017. That includes machinery found extensively damaged by fire in August 2016 located at three oil pipeline construction sites in central Iowa near Newton, Reasnor and Oskaloosa. If convicted, Reznicek and Montoya each face decades in prison.  The women released a statement in 2017 claiming they had burned construction machinery, cut through pipe valves with a torch and set fires with gasoline, rags and tires along the Dakota Access pipeline route. The $3.8 billion pipeline crosses North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. Krickbaum said Montoya was recently arrested in Arizona and is being detained pending court proceedings to determine her appearance in Iowa. Reznicek appeared Tuesday in a Des Moines federal court and was conditionally released pending trial, which is currently scheduled for Dec. 2. It was not clear whether the women yet have attorneys. Publicly-listed phone numbers for the women could not be found Tuesday.

2 Women Charged With Conspiracy, Arson Over 2017 Dakota Pipeline Protests - Federal authorities on Wednesday charged two women who set fire to machinery and attempted to pierce portions of the Dakota Access Pipeline with torches with counts of conspiracy and arson. Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek worked in November of 2016 to damage the controversial pipeline, hosting a news conference in July of 2017 in front of the Iowa Utilities Board describing their actions. The charges come more than two years after that press conference, and the women could face decades in prison if convicted.Authorities also charged a South Dakota man this month with a felony conspiracy to commit criminal mischief for participating in a September 2016 #NoDAPL protest, claiming that DNA from a cigarette butt collected at the scene links him to the action. Native protesters have faced particularly harsh charges and convictions in the aftermath of the pipeline protests. As reported by The New York Times:  "Some may view these actions as violent, but be not mistaken," Ms. Montoya said at the news conference in July 2017. "We acted from our hearts and never threatened human life nor personal property. What we did do was fight a private corporation that has run rampantly across our country seizing land and polluting our nation's water supply."

Whistle-blower Reveals Flawed Construction at North Dakota Gas Plants Where Massive Spill Was Downplayed | DeSmog - Two North Dakota gas processing plants in the heart of the Bakken oil fields have shown signs of an eroded safety culture and startling construction problems, according to Paul Lehto, a 54-year-old former gas plant operator who has come out as a whistle-blower. He described worrisome conditions at the Lonesome Creek plant, in Alexander, and the Garden Creek plant, in Watford City, where DeSmog recently revealed one of the largest oil and gas industry spills in U.S. history had occurred. Both plants process natural gas brought via pipeline from Bakken wells and are run by the Oklahoma-based oil and gas service company, ONEOK Partners.“The safety culture is embarrassing,” said Lehto, who has described to DeSmog the discovery of dozens of loose bolts along critical sections of piping, and other improperly set equipment, deficiencies he attributes to the frenzied rush of the oil boom that has dominated the state’s landscape and economy. “North Dakota is basically a Petrostate,” said Lehto, who worked at the two plants between 2015 and 2016. “There is regulatory capture, and sure that happens in other areas, but nowhere is it more extreme than in North Dakota.”“The reason I am coming forward is that while I didn’t think ONEOK was doing their job, I still trusted the state to regulate and do its job,” said Lehto. “But in reading what the state’s response was to the condensate spill, I have lost all confidence that the state is acting as a legitimate regulator.”Furthermore, a trove of documents received by DeSmog from the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) under a public records request has revealed that despite state regulators listing the Garden Creek spill as just 10 gallons from 2015 to 2019, an intense multi-year cleanup operation was underway to remove the spilled natural gas condensate from the grounds of the plant. According to a cleanup document, the ground well beneath the plant became saturated with condensate, so much so that even 18 feet down, a “pure gasoline-like odor” was detected.Also, groundwater at one monitoring well registered the carcinogen benzene at levels nearly 2,000 times that required by the state health department.

California fines Chevron $2.7 million for surface oil spills at Cymric field in Kern County - California on Wednesday fined Chevron more than $2.7 million for allowing an oil spill at the Cymric Oil Field in Kern County that lasted 113 days and covered almost an acre of a dry streambed. Four “surface expression” spills – water, steam and oil forced to the surface — occurred in the field between May and July, Acting Oil and Gas Supervisor Jason R. Marshall found. The spills caused “a significant threat of harm to human health and the environment," Marshall said in his order levying the penalties. The penalties include $900,000 for failure to prevent a surface expression and $1,832,991 for "failure to comply with transport requirements for oil and to conduct operations in accord with good oilfield practice." Officials said the Chevron penalty is the second-largest issued under the Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resource’s recently created Office of Enforcement. In January, DOGGR issued a $5.076 million fine against HVI Cat Canyon, Inc. for violations related to its operation of the Richfield Oil Field in Orange County. In the Chevron spills, Marshall noted that the company allowed oil from the four spills to run downhill. "Division staff observed [Chevron] on multiple occasions using pumps, bins, and a vacuum truck to capture oil from the unlined channel and transport it for processing" in violation of regulations that prohibit transporting oil and water containing oil through open unlined channels and ditches. Chevron said it is reviewing the order from DOGGR. It is allowed to appeal the fines, but has not said if it will do so.

Trump Admin: There's No 'Climate Crisis,' So Drill Baby Drill --The Trump administration has asserted that "there is not a climate crisis" as justification for expanding drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. E&E first reported Monday that the Bureau of Land Management's Environmental Impact Statement for expanded drilling in Alaska, released last month, contains stark denier language tucked into the vast appendix, where BLM staff attorney Brook Brisson responds to public criticisms of the proposal. Brisson asserts in response to a comment asking BLM to acknowledge that drilling "is inconsistent with maintaining a livable planet" that "societies prospered" in previous warm periods in Earth's history.In July, Politico published an extensive report detailing the exhaustive and political edits to and deletions of scientific work in the statement.The Politico report explains the pristine wilderness at the Arctic National Wildlife Refugee:For decades, the refuge has been the subject of a very public tug of war between pro-drilling forces and conservation advocates determined to protect an ecosystem crucial to polar bears, herds of migratory caribou, and native communities that rely on the wildlife for subsistence hunting. The Trump tax law, for the first time since the refuge was established in 1980, handed the advantage decisively to the drillers. For a deeper dive: E&E $, The Hill

Oil lawyer says ‘inexperienced’ Trump team could jeopardize its own agenda -  The Trump administration has done a lot for oil and natural gas firms. But behind closed doors, they worry that the Trump team's inexperience may ultimately end up jeopardizing its efforts to wipe climate rules off the books.  Industry lawyer Mark Barron, at a a private meeting of oil and gas executives in Colorado Springs, openly worried that the courts might ultimately throw out key parts of the Trump administration's deregulatory agenda under challenge by environmental groups. “The current [Interior Secretary, David Bernhardt] is a competent technocrat but the other folks who are in the office are inexperienced government folks,” Barron said, referring to political appointees at key agencies, according to a recording obtained by The Post’s Juliet Eilperin. “And so they may want to implement policy, but at some point, you need people who are familiar with Washington, who know how to draft a regulatory rule, who have experience doing it on a big level," said Barron, who heads the energy litigation arm of Baker Hostetler, at the June 24 meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. IPAA, which represents small and midsize oil and gas companies, has publicly been one of the biggest backers of the Trump administration’s rollbacks aimed at curbing methane leaks, protecting endangered species and other issues.But privately, Barron echoed an observation of many outside the oil and gas business: The administration’s rush to write regulations has left it vulnerable to courtroom challenges. “I'm going to be candid; some of those recissions were done by too few people and at too fast a pace,” Barron said.

Frac Spread Drop Could End Soon - Hydraulic fracturing operations in U.S. shale basins have been trending downward since the spring of this year, and the number of active frac spreads has dropped for the past 12 consecutive weeks, according to a Los Angeles-based firm that uses frac spread counts to assess the health of the upstream industry.Also called a “frac fleet,” a frac spread comprises the equipment that a pressure pumper – an oilfield service company – uses to perform a frac stimulation job.Pointing out the downward trend could stem from exhausted budgets and seasonality, Primary Vision, Inc. reported Tuesday that the overall pattern may level off in the coming weeks.“Seasonally we’ve seen a comeback typically in the fall before a slowdown around the holidays,” Matt Johnson, principal of Primary Vision, told Rigzone. “This may be different this year, but we’re in a serious decline here, one of the longest we’ve seen since we started tracking the Frac Spread Count in 2014.”In its latest weekly newsletter, Primary Vision points out that U.S. frac spread counts are down nearly 100 since mid-spring. Roughly two-thirds of the reported declines are in three plays:

• Permian Basin: down 30 frac spreads
• Eagle Ford Shale: down 20 frac spreads
• Williston Basin: down 15 frac spreads

“We may not see a comeback at all, but we’re predicting that it will level off before getting much worse because of planned completions,” noted Johnson.Johnson attributes the downward movement in frac spread counts in recent months to operators’ ability to do more with less. “It seems that more wells were completed with less spreads,” he said. “When the dust settles, it will be interesting to understand how utilization changed year over year.”

Oil Discoveries Hit 70-Year Low - The last three years has been the worst stretch of time in seventy years for new conventional oil discoveries.A new report from IHS Markit finds that conventional oil discoveries plunged to a seven-decade low and “a significant rebound is not expected.” Conventional exploration – as opposed to unconventional development, including shale – had already been trending down following the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath, which overlapped with the rise of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in several U.S. shale basins.But the collapse of oil prices in 2014 really knocked conventional exploration – and thus, discoveries – on its back.After OPEC refrained from cutting production in the face of a swelling supply surplus in late 2014, prices fell sharply…and continued to fall for much of the next year and a half. WTI bottomed out in early 2016 below $30 per barrel, before a pullback in drilling and production cuts by OPEC+ led to a more durable price rebound beginning in 2017.But the multi-year downturn hit conventional exploration in multiple ways. Not only were companies slashing spending and cancelling riskier ventures, but the oil majors and investors began to view short-cycle shale drilling as inherently less risky. That was because drilling was quick – companies were able to turn projects around in a matter of weeks or months, not the years that large-scale conventional projects took, particularly those offshore in deepwater. Capital flowed en masse from conventional to unconventional development. Predictably, that led to a steep rise in U.S. shale output, while simultaneously leading to a sharp contraction in conventional discoveries. “One of the main drivers here is the shift of investment by US independents from international exploration to shale opportunities in the United States—shorter cycle-time projects—with greater flexibility to respond to changing market conditions,”   “These operators can quickly turn an unconventional project off and stop or postpone drilling next month if oil prices fall.”

US shale oil boom ends as lower prices take toll (Reuters) - U.S. oil production growth is decelerating gradually in response to lower prices, which should reduce predicted over-supply in 2020 and force the global oil market back towards balance.Domestic crude production fell 276,000 barrels per day to 11.806 million bpd in July, according to data published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Monday.The month-on-month reduction was entirely attributable to the Gulf of Mexico, where output fell 332,000 bpd, because many offshore platforms were shut due to the threat from tropical storm Barry.Onshore production from the Lower 48 states, much of it from shale plays, actually increased by 63,000 bpd to a multi-decade high of 9.778 million bpd ("Petroleum supply monthly", EIA, Sept. 30).Even onshore, however, there were signs the frenzied production growth of 2017 and 2018 has run out of momentum, as shale firms throttle back in response to lower prices (https://tmsnrt.rs/2o8imVk).Onshore output was up by 1.149 million bpd in July compared with the same month a year earlier, but growth has slowed progressively from 1.900 million bpd in August 2018.Of the major oil-producing states, Texas has reported the sharpest and most consistent slowdown, with more gradual decelerations in New Mexico and North Dakota.The second U.S. shale oil boom (2017-2018) is ending for much the same reasons as the first (2012-2014): high prices encouraged over-production and global oil consumption growth cooled. Experience suggests changes in oil prices filter through to drilling with an average delay of around 4 months and to output with a total lag of around 12 months.Production in July, therefore, reflected the relatively high prices that prevailed before oil prices started to slump in October 2018.Since then, as prices have tumbled, the number of rigs drilling for oil has fallen by 175 or 20%, according to oilfield services company Baker Hughes.Lower prices and drilling activity should start to filter through into even slower growth in Lower 48 output towards the end of the year and into 2020. Prices will remain low to enforce a U.S. drilling and production slowdown unless and until there are stronger indications of economic growth next year.

You're Footing The Bill For Bankrupt Shale Driller - A wave of oil and gas wells abandoned by bankrupted drillers could cost the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars.  A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) studied oil and gas wells drilled on federal lands, and found that the public could get stuck with a significant tab from companies that go out of business. Inactive wells that have not been properly plugged present environmental threats, from methane leaks to surface, air and groundwater contamination. Reclaiming a well that goes offline involves plugging it, removing structures and revegetating that landscape.On federal lands, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) collects a bond upfront that can be returned to a driller after reclamation. If the well is not properly reclaimed at the end of its life, BLM uses the bond to pay for the cleanup.But the problem is that the bond payments are often too low to cover the cost of reclamation. BLM regulations have minimum bond rates at $10,000 per lease, $25,000 for all wells in a state and $150,000 for all wells nationwide.When a company abandons a well because it cannot afford to clean it up, the well becomes “orphaned,” and tends to fall to BLM. But the agency does not have the funds to handle a wave of orphaned wells because the bonds that drillers pay are too low. “Bonds held by BLM have not provided sufficient financial assurance to prevent orphaned oil and gas wells,” the GAO report found. For instance, GAO identified 89 new orphaned wells between July 2017 and April 2019, which could cost as much as $46 million to clean up.More eye-opening was the fact that the agency identified nearly 3,000 wells that are at risk of becoming orphaned. Costs for reclaiming old wells vary widely, so much so that the GAO offered two scenarios: low-cost wells can cost $20,000 a piece, while high-costs wells can reach $145,000. For those 3,000 at-risk wells, the cleanup tab for the federal government could range from $46 million to $333 million. Roughly 84 percent of bonds are likely too low to reclaim the wells to which they are linked. “Bonds generally do not reflect reclamation costs because most bonds are set at their regulatory minimum values, and these minimums have not been adjusted since the 1950s and 1960s to account for inflation,” GAO said. It can also be decades between when a bond is paid and reclamation is actually completed. Notably, the average bond that BLM has on hand has declined over the years on a per-well basis, from $2,207 per well in 2008 to $2,122 per well in 2018.

Despite Bankruptcies, US Shale is Not Doomed - Recent bankruptcies affecting shale companies does not indicate future doom for the industry, according to Rystad Energy.While news of bankruptcies among U.S. onshore exploration and production (E&P) companies seems to be more frequent these days, Rystad Energy doesn’t believe this indicates doom for the shale industry.“In a nutshell, we do not believe the recent bankruptcies that have beset a number of shale players are indicative of an industry-wide epidemic,” said Alisa Lukash, a senior analyst on Rystad Energy’s North American Shale team.Some of those recent bankruptcies include Halcon Resources Corporation, Sanchez Energy Corporation and Alta Mesa Resources, Inc.Rystad forecasts that the top 40 U.S. shale oil producers will spend about $100 billion in the next seven years on debt installments and interest unless further debt refinancing is applied.  This group of producers accounted for nearly half of U.S. shale crude production in 2018, according to Rystad, and are now faced with interest payments between $2.6 billion and $5.1 billion annually. Maturities amount to about $71 billion between 2020 and 2026.A total of $23.7 billion in cash flow from operations was generated in the first half of 2019 with spending being $28 billion on capital expenditures. Rystad sees more than $112 billion in outstanding debt for this group, with a combined enterprise value of $355.5 billion as of September 2019. “These numbers indicate a lack of financing to deal with the burden of the obligations,” said Lukash. “Given the low levels of external capital additions during the past 10 months, the probability of debt refinancing in the coming quarters seems relatively slim.”

Democrats say they will ban fracking nationwide. An empty campaign promise or are they serious? - Several contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination have promised a nationwide ban on fracking. How viable is that proposal and do they really want to do it – or is it just a campaign promise they can never fulfil?Banning ‘fracking’ – the process of extracting oil and natural gas via hydraulic fracturing – is popular among environmentalists and activists who are increasingly concerned about climate change. Among the candidates who have backed a ban are the current frontrunner Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), as well as her colleagues Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Kamala Harris (D-California).  Yet, the fracking boom of the past decade has transformed the US from an energy importer to an exporter, impacting the economy in a major way – and even giving Washington a certain amount of foreign policy leverage that Democrats might find difficult to abandon.The industry has touted fracking as a ‘cleaner’ alternative to coal – another bugbear of the environmentalists. In reality, the method poses “significant threats to air, water, health, public safety, climate stability, seismic stability, community cohesion, and long-term economic vitality,” according to last year’s report by the Concerned Health Professionals of New York, which concludes: There is no evidence that fracking can operate without threatening public health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which public health depends. Among the disastrous effects on the environment of fracking are the contamination of groundwater and surrounding soils and vegetation. Some studies have even linked fracking to earthquakes, due to the high pressure used to extract the oil and gas from rock. Researchers speaking at the 2019 annual Seismological Society of America meeting said they had identified “more than 600 small earthquakes” in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Texas linked to activity in the wells.Then there’s the effect on air quality and climate change. Fracking could be even worse than coal for carbon emissions, according to research by Cornell University’s Robert W. Howarth. This is because of the release of methane in the process, coupled with emissions produced during transportation. Four US states – Washington, Vermont, New York and Maryland – have already prohibited fracking. But before the new 2020 presidential election race kicked off, the idea of a nationwide ban was not a hot topic.A president like Warren or Sanders could attempt to get anti-fracking legislation through Congress, but that would be a gargantuan task, especially if the Republicans still control the Senate. If they try to do it through regulations and executive orders, the next Republican administration could simply rescind them later. While executive action could ban fracking on public lands, much of the oil and gas exploration happens on privately owned land. Former president Barack Obama balanced his stricter regulations with rhetoric about the benefits of fracking, and still faced legal challenges at every turn.

Conoco's Move to Keep Canadian Synthetic Crude Under Fire  -- ConocoPhillips’s shift to a cheaper substitute to dilute the thick bitumen coming from its oil-sands operations may deal a blow to companies that turn heavy oil into more-valuable lighter grades. The company currently uses synthetic crude produced in local upgraders to thin out the bitumen extracted from wells at its 150,000 barrel-a-day Surmont site. But by end of the fourth quarter, Surmont will be able to switch to using condensate -- a very light hydrocarbon produced from natural-gas wells -- as a diluent instead, according to documents submitted to the Alberta Energy Regulator. Using condensate to dilute the heavy crude so it can flow through pipelines has some advantages. While an entire barrel of synthetic crude is typically needed to dilute one barrel of raw bitumen, half a barrel of condensate is needed. Also, condensate is almost $3 a barrel cheaper, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “Work to enable our Surmont 2 central processing facility to utilize either condensate or synthetic crude oil is nearly complete,” Katherine Springall, spokeswoman for ConocoPhillips Canada, said in an email. “While we currently use a small percentage of condensate in our blend, this work, when complete, will allow us to use either diluent in order to react to changing market conditions.” A switch by the Surmont operation to 100% condensate would amount to more than 10% of the total volume of synthetic crude produced in Canada, according to Canadian Energy Regulator data. That loss of demand may depress prices of synthetic crude, hurting companies such as Suncor Energy Inc. and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. that process bitumen in refinery-sized plants called upgraders to make the lighter grades. Neither company returned emails seeking comment.

 Size of oil spill still a mystery - FOUR weeks after Hurricane Dorian, Equinor still does not know how much oil was spilled from its South Riding Point facility in East Grand Bahama or the exact parameters of the land area that was affected, an official said. Equinor has engaged an independent firm to monitor the area near for potential groundwater contamination and officials maintain they are heavily focused on getting clean-up done right. On Friday, it was revealed that about 12,000 barrels of oil and water have been recovered by clean-up crews in response to the oil spill triggered by Hurricane Dorian. Before the storm, the terminal had 1.8 million barrels of crude oil stored. However at a media briefing onsite nearly a month after the disaster, Equinor Operations Manager Kevin Stuart admitted that they still do not know the full extent of the impact. The dome-shaped lids of two storage tanks – numbers six and ten – at the facility were blown off and oil was dispersed in the area as Hurricane Dorian unleashed 185mph winds and pummeled the island for about 40 hours. The event is being called “the worst disaster” ever in the company’s history. Equinor’s oil-stained administrative building is no longer able to accommodate its 54 employees, who have been relocated to the Pelican Bay Resort at Port Lucaya. “We have a situation in front of us; I call it an act of God – we have a spill – and we want to clean it up safely,” Mr Stuart said at the company’s command centre, located on board one of the mega response vessels docked at its terminal, equipped with a heli-pad and a 16-seater helicopter. He said at the time of the storm, only three tanks contained crude oil. Storage tank number 8, which was not compromised, contained 410,178.91 barrels of oil. Of the two damaged storage tanks, number six contained 729,681.08 barrels and number ten contained 730,707.01 barrels. “Right now, we cannot speak to volumes that was spilled because we just do not know. Two tanks damaged by tornadic activity, we cannot safely assess them to get volumes.

Equinor deploys over 300 workers to clean Bahamas oil spill (Reuters) - Norway’s Equinor is still assessing the devastation and level of pollution at its oil terminal in the Bahamas, one month after a massive hurricane swept through the region, the company told Reuters on Friday. “We have collected over 28,000 barrels of oil products around the tanks, on the main road and areas around the terminal. Over 300 personnel on site working on the recovery work,” Equinor spokesman Eskil Eriksen said in an email. Dozens of people have been confirmed dead and hundreds are still missing after Hurricane Dorian pummeled the Caribbean, destroying buildings and facilities across the Bahamas, although Equinor’s employees were all safe. At the firm’s South Riding Point terminal, where 1.8 million barrels of oil equivalent were stored at the time, the roofs were ripped off several tanks and some of the contents spread over a wide area. “Due to damages on the tanks we have not been able to get safe access to do accurate measurements of (the) total oil spill. We will continue to work to get safe access to do accurate measurements,” he added.

Oil Pirates- The Gulf Of Mexico's Billion Dollar Problem - Pirate activity in the Gulf of Mexico is on the rise and so is oil theft from platforms operating in the area, Fox News reports, with losses for Pemex as high as $1 billion annually.  Oil theft is not uncommon in Mexico, with most of it linked to local cartels using the services of crooked Pemex employees. Yet most of this theft takes place on land: over just two months in 2018, criminals drilled almost 2,300 illegal taps into Pemex pipelines in Mexico.Although oil and diesel stealing has been going on for decades, there has been an increase in criminal activity reported in the last four years, said Johan Obdola, the founder of the International Organization for Security and Intelligence, a Canada-based nonprofit.“It is estimated that the stealing in Mexico is up to 1.18 million barrels a day, bringing millions to criminal organizations, and making it very difficult to control,” Obdola also told Fox News.According to Pemex’s own estimates, the losses from fuel theft over the past three years have reached $7.5 billion (147 billion Mexican pesos). A lot of the theft is conducted by gangs who are quick to resort to violence as they fight among themselves for greater access to state fuels and also engage in extortion of oil workers.According to Mexico’s President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, authorities are also involved in widespread fuel theft, which he last year vowed to tackle without compromise.So far, the tackling has involved deploying military personnel at key oil and fuel infrastructure locations. Offshore, Lopez Obrador has said the Navy would conduct continuous surveillance of Pemex platforms, which are the targets of choice of the pirates. According to some Mexican officials, the Pena-Nieto energy sector reform is to blame for the rise in oil theft. Opening up the local oil and gas industry to private players has increased the number of targets for pirates offshore and this includes not just the oil itself but also equipment and raw materials.

Mexico's Pemex seeks control of U.S. oil firm's billion-barrel find (Reuters) - When U.S. oil firm Talos Energy (TALO.N) found nearly a billion barrels off Mexico’s southern Gulf coast two years ago, it marked the first discovery by a foreign firm since the oil industry was nationalized eight decades earlier. Now Mexico’s state-run oil firm Pemex wants to take over the lucrative project, according to two former Mexican energy officials and two company executives with knowledge of internal Pemex discussions. The Pemex push to run drilling in the oilfield comes amid the ongoing drive by leftist President Andres Lopez Obrador to return more control of Mexico’s energy sector to its state oil firm. His predecessor, Enrique Pena Nieto, ended Pemex’s monopoly and started auctioning off oilfields to private companies in 2015. Talos was the first to find oil, in a shallow-water field it named Zama after the Maya word for dawn. Wresting control of the project from the company now would strike a symbolic blow to Mexico’s biggest economic policy change in decades and could further chill investment by the world’s top energy firms, oil executives and industry experts told Reuters. Pemex has a potential claim to control over Zama because it has drilling rights to an adjacent field. The oil deposit likely extends into Pemex territory – although the firm has yet to prove that by drilling. The two companies began talks last year about a merged project and will later negotiate how to split revenues and who gets operational control. If the talks deadlock, Lopez Obrador’s Energy Ministry would settle disputes and appoint one company to oversee drilling. “If Pemex does end up operating it, that would not send a good signal to private investors,” said one executive from an oil major with several offshore projects in Mexico.

Mexico: López Obrador makes a big bet on oil | Financial Times -- Every couple of minutes, a large truck splattered with mud rumbles through the gate to what was once an expanse of mangroves. After recent rains, a lake has formed where the lush vegetation once flourished. Further on, more than 20 yellow diggers are hard at work scooping up sludge, which lorries dump in a nearby field. For Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who wants to turn this swamp into his signature infrastructure project — an $8bn oil refinery — the location in his southeastern home state of Tabasco could not be better. The town is called Paraíso, or paradise. The president sees it as the promised land for Pemex, the struggling national oil company; for Tabasco, whose economy shrank 11 per cent in the first quarter; and for people like Concepción Álvarez, who has parked his cart selling juices and snacks outside the gates to the site. “This is going to change things. It’s going to create jobs,” he says. The planned refinery, beside the Dos Bocas port, is much more than just a prestige project. It is a powerful symbol of the new economy Mr López Obrador wants to build: state-directed, centrally-driven, reliant on national production and free of foreign influence. Pemex is the centrepiece of Mr López Obrador’s aspiration to overturn what he sees as more than three decades of “neoliberal” economic policy. One of his first moves after taking office was to order the oil company to add the motto “For the recovery of sovereignty” to its Mexican-eagle logo. A Pemex refinery in Cadereyta. One former senior government official says the oil company is 'the cornerstone of [López Obrador's] presidency and his economic policy' © Reuters “Pemex means so much to López Obrador . . . because he is from an oil state and came of age in the 1960s, when Pemex was very powerful,” says one former senior government official. “It’s the cornerstone of his presidency and his economic policy.”

 Pemex PMI Turnover is AMLO's Effort to Clean Unit --- Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said that the replacement of 10 executives at the Petroleos Mexicanos arm that sets and monitors prices was an effort to end decades-long questionable practices. “There was an instruction to clean Pemex International,” AMLO, as the leftist president is known, said at his morning news conference on Thursday. “Some people had been there for almost 30 years. It was converted into a limited partnership.” AMLO said that the people who were in charge of PMI had been buying and selling a million barrels of oil a day and distanced themselves from government supervision using as excuses their own technical expertise. He repeated the frequent promise that his government isn’t going to tolerate corruption. Pemex in a shakeup on Friday announced that it had replaced the head of PMI and the head of crude trading, among other new appointments. The moves followed a clash between the former PMI management and Pemex’s new leadership team headed by Chief Executive Officer Octavio Romero over new formulas created to price oil sales to refiners in the U.S. and elsewhere, according to people familiar with the matter. Romero, a longtime Lopez Obrador ally, had called for an external review because he had questions about the marketing of Mexico’s crude, while the head of trading opposed his decision to launch an external review of the formula.

Cuadrilla: More fracking this year in Lancashire unlikely after earthquake  -  Fracking is unlikely to restart at Cuadrilla’s controversial site in Lancashire this year, the company admitted today over a month since an earthquake ripped through the site, bringing an end to drilling. Instead the firm said it would ensure Preston New Road will not be brought to a standstill as it tests how much gas flows from the well. It will help assess how much gas is under ground. “We believe that this will further demonstrate the huge commercial opportunity here,” said Francis Egan, the chief executive of Cuadrilla. The flow testing comes after the company found it could extract gas from a separate well at the site in February this year. The well was already fracked in early August, causing several earthquakes, including a record 2.9 magnitude tremor which locals reported had damaged their nearby properties. Cuadrilla has said it will pay for repairs. Current regulations require frackers to temporarily stop if they measure an earthquake above 0.5 on the Richter scale. But after the 2.9 magnitude quake, the Oil and Gas Authority stepped in, forcing Cuadrilla to stop indefinitely. The company said it was still working with the regulator to figure out what happened and what can be learnt from the tremor. “A timeframe has not been agreed with the OGA for this work to be completed and further hydraulic fracturing will not take place at Preston New Road before current planning permission for fracturing expires at the end of November,” it said.

Exxon Sells Norwegian Assets for $4.5B - After much speculation, ExxonMobil Corp. has signed an agreement to sell its non-operated upstream assets in Norway to Var Energi AS for $4.5 billion, the oil and gas powerhouse announced Thursday afternoon.Rigzone first reported on a potential sale in late June, when Exxon was “testing market interest” for the assets. A couple of weeks ago, Exxon declined to comment on a sell of its Norwegian assets.The deal is part of Exxon’s previously announced plan to divest $15 billion in non-strategic assets by 2021. The transaction includes ownership interests in more than 20 producing fields operated mostly by Equinor ASA with a combined production of approximately 150,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in 2019."This transaction is a major milestone in the short history of Var Energi and a proof of our commitment to further develop the [Norwegian Continental Shelf]," Var Energi chief executive Kristin Kragseth said in an email sent to Rigzone. "In delivering on our ambitious growth plans, Var Energi will not only be a major force on the shelf, we are also creating major opportunities for Norwegian suppliers in the years to come, securing employment in man parts of the country." Exxon said the majority of its employees impacted by the sale will transfer to positions at Vår Energi.

How U.S. fossil fuels are tied to Ukraine and impeachment - Ukraine, now at the center of a rapidly accelerating impeachment inquiry against President Trump, has been central to the president's efforts to increase U.S. exports of fossil fuels.  The Eastern European nation sits at the crossroads of Europe and Russia. Today, roughly a third of Russian gas consumed in Europe passes through Ukraine. That has made the country uniquely susceptible to Russian meddling. Moscow has twice cut off gas supplies to Ukraine in the past 15 years and stopped selling directly to the country after the onset of the civil war there in 2014. The prospect of a third shutoff looms at the end of the year, when the current transit agreement between Russia and Ukraine is set to expire.The impeachment inquiry against Trump could strain the relationship between the United States and Ukraine. House Democrats are seeking information on how the president and his administration may have pressured Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. The White House may have delayed military aid to Ukraine as part of a campaign to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to open an investigation into an energy company that employed the former vice president's son.And while Ukraine has benefited financially and strategically from U.S. support for its energy independence from Russia, that policy is usually centered around the country's desire to maintain American support for its military,  President Trump has seized upon the conflict in Ukraine as a central argument for bolstering the sales of American fossil fuels abroad, arguing that U.S. allies need reliable energy suppliers to ward off adversaries and grow their economies. Administration officials have coordinated sales of Pennsylvania anthracite, a particularly carbon-intensive form of coal, to help offset a decline in Ukrainian coal production associated with the conflict there (Climatewire, Aug. 1, 2017).Administration officials have vehemently objected to plans to build Nord Stream 2, an undersea natural gas pipeline linking Russian directly to Germany, and thus cutting out Ukraine. Rick Perry, the U.S. Energy secretary, has voiced support for congressional efforts to sanction companies participating with the project (Greenwire, May 21).And Trump has aggressively marketed U.S. liquefied natural gas exports as an alternative to Russian gas. "Ukraine already tells us they need millions and millions of metric tons right now," Trump told a gathering at the Department of Energy in 2017, when he announced his desire to see the United States dominate global energy markets. "We want to sell it to them and everyone else all over the globe" (E&E News PM, June 29, 2017).

Russian energy minister ridicules Rick Perry's idea of US 'freedom gas' - Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak accused the U.S. of weaponizing liquefied natural gas (LNG) — gas which is super-cooled to liquid form — in an attempt to derail Moscow’s economic ties to Western Europe.Speaking at an energy conference in the Russian capital on Wednesday, Novak said that when it comes to exporting LNG to Europe, Washington did not appear to be prepared to allow for the development of market competition.He also criticized the U.S. for considering sanctions on companies and individuals involved in building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project linking Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea.“They use gas as a weapon and they do it on the other side of the Atlantic,” Novak said, referring to the world’s largest economy.The U.S. Department of Energy was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC Wednesday morning. Novak’s comments come as construction continues apace on Nord Stream 2 — a contentious undersea gas pipeline that will allow Russia to bypass Ukraine when delivering gas exports to Europe. The project, which Novak said was 82% complete, is intended to provide Europe with a sustainable gas supply while providing Russia with more direct access to the European gas market. The pipeline is scheduled to become operational in early 2020.

U.S. sanctions on COSCO hit LNG tankers in Russia's Arctic (Reuters) - U.S. sanctions on two units of Chinese shipper COSCO hit the liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker industry on Monday as U.S.-listed Teekay LNG (TGP.N) said its shipping joint venture in Russia had been “blocked” because of its ties to COSCO. The United States imposed sanctions on COSCO Shipping Tanker (Dalian) Co and subsidiary COSCO Shipping Tanker (Dalian) Seaman & Ship Management Co for allegedly carrying Iranian crude oil. Teekay LNG said on Monday that its 50-50 Yamal LNG Joint Venture had been deemed a “blocked person” under the sanctions because its partner China LNG Shipping (Holding) (CLNG) is 50% owned by COSCO Dalian. “As a result of CLNG’s 50% interest, the Yamal LNG Joint Venture also currently qualifies as a ‘Blocked Person’ under OFAC rules,” Teekay said, referring to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). “Teekay Group has not traded and will not trade with Iran and will not act in contravention of any trading sanctions,” Teekay said. The venture owns Arc7-class LNG tankers capable of navigating through Arctic ice, making them key to transporting LNG from Novatek’s (NVTK.MM) Yamal LNG plant in northern Russia. The LNG plant, surrounded by thick ice during the winter, is unique in operating in such harsh conditions. The Arc7 tankers take LNG westward to Europe in winter and eastward to Asia in summer when ice along the Northern Sea Route dissipates sufficiently to allow passage. Its Yamal LNG project “has all the necessary capabilities to ensure the delivery of produced LNG to buyers within the agreed by contracts schedules,” Novatek said in a statement.

Russia's Largest Oil Company Ditches Dollar In New Oil Deals -Russia’s largest oil company Rosneft has set the euro as the default currency for all new exports of crude oil and refined products, as the state-controlled giant looks to switch as many sales as possible from U.S. dollars to euros in order to avoid further U.S. sanctions against it.As of September, Rosneft is seeking euros as the default option of payment for its crude oil and products, Reuters reported on Thursday, quoting tender documents the Russian firm has published.“Rosneft has recently adjusted all the new contracts for export supplies to euros,” a trader at a company that regularly procures oil from Rosneft told Reuters, adding that buyers have already been notified of the change.Rosneft is the biggest oil exporter from Russia, selling around 2.4 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil, according to Reuters estimates.  In the latest tender for a spot sale of 100,000 tons of Urals blend loading from the port of Primorsk at the end of October, Rosneft specifies that the default currency in the payment should be in euros, according to the tender document cited by Reuters. The United States has not ruled out imposing sanctions on Rosneft over its involvement in trading oil from Venezuela. Rosneft has been reselling the oil from the Latin American country to buyers in China and India and thus helping buyers hesitant to approach Venezuela and its state oil firm PDVSA because of the U.S. sanctions on Caracas, and, at the same time, helping Venezuela to continue selling its oil despite stricter U.S. sanctions.

Russia’s Oil Reserves Now Worth $1.2 Trillion - The total value of Russia's oil reserves is estimated at $1.2 trillion, nearly doubling the valuation over the course of a single year, Moscow's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment reported Friday. According to the ministry’s data, the market value of the oil reserves increased by 88 percent over the past year, largely due to newly discovered reserves as well as the higher valuations for the existing reserve supply. Russia's oil reserves valuation increased by $385 billion to $1.07 trillion. Regarding newly discovered oil reserves in volume terms, the increase was not so impressive. An increase of 8.7 percent was recorded, from 9.04 billion to 9.83 billion tons, according to RBC. It caused a 73% year-on-year surge in monetary value. The value of oil reserves reached some 71.7 percent of Russia’s GDP in 2018.Oil accounted for 72 percent of Russia's gross domestic product last year. The oil production cost remains about $15.5 per barrel, in line with previous estimates of $8-20 per barrel.  The value of gas reserves increased by about a quarter, from $177 billion to $221 billion. In volume terms, it increased by 3.6 percent, to 15 trillion cubic meters. The value of Russia’s iron ore was estimated at $18 billion, gold was valued at $9.6 billion, and diamonds were estimated to be worth $8.5 billion. Copper and coal reserves in value terms have slightly decreased since 2017.

Putin condemns Saudi oil attacks but defends Iran - Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the attacks on Saudi Arabian oil infrastructure last month but defended Iran, saying there is no proof the country had a role in, or was responsible for, the strikes. “We condemn such acts no matter who is behind (them). It is a destructive event that had a toll on the whole global energy market,” Putin told an audience at a NBC-moderated panel, according to a translation. “But we’re against shirking the blame upon Iran, because there is no real proof behind that and yesterday we spoke about that with President (Hassan) Rouhani. His position is that Iran would not assume any responsibility and is in no way related to that act,” he added. Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the attacks that initially halved the Saudi kingdom’s oil production. But Saudi Arabia and the U.S. suggested that Houthi-allied Iran had a role in, or was responsible for, the attacks on Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities. Iran has denied the accusations it was involved, calling them “meaningless” and “pointless.” Asked if he accepted Iran’s denial of involvement, even though U.S. intelligence services had pointed the finger of blame at the country, Putin said these intelligence services “served the foreign policy of the U.S., but they have not come up with any evidence.” “Let’s not be guided by emotions but by facts,” he added.

Thousands of Ships Fitted With ‘Cheat Devices’ To Divert Poisonous Pollution Into Sea  -Global shipping companies have spent billions rigging vessels with “cheat devices” that circumvent new environmental legislation by dumping pollution into the sea instead of the air, The Independent can reveal.More than $12bn (£9.7bn) has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract sulphur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on heavy fuel oil.This means the vessels meet standards demanded by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) that kick in on 1 January.However, the sulphur emitted by the ships is simply re-routed from the exhaust and expelled into the water around the ships, which not only greatly increases the volume of pollutants being pumped into the sea, but also increases carbon dioxide emissions.The change could have a devastating effect on wildlife in British waters and around the world, experts have warned.A total of 3,756 ships, both in operation and under order, have already had scrubbers installed according to DNV GL, the world’s largest ship classification company. Only 23 of these vessels have had closed-loop scrubbers installed, a version of the device that does not discharge into the sea and stores the extracted sulphur in tanks before discharging it at a safe disposal facility in a port.

Oil spills reach more than 100 regions of Brazils coast -Brazil’s main environmental agency Ibama said Thursday that it has detected 105 crude oil spills from an undetermined source polluting the waters of the country’s northeast coast this month. The spill spans over 1,500 kilometers of Brazil's northeast coast, affecting wildlife and polluting some of the postcard beaches in one of the nation's top touristic destinations, such as Praia do Futuro, in the state of Ceara, and Maragogi, in Alagoas state. Local media showed pictures of sea turtles coated in black tar by the slick.Some marine turtles were contaminated by the oil. They were rescued alive in the state of Rio Grande do Norte and sent to rehabilitation centers. Other animals were found dead, Ibama said, without disclosing species or numbers.Brazil's state-controlled oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, also known as Petrobras, said in a statement that even though it was not involved in the spill it was contributing to the clean-up efforts, with some 100 Petrobras employees helping clean the beaches. The company is also investigating the cause and origin of the oil spill. After concluding the investigation the company said in a statement that after completing a molecular analysis of the oil it was found that the crude spilled was not produced nor sold by the company. It also said that the spills spread across eight states come from a single source but were not produced in the South American nation.“So far there is no evidence of contamination of fish and crustaceans,” the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources institute said. Brazil’s environmental body urged beachgoers and fishermen to avoid the material. It said the situation is stable in the waters of the most affected state, Rio Grande do Norte. Investigators are now concentrating on the Amazon state of Maranhao, close to the border with French Guiana.  Anna Carolina Lobo, a coordinator of the marine program of the WWF conservation group in Brazil, said it is alarming that Brazilian authorities don’t know the origin of the oil spills.  “The surveillance in our waters, no matter if this was an intentional or an unintentional spill, is too fragile for a country this big,” Ms. Lobo said.

Source of Vast Oil Spill Covering Brazil's Northeast Coast Unknown --Brazil's main environmental agency said on Thursday the source of a sprawling oil spill along the northeast coast remains unknown, but that the crude oil was not produced in the country.  The spill stretches over 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) of Brazil's northeast coast, affecting 46 cities and around one hundred of the country's nicest beaches since being first detected on Sept. 2. Brazilian television has shown slicks at sea and oil puddles along shores, as well as turtles covered in black tar. Other marine life has also been found dead.The Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, Ibama, said state oil company Petrobras analyzed the spill and determined it came from a single source.However, it said, a molecular analysis of the crude showed that it was not produced in Brazil, the world's 9th largest crude producer at 3.43 million barrels a day. Petrobras reported that "the oil found is not produced by Brazil. Ibama requested support from Petrobras to work on beach cleaning. In the coming days, the company will make available a contingent of about 100 people," the environmental institute announced in a statement.

Mysterious oil spill contaminates beaches across swathe of Brazilian coast - An oil spill has contaminated beaches and coastline across eight Brazilian states, the country’s environment agency said on Friday, although authorities are still stumped as to its origin. Environmental agency Ibama said that beaches along a 3,000-kilometer (1,860-mile) coastline of Brazil’s Northeast region had been hit by the spill. It said some oil-coated birds and sea turtles had been washed up and were being treated. The area is a popular tourism destination for locals and foreigners, with a large number of Spanish and Portuguese visitors frequenting resorts spread along the coast. Although there is extensive oil exploration activity offshore Brazil, authorities have ruled out that as the source of the spill. State-controlled oil company Petróleo Brasileiro SA <PETR4.SA> said it had performed laboratory analysis of the oil and determined, by observing its molecules, that “the organic compounds of the material found are not compatible with that of the oils produced and marketed by the company.”

Oil leak confirmed from Pacific Energy pipe - (Cook Islands) A leak from the Pacific Energy pipeline has been established as the source of a big oil spill in Avatiu harbour. Hundreds of members of the public expressed concern at the powerful stench of what smelled like diesel, yesterday. Ports Authority general manager Nooroa Tou said the spill was a hazard, and they had positioned oil spill booms to confine the leakage. The Ports crew also used skimmer equipment machinery to suck up the leaking residue into drums. Shipments of gasoline, automotive diesel oil and oil from ships are moved via a pipeline from Avatiu harbour to Pacific Energy. The company’s country manager Mark Vaikai said, they were pressure-testing the 2km pipeline in an attempt to discover where the leak had started. The type of oil spillage could not be identified; more testing was required before this could be determined. Samples had been taken from the site and were currently undergoing testing in the company’s laboratory. Vaikai assured the public positive efforts had taken place and Pacific were in discussion with Ports, and had the support of TOA. “It’s a multi effort.” He said the spill in the harbour was nothing of the nature that would cause a fire. People are encouraged to stay away from the area. 

 Oil spill near Kharg Island contained - The Iranian Offshore Oil Company said the leak in the 24-inch oil pipeline from Abouzar Oilfield to Kharg Island, in the Persian Gulf, has been fixed and the spilled oil in the region has been cleaned up. According to reports, the leakage occurred on September 13, about 4 kilometers off the coast of Kharg Island, the Oil Ministry news agency Shana reported. Members from the HSE department of IOOC were dispatched to find the leak location and took measures to fix it. After plugging the leakage, the oil spill was cleaned by spraying oil spill eater, which is the world’s most environmentally safe and cost effective bioremediation product, for the mitigation of hazardous waste, spills and contamination. However, after a few days the oil spill reached the coast of Kharg Island and was also soon cleaned up. IOOC is in charge of developing oil reservoirs in the Persian Gulf, including Abouzar, Forouzan, Hendijan, Bahregansar, Reshadat, Soroush, Norouz, Salman and Doroud fields. It is in charge of collecting associated petroleum gases on Kharg Island and in the Bahregan oil region in the Persian Gulf.

India saw 'absolutely no disruption' in oil from Saudi Arabia (video) Dharmendra Pradhan, India’s minister of petroleum and natural gas, says India has “very diversified” crude oil sources and is not dependent on any specific country

Erdogan- Impossible For Turkey To Stop Its Iranian Oil & Gas Imports --Returning from the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told reporters Friday that it remains "impossible" for Turkey to halt its oil and gas purchases from Iran in conformity to US sanctions. He affirmed commitment to continuing to buy oil and gas from Iran despite US threats, with no plans to halt or even reduce imports in the future. He said further he was "not afraid" of possible US sanctions over continued dealings with Tehran, Reuters reported. This as the Trump administration has gone after Chinese shipping companies this week over alleged sanctions busting activity related to Iranian oil imports to China and other east Asian ports.No doubt Erdogan has to be taking note of the lengths to which Washington is prepared to go, which included rattling the global shipping industry this week by sanctioning Chinese firms China Concord Petroleum Co., Kunlun Shipping Co., Pegasus 88 Ltd., and COSCO Shipping Tanker (Dalian) Seaman & Ship Management Co, in its long-haul campaign to see Iranian oil exports go to "zero".Turkey has long been exclusively reliant on imports to meet the growing energy needs of its 80 million citizens.  Turkish media sources note that even the country's electrical grid is heavily tied to natural gas imports, as "almost 40 percent of its electricity is produced in gas-fired plants."

A 12,000-Mile Trip May Be Null Due to Iran Oil Sanctions - More than two months and 20,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) ago, the tanker Da Yuan Hu left Singapore and headed to Mexico to pick up a shipment of crude oil. On Thursday, with less than two weeks to go until it reaches its destination, its long quest could be in jeopardy. The ship, along with dozens of others, is now ensnared in the standoff between the U.S. and Iran. The White House announced penalties against the vessel’s owner, China’s COSCO Shipping Tankers (Dalian) Co., in connection with violating sanctions by shipping Iranian crude. Indian Oil Corp. is considering alternatives to the Da Yuan Hu, according to people familiar with the situation who asked not to be named because the information isn’t public. The announcements by the U.S. Treasury and State departments left shipbrokers and charterers scrambling to cancel bookings with sanctioned companies and letting provisional charters lapse. Uncertainty still remains on whether cargoes that have already been loaded onto the vessels of sanctioned firms would be allowed to deliver, or whether they would have to transfer their loads to unsanctioned tankers. The Da Yuan Hu was supposed to transport oil from Mexico’s Dos Bocas to India’s eastern coast of Paradip, the people said. While the company is looking for a replacement, its plans may still change, one of the people said. An Indian Oil spokesman declined to comment. Supertanker Yuan Qiu Hu, earlier chartered by Atlantic Trading & Marketing Inc., a subsidiary of Total U.S., was headed to Galveston to pick up oil for delivery to South Korea. The vessel has since slowed to under 2 knots, from more than 9 yesterday as it puttered off the eastern coast of the U.S.

August non-OPEC unplanned oil production outages fell to lowest level since at least 2011 -- Unplanned oil production outages among countries outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) fell to 64,000 barrels per day (b/d) in August, the lowest level since the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) began tracking global production outages in 2011. Unplanned outages in major non-OPEC oil producers such as the United States, Russia, and Canada have abated, leaving Sudan and South Sudan as the only remaining non-OPEC producers with unplanned outages in August. The decline in non-OPEC unplanned outages may have contributed to the resilience of the global oil market following the disruption of almost 5.7 million b/d of Saudi Arabian crude oil production on September 14, 2019.  EIA tracks both OPEC and non-OPEC production outages. In its estimates of outages, EIA differentiates among declines in production resulting from unplanned production outages, permanent losses of production capacity, and voluntary production cutbacks. EIA’s estimates of unplanned production outages are calculated as the difference between estimated effective production capacity (the level of supply that could be available within one year) and estimated production. EIA publishes historical unplanned production outage estimates in EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO).The duration of any supply outage mainly depends on the cause of the disruption. When an outage is related to weather, natural disasters, labor strikes, technical failures, or accidents, the disruption generally ends within weeks, such as is often the case in non-OPEC countries. Disruptions tied to political disputes or conflicts—such as in Sudan and South Sudan—often last for years.

Oil Price Projected to Hit $185 in 2050 - Brent crude oil is projected to hit a value of $185 per barrel in 2050, in 2018 dollars, in the high oil price case of the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest International Energy Outlook report. The report also offers a low oil price case, which places oil at $45 per barrel, in 2018 dollars, in 2050 and a reference case, which has oil at $100 per barrel, in 2018 dollars, in 2050. The reference case reflects current trends and relationships among supply, demand and prices in the future and includes some anticipated changes over time, the report highlights. The high and low oil price cases address the uncertainty associated with world energy prices, the report notes. “In the high oil price case, energy demand increases because non-OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) economies grow more quickly than in the reference case, despite tighter petroleum supply conditions,” the report states. “Although energy consumption rises, higher oil prices limit the growth in liquid fuels and consumers conserve or switch to alternative fuels whenever possible,” the report adds. The report notes that in the low oil price case, lower economic activity, “especially in countries that are not a part of the OECD”, discourages energy consumption. “Simultaneously but independently, greater resource availability and lower extraction costs encourage additional petroleum supplies, despite the reduced economic growth. The resulting lower oil prices encourage liquid fuels consumption and discourage energy conservation and fuel switching,” the report adds.

Oil will hit levels 'we haven't see in our lifetimes' if Iran isn't stopped, Saudi Crown Prince says - Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has warned of astronomical oil prices in the event that tensions escalate in the Persian Gulf, two weeks after his country was hit by a drone and cruise missile attack that Riyadh and Washington have blamed on Iran. “If the world does not take a strong and firm action to deter Iran, we will see further escalations that will threaten world interests,” the crown prince said in an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes” over the weekend. “Oil supplies will be disrupted and oil prices will jump to unimaginably high numbers that we haven’t seen in our lifetimes.” The predawn attack on Sept. 14 hit two of state oil giant Saudi Aramco’s largest facilities, forcing the country to temporarily shut down roughly 50% of its output, or more than 5% of the world’s daily crude production. The following Monday, international benchmark Brent crude rose as much as 19.5% to $71.95 per barrel at the open ⁠— the biggest jump on record ⁠— before paring gains. The Middle East “represents about 30% of the world’s energy supplies, about 20% of global trade passages, about 4% of the world GDP,” the crown prince, who is next in line for the Saudi throne and considered the kingdom’s de facto ruler, told CBS. “Imagine all of these three things stop. This means a total collapse of the global economy, and not just Saudi Arabia or the Middle East countries.” Energy industry experts have cited figures between $100 and $150 per barrel for the price of oil if the adversaries — OPEC’s highest and third-highest oil producers, respectively — went to war. Aramco quickly promised it would restore its oil output to normal by the end of September, and has already brought roughly 50% of that back online, company executives said. Two weeks later, Brent was trading at $61.48 Monday morning London time. Yemen’s Houthi rebels, at war with the Saudis since the kingdom launched a bloody offensive on its southern neighbor in 2015, claimed responsibility for the attack. But officials in the U.S., U.K. and Saudi Arabia say the rebels would not have been capable of launching an attack of such scale and precision and assert the Iranians were behind it, something Tehran has vehemently denied.Washington and Riyadh also blame Iran for a series of mysterious sabotage attacks on several foreign oil tankers in the Gulf near the vital Strait of Hormuz, the narrow conduit through which 30% of the world’s seaborne oil passes. Iran denies those allegations as well. The attacks began taking place shortly after President Donald Trump’s administration ended waivers for countries importing Iranian oil, amplifying the effect of crippling sanctions it’s imposed on Iran since late 2018 after the U.S. withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal. Animosity between Washington and Tehran has skyrocketed since then.

Aramco Crude Production Restored To Pre-Attack Levels, Official Says --Despite the worst attack on its infrastructure in the oil giant's 80-year-plus history, Saudi state-owned oil giant Aramco has succeeded in making all of its shipments in the month of September, says Ibrahim Al-Buainain, the CEO of Aramco's trading arm. Moreover, the oil giant has also managed to restore its oil-production capacity to pre-attack levels, meeting an accelerated two-week timeline announced by the firm earlier this month.Saudi oil output was cut in half by an attack on Aramco facilities, an attack that was allegedly orchestrated by Saudi Arabia's arch-rival Iran (though Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels initially took credit for it).In the wake of the attack, oil prices soared, as the kingdom warned that the equivalent of 5.5% of global production had been temporarily taken offline. Initially, Aramco warned that the damage could take months to repair. However, the Saudis adjusted that prediction just days after the attacks as repairs reportedly progressed much more quickly than Aramco had initially anticipated, according to a senior executive.And oil prices have erased all of the spike gains...

Trump’s Latest Trade War Move Sends Oil Tanking - Oil prices fell again on Monday on waning hopes of a breakthrough in the U.S.-China trade war.Late last week, Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration was considering more extreme measures aimed at China, including putting limits on American investments in China, de-listing some Chinese companies from American stock exchanges, as well as putting caps on the value of Chinese companies that managed index funds can hold in the U.S.No decision has been made, but Bloomberg reported that President Trump gave the go-ahead to his advisers to explore some potential moves. Some China “hawks” have described the plans as a possible “financial decoupling” of the U.S. and Chinese economies.In response to that press report, the Trump administration issued only a partial and qualified denial, according to Bloomberg. “The administration is not contemplating blocking Chinese companies from listing shares on U.S. stock exchanges at this time,” Treasury spokeswoman Monica Crowley said to Bloomberg, without addressing some of the other ideas allegedly put forward.But Trump’s top trade adviser Peter Navarro seemed to hint at the fact that the administration was considering precisely those moves, while simultaneously calling the reports “fake news.”“There’s some significant issues related to Chinese stocks listed on public exchanges,” he said on CNBC. “There’s some interesting and significant transparency issues with Chinese stocks, but that’s all I’m going to say, I’m not going to talk about what’s going on behind closed doors.” The precise policy under consideration is not the main point. Rather, turning to restrictions on investment flows and other punitive measures would amount to yet another escalation in the trade war. It would severely undercut whatever slim goodwill has been built in recent weeks between the two countries, and it would make a breakthrough in trade talks infinitely harder.

Oil drops 3.3% on Chinese data, Saudi output recovery - Oil fell on Monday as China’s economic outlook remained weak amid an ongoing trade war with the United States and market fears of supply shortfalls and conflicts in the Middle East after the Sept. 14 attack on Saudi Arabia faded. Brent crude futures were down $1.16, or 1.9%, at $60.75 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures fell $1.84, or 3.3%, to settle at $54.07. Both benchmarks were on track for little price changes in September after volatile month where prices spike nearly 20% after the attacks halved Saudi Arabia’s output, but have pared nearly all those gains as output has been quickly restored. For the quarter, however, global benchmark Brent was set for a 8.6% loss, while WTI was down about 6.1%, as concerns that the trade war between the United States and China has plunged global economic growth to its lowest levels in a decade weighed on oil demand growth. China’s official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) was slightly improved this month, increasing from 49.5 in August to 49.8 in September, but remained below the 50-point mark that separates expansion from contraction on a monthly basis, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed. China, the world’s largest crude importer, warned of instability in international markets from any “decoupling” of China and the United States, after sources said U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration was considering delisting Chinese companies from U.S. stock exchanges. “The U.S. and China are still far from any type of agreement. The concern is oil demand is not going to be there,” said Kyle Cooper, an oil analyst at IAF Advisors. Saudi Aramco last week restored full capacity to the level before the attacks on its oil facilities, Ibrahim Al-Buainain, chief executive officer of its trading arm, said on Monday at a conference in the United Arab Emirates. The world’s top oil exporter Saudi Arabia has restored capacity to 11.3 million barrels per day (bpd) after the attack knocked out 5.7 million bpd of the kingdom’s output, sources told Reuters last week, though Saudi Aramco has yet to confirm its operations have been restored fully.

False Optimism In Oil Won't Last - Oil prices fell on Monday on diminished hopes of a breakthrough in the U.S.-China trade war. Prices then stabilized in early trading on Tuesday, on news that U.S. oil production fell in July (much of which could be attributed to temporary hurricane-related outages). Saudi Aramco said that it is producing more than 9.9 mb/d, largely restoring production to levels seen prior to the Abqaiq attack. The company is still working on restoring damaged spare capacity. Saudi Arabia said that Aramco would pay $75 billion in annual dividends, an effort made to attract more investors ahead of the company’s IPO. The government also said that it would overhaul royalty payments and cut corporate tax. Fitch cut Saudi Aramco’s credit rating due to geopolitical risks from A+ to A, with a stable outlook. “The downgrade reflects rising geopolitical and military tensions in the Gulf region, Fitch’s revised assessment of the vulnerability of Saudi Arabia’s economic infrastructure and continued deterioration in Saudi Arabia’s fiscal and external balance sheets,” Fitch said in a release.  BP CEO Bob Dudley is expected to retire next year, ending his tenure at the British oil company that began in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster nearly a decade ago.   A growing number of U.S. oil companies are looking to list on the London Stock Exchange after falling out of favor with investors in New York and Toronto, according to the FT, which cited a few small-cap African-focused E&Ps that chose London rather than North America for a public listing. “There are investors in London with appetite for smaller cap African E&Ps,” Cary Bounds, Vaalco chief executive, told the FT. “Analysts in North America have an educated understanding of shale play but they struggle with us. London analysts understand how to value our business.”   Royal Dutch Shell provided a quarterly update ahead of its official third quarter earnings release at the end of October. Shell said its upstream production fell by 2.7 percent compared to a year earlier, while its LNG liquefaction rose by at least 10 percent. It also expects $250 to $350 million in write-offs due to unsuccessful exploration drilling. 

Oil prices recover on lower output from US, Russia, OPEC - Oil prices rebounded on Tuesday on reports that output from the world’s largest oil producers fell during the third quarter, although a resumption in Saudi supply and demand concerns kept a lid on gains. Brent crude futures rose 61 cents to $59.86 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was up 48 cents at $54.55 a barrel. Front-month prices for both contracts posted their largest quarterly falls this year on Monday, hurt by a slowdown in global economic growth amid the U.S.-China trade war. “Although oil has been given every opportunity to jump well above $70 per barrel due to geopolitical events, the fact that it did not is telling,” Tamas Varga of oil brokerage PVM said. “It suggests that the market is not concerned about eventual supply shortages but worried about global recession and possibly about supply surplus next year,” he added. Oil prices are likely to remain steady, with Brent averaging $65.19 a barrel and WTI $57.96 in 2019, as flagging demand outweighs supply shocks, a Reuters survey showed. Output from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries fell to the lowest in eight years in September at 28.9 million bpd, down 750,000 bpd from August’s revised figure and the lowest monthly total since 2011, a Reuters survey found. Output at the world’s two largest producers, the United States and Russia, also fell in July and September respectively. Russia’s output declined to 11.24 million bpd in Sept. 1-29, down from 11.29 million bpd in the previous month, sources said, although it is still above the quotas set in an output deal between Russia and OPEC. U.S. crude oil output fell 276,000 bpd in July to 11.81 million bpd as federal offshore Gulf of Mexico production slid, according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration monthly report released on Monday. U.S. production peaked at 12.12 million bpd in April.

Oil Prices Rebound After Ugly Day On Big Surprise Crude Draw - Oil prices tumbled back below pre-Saudi-attack levels today, near 2-month lows, as a global growth scare was sparked by disappointing PMIs around the world spooking the global energy demand bounceback narrative. WTI almost tested $52 handle intraday.“Demand fears are overriding supply fears,” Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group Inc., said by telephone. API:

• Crude -5.92mm (+2.25mm exp)
• Cushing +373k
• Gasoline +2.133mm
• Distillates -1.741mm

After the previous week's surprise crude build, traders expected another notable rise in stocks, but were surprised when API reported a large 5.92mm draw. Ahead of the print, WTI was trading well below the pre-Saudi attack levels...  WTI hovered around $53.70 into the API print and kneejerked back above $54 after the surprise draw...

Oil prices rise after surprise fall in U.S. crude stocks (Reuters) - Oil rebounded from several days of falling prices after industry data showed a surprise drop in U.S. crude inventories and offset weak economic readings in the United States that have depressed global stock markets. Brent crude rose 47 cents, or 0.8%, to $59.36 a barrel by 0657 GMT, claiming back some of the ground lost over the past three sessions. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was at $54.29 a barrel, up 67 cents or 1.3%. Front-month WTI prices settled down for a sixth straight session on Tuesday, their longest losing streak this year, after U.S. manufacturing activity dived to a 10-year low as U.S.-China trade tensions weighed on exports. "Brent and WTI have erased those (Tuesday) losses in early trade," Jeffrey Halley, a senior market analyst at OANDA in Singapore said, although the trading volume was low because of regional holidays. "We would expect the rallies to quickly run out of steam as we approach $61.00 and $55.00 a barrel," he said. Oil pared some losses in post-settlement trade on Tuesday after American Petroleum Institute (API) data showed U.S. crude stocks fell last week by 5.9 million barrels, against expectations for an increase of 1.6 million barrels. The Energy Information Administration's weekly oil inventories report is due at 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT) on Wednesday. Oil prices are now below levels from before the Sept. 14 attacks on Saudi oil facilities as the world's largest oil exporter has restored its full oil production and capacity. " Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said he would be willing to meet the oil minister of regional rival Saudi Arabia while in Moscow, but that the Saudis have a problem with meeting, according to the official IRNA news agency. "The energy market must be non-political in order to prevent unilateral and illegal interference," Zanganeh said upon arrival in Moscow for a meeting of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum. 

WTI Tumbles After Bigger Than Expected Crude Build - Oil prices have erased the immediate gains following last night's surprise crude draw reported by API as global growth scares accelerate and weigh on energy demand forecasts.“Demand fears are overriding supply fears,” Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group Inc., said by telephone. DOE:

• Crude +3.104mm (+2.25mm exp)
• Cushing -201k
• Gasoline -228k (+600k exp)
• Distillates -2.418mm

After last week's huge surprise builds in Crude stocks (and at Cushing), last night's API-reported big draw goes against analyst expectations of another build, but the analysts were right as DOE printed a 3.1mm barrel build. This is the 3rd weekly build in a row... “There’s a possibility that exports were super-sized” and after the Saudi Aramco attacks, “some customers were worried about their flows and wanted a more reliable flow, which would make the export number higher,” says Bob Yawger, director of the futures division of Mizuho Securities USA As the oil rig count continues to collapse, traders are watching avidly for signs that US Crude Production is topping out

 Oil Sinks Deeper Into Red as Stockpiles, Demand Concerns Grow - Oil prices fell for a seventh-straight session on Wednesday, succumbing to the double whammy of a bigger-than-expected build in crude inventories and a slump in Wall Street stocks. WTI futures settled down 98 cents, or 1.3%, at $52.64 per barrel. Global benchmark Brent settled down $1.20, or 2%, at $57.64. Crude prices have fallen without a pause since their last settlement higher on Sept. 23, losing about 11% in the seven-day stretch. Wednesday's slide came as concerns about the U.S. economy triggered another sharp selloff on Wall Street, with the S&P 500 off 1.7%, falling below 2,900. The ADP reported this morning that September private payrolls came in below expectations at 135,000. That followed Tuesday’s equity losses after the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing PMI came in at a 10-year low. That raises questions about future demand for oil in the U.S. at a time when global economies are already struggling. Meanwhile, U.S. oil inventories showed a gain of 3.1 million barrels last week, the Energy Information Administration reported. Analysts were expecting a rise of about 1.57 million barrels of crude for the week ended Sept. 27, according to forecasts compiled by Investing.com. “At the outset, a headline build that’s double expectations is certainly bearish, considering that the API even called for a drawdown of nearly 6 million barrels,” Investing.com analyst Barani Krishnan said. “And imports are still averaging below 7 million bpd, so we should logically have less oil in circulation, all things being equal.” “The mitigating factor might be that refinery runs remain grossly under the 95% level that we’ve become used to,” Krishnan added. “It could be the lingering impact of the recent floods in Texas and the disruption brought to refineries there.” The EIA said gasoline inventories for the week fell by about 230,000 barrels, confounding forecasts for a build of about 450,000 barrels. Distillate stockpiles dropped by about 2.4 million barrels. Analysts had been looking for a decline of about 1.8 million barrels.

 Oil extends losses as economic data, growing inventories drag - Oil futures extended losses on Thursday as weak economic data weighed on the outlook for fuel demand which was made worse by a larger than expected rise in U.S. crude inventories. “Crude oil prices fell as rising inventories added to the weakening economic backdrop,” said ANZ Bank in a note on Thursday. Brent crude oil futures fell 17 cents, or 0.3%, to $57.52 a barrel by 0052 GMT, after tumbling 2% in the previous session. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures fell 9 cents, or 0.2%, to $52.55 a barrel, after sinking by 1.8% on Wednesday. “What’s impossible to ignore is the economic realities being signaled in the latest run of doom and gloom financial market data which offers few if any reason for oil investors to be optimistic over the outlook for global demand,” World equity benchmarks hit their lowest levels in a month on Wednesday as signs of a slowdown in U.S. economic growth and weak earnings in Europe fanned fears that the U.S.-China trade war could push the global economy into a recession. “While the near-term triggers may continue to relate to oil demand, next week U.S.-China trade talks remain the unknown variable which could lend a modicum of support,” U.S. crude inventories rose 3.1 million barrels last week, the Energy Information Administration said on Wednesday, far exceeding analyst expectations for an increase of 1.6 million barrels. WTI futures are on track for eight straight sessions of declines, their longest losing streak since November 2018. Brent futures are now below levels seen before the Sept. 14 attacks on Saudi Arabia oil facilities that briefly halved more than half the kingdom’s output.

Oil ends little changed after touching near two-month lows (Reuters) - U.S. crude futures were slightly lower on Thursday, drawing some support from the stock market after earlier touching nearly two-month lows on weak economic data. U.S. crude settled at $52.45 a barrel, down 19 cents. Global benchmark Brent crude settled up 2 cents at $57.71 a barrel. During the session, both benchmarks tumbled to the lowest level seen since early August, plunging as weak U.S. economic figures were released. U.S. services sector growth slowed to its most anaemic pace in three years last month, and job growth in the largest slice of the American economy was the weakest in half a decade, a survey of purchasing managers showed. Even as U.S. crude pared losses late in the day, crude futures have found lower lows in each of the last eight sessions, said Bob Yawger, director of energy futures at Mizuho in New York. "From both a supply and demand situation it seems to be a problem: storage is the supply side, economic data is the demand side and they're both on the wrong side of the letter," Yawger said. Across the Atlantic, economic data has also put pressure on crude. Euro zone business growth stalled in September, a survey on Thursday showed. Lending oil some support were hopes that the United States and China might make progress in resolving their trade dispute and figures showing output in the United States - which has been the fastest source of supply growth - fell in July. "Next week U.S.-China trade talks remain the unknown variable which could lend a modicum of support," said Stephen Innes, market strategist at AxiTrader. The talks are set to resume on Oct. 10. This year, Brent has risen about 7%, supported by supply cuts led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies including Russia, plus involuntary outages such as a drop in Iranian and Venezuelan exports due to U.S. sanctions. Nonetheless, concern about the worsening economic outlook has overshadowed support from the supply side and the prospect of further output disruption in the Middle East appears of limited concern to investors. Brent spiked to $72 a barrel on Sept. 16 following attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil installations that shut more than half of the country's output. But both oil benchmarks are now below their pre-attack levels after the Saudi authorities resumed output.

Oil Markets: Everything Is About Weak Demand - Oil prices dropped sharply during trading on Thursday but recovered on hopes of more aggressive action from the Federal Reserve. The U.S. jobs report on Friday revealed more weakness, but it wasn’t as poor as feared. Geopolitical risk has receded from the top of minds of oil traders. Everything is about weak demand now.    Largely due to the Abqaiq attack, OPEC’s oil production fell sharply in September. It was the single-largest disruption in history when it occurred, although its short duration meant that the outage fell short of the PDVSA strike in 2002 in terms of total volumes lost. Still, oil prices languish as demand continues to weaken. “Oil-demand growth is hitting the skids as macroeconomic, trade, and political risk drivers continue to intensify, from Brexit to impeachment through Persian Gulf conflict risk and the U.S.-China trade war,” Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group, told Bloomberg.  Iraqi security forces have tried to violently suppress widespread protests in the country, and there is little sign of a resolution. Oil production has not been affected yet.   The U.S. strategic petroleum reserve is thought to be a massive trove of oil that can be readily deployed. For instance, in a hypothetical outage in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. should be expected to withdraw 3.5 mb/d of oil from the SPR. But the reserve might not be able to pull that off. Changes in pipeline flows, and huge increases in upstream production mean that only about 1.5 mb/d can be drawn down at a time, according to Platts. Climate Action 100+, a group of investors overseeing $35 trillion, says that of the most polluting companies in the world, only about 9 percent have aligned their operations with the Paris Climate Agreement. The investor group has already pressured oil companies, including Royal Dutch Shell and BP to take more aggressive action. Exxon and Shell both issued profit warnings this week ahead of their third quarter reports later this month. Exxon said its earnings would be around 50 percent lower than the same quarter last year, largely due to lower oil prices.  Ecuador said that it would leave OPEC in January due to fiscal problems. 

 Oil edges higher but on track for big weekly loss - Oil futures edged higher on Friday but were on track for a large weekly loss on fears that slower global economic growth will hurt fuel demand, while Saudi Arabia said it has fully restored oil output after recent attacks. Brent crude oil futures rose 8 cents, or 0.1%, to $57.79 a barrel by 0138 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures rose 12 cents, or 0.2%, to $52.57 a barrel. For the week, Brent futures were down 6.7%, marking its largest weekly loss since December, while WTI was down 6%, its biggest decline since July. Weak U.S. services sector and jobs growth data on Thursday added to worries about global oil demand and exacerbated fears that a protracted U.S.-China trade war could push the global economy into a recession. “Concerns about global oil demand are rising, and next week’s U.S.-China trade talks, the significant X factor, will be particularly important, given the sharp drop in the oil price over the last week,” said Stephen Innes, Asia Pacific market strategist at AxiTrader. Saudi Arabia’s energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman also said on Thursday the world’s top crude oil exporter has fully restored oil output after attacks on its facilities last month that knocked out more than 5% of global oil supply. “The mood wasn’t helped by news that Saudi Arabia has managed a speedy recovery from the recent attacks,” ANZ Bank said in a note on Friday. However, recent data showing a slowdown in U.S. shale output and drilling activity could lend some support.

 US oil prices snap 8-day losing streak, fall over 5% for the week - Oil futures settled higher Friday, with U.S. benchmark crude breaking an eight-day string of losses, but still posted its biggest weekly loss since mid-July, after a run of weak economic data underlined concerns over global demand. Oil prices staged a rebound Friday, said Lukman Otunuga, senior research analyst at FXTM. “This has nothing to do with a change of sentiment towards the commodity.” West Texas Intermediate crude for November delivery CLX19, +0.38%  rose 36 cents, or 0.7%, to settle at $52.81 a barrel, with the U.S. benchmark logging a 5.5% weekly loss. That was the biggest weekly net and percentage loss since the week ended July 19, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The global benchmark, December Brent crude BRNZ19, +0.10%, rose 66 cents, or 1.1%, to $58.37 a barrel—for a 4.4% weekly decline. Over in the U.S., weekly data on active domestic oil rigs was supportive for prices. Baker Hughes BHGE, -0.97%  on Friday reported that the number of active U.S. rigs drilling for oil fell by three to 710 this week. That followed declines in each of the last six weeks.Still, “given how global growth concerns and rising U.S. oil inventories are bringing demand-side dynamics back into the picture, oil is positioned to extend losses,” said Otunuga.Attacks on Saudi oil production facilities on September 14 briefly provided a supply side shock before recent weak economic data revived fears about global oil demand. “A flare up in U.S.-China trade tensions is likely to fan concerns over the global economy, ultimately igniting fears around falling demand for crude, [and] while geopolitical tensions may spark negative supply side shocks, this will ultimately be countered by demand-side themes,” said Otunuga. The U.S. and China are due to resume talks on their two year old trade dispute next week. Oil prices ended up after the U.S. Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy added 136,000 new jobs in September, slightly less than forecast, and the pace of job growth fell to the slowest in four months, but the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 3.5%, the lowest rate since December 1969. Back on Nymex, November gasoline RBX19, +0.17%  rose 1.1% to $1.5734 a gallon, with the contract registering weekly decline of 2.1%, while November heating HOX19, +0.18%  rose 1% to $1.8945 a gallon—ending down 2.1% for the week. November natural-gas futures NGX19, -0.13%  climbed 1% to $2.352 per million British thermal units, with prices down 2.2% for the week.

Exclusive: In Saudi Arabia, criticism of Crown Prince grows after attack (Reuters) - Some members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family and business elite have expressed frustration with the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman following the largest-ever attack on the kingdom’s oil infrastructure last month.It has sparked concern among several prominent branches of the ruling Al Saud family, which numbers around 10,000 members, about the crown prince’s ability to defend and lead the world’s largest oil exporter, according to a senior foreign diplomat and five sources with ties to the royals and business elite. All spoke on condition of anonymity. The attack has also fanned discontent among some in elite circles who believe the crown prince, known in the West by the initials MbS, has sought too tight a grip on power, the sources said. Some of these people said the event has also fueled criticism among those who believe he has pursued an overly aggressive stance towards Iran. “There is a lot of resentment” about the crown prince’s leadership, said one of the sources, a member of the Saudi elite with royal connections. “How were they not able to detect the attack?” This person added that some people in elite circles are saying they have “no confidence” in the crown prince, an assertion echoed by the four other sources and the senior diplomat. The crown prince nonetheless has staunch supporters. A Saudi source within circles loyal to the crown prince said: “The latest events won’t affect him personally as a potential ruler because he is trying to stop the Iranian expansion in the region. This is a patriotic issue, and so he won’t be in danger, at least as long as the father lives.”

Iran's oil minister dismisses tensions over Aramco attack; says Saudi energy minister is a 'friend' -- Geopolitical tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia might be the biggest issue facing the Middle East right now but Iran’s oil minister has insisted he has a good rapport with his Saudi Arabian counterpart.“Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman (Saudi Arabia’s new energy minister) has been a friend for over 22 years,” Iranian oil minister Bijan Zanganeh told an energy conference in Moscow on Wednesday.Although Iran and Saudi Arabia are both members of OPEC, they are known to disagree over OPEC policy — Saudi Arabia has led cuts to OPEC production but Iran, under U.S. sanctions on its oil industry, did not want to cut output.  It is currently exempt from the output cuts agreed by OPEC and a group of non-OPEC producers.Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia has long been tensed because of the rival religious powers’ power struggle (often by proxy) in the region.“Despite this long-term up and down political relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia we have been friends and I hope to be friends in future, we have no difficulty with him,” he said, adding that the difficulty in Saudi-Iranian relations was not created from the Iranian side. “We believe that all the Muslim countries, all the neighbor countries, should have a peaceful environment between themselves … Our enemy is another country out of this area,” he said, making a thinly veiled swipe at the U.S.

Saudi Arabia accepts cease fire in Yemen - "Saudi Arabia has agreed to a limited cease-fire in several areas of Yemen including the capital Sana’a, which is controlled by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, as part of broader efforts to end a four-year conflict that has threatened to escalate into regional war.A Yemeni government official and a diplomat said attempts were underway to expand the truce. Saudi officials couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.Last week, the Houthis announced a unilateral halt to the hundreds of drone and missile attacks that have targeted OPEC’s largest producer in recent years.The apparent breakthroughs follow a devastating attack on major Saudi oil facilities that briefly halved the country’s output and rattled global markets this month. Yemen’s Houthis said they carried out the attack using a swarm of unmanned aircraft, but the U.S. has said Iran was responsible."  yahoo, Bloomberg, etc.-------------- This doesn't fit the US government BS narrative in which it was IRAN who attacked at Abqaiq and Khareus.  Pompeo scoffed the other day at the idea that the Yemeni rebels could have done the deed, but here we have the obvious truth.Saudi Arabia would not have negotiated a cease fire with the Yemeni rebels if it had not been the Yemenis who attacked them. They know that if there is not a cease fire there will be more attacks against their petroleum infrastructure and possibly their desal plants without which they cannot survive. Remember this the next time Pompeo tells you anything.  He evidently forgot the word "honor" in the West Point motto. 

Fitch downgrades Saudi Arabia's credit rating stressing a 'risk of further attacks' — Saudi Arabia’s strong credit rating has been taken down a notch by a major ratings agency thanks to geopolitical risks and concerns over the safety of its economic infrastructure. Fitch has downgraded the kingdom’s long-term foreign currency issuer default rating from A+ to A, the New York-based agency announced Monday. Its outlook remains stable. “The downgrade reflects rising geopolitical and military tensions in the Gulf region, Fitch’s revised assessment of the vulnerability of Saudi Arabia’s economic infrastructure and continued deterioration in Saudi Arabia’s fiscal and external balance sheets,” Fitch said in a release. The downgrade comes roughly two weeks after the heart of the kingdom’s oil infrastructure was hit by a drone and cruise missile attack that Riyadh and Washington have blamed on Iran. Riyadh was quick to rebuke the agency’s move. “The Ministry of Finance is disappointed that Fitch took a swift decision to downgrade the Kingdom,” read a statement issued by Saudi Arabia’s finance ministry within a few hours of Fitch’s announcement. “Rather, the event highlights Saudi Arabia’s outstanding capacity to effectively deal with adversities, commitment to maintaining stability in the global oil markets, and the Kingdom’s status as an important international ally,” it said. “As such, the downgrade of the rating comes across as somewhat speculative without direct reference to the swift, decisive and effective response to the event,” the ministry added.

The Military Officials Who Knew Saudi Arabia Would Fail - While it’s seems axiomatic that most Americans suffer from historical amnesia, that’s not necessarily true for the U.S. military. And as America and Iran were sprinting towards a military confrontation last week, a recently retired senior U.S. military officer expounded on what he called “the bumbling, incompetent and feckless stupidity of it all.” The target of the officer’s ire was not Donald Trump (whom he admires) or Mike Pompeo (who he doesn’t), but Saudi Arabia’s March 2015 decision to go to war against the Iranian-allied Houthi tribal movement in Yemen —“which is,” he argues, “how all of this nonsense got started in the first place.” He explained: “We didn’t see the [Saudi] invasion [of Yemen] coming and we were shocked when it happened. But we were pretty blunt. We told them, ‘you can’t win and you’ll bankrupt your country. It’ll be a quagmire.’ And we were right.” This officer’s “we-told-ya-so” narrative, as it turns out, is accurate. Saudi Arabia’s invasion of Yemen to destroy the Houthi rebellion (and reinstate the government of Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi) not only surprised the Obama administration, it was met with nearly open disdain by the U.S. military. Key senior officers of the U.S. Special Operations Command viewed the Houthis as a robust counter to al-Qaeda’s strength in Yemen and even argued that America take steps to support them. “The Houthis were only nominally Iran’s surrogates,” a military officer told me at the time, “but they were also our quiet partners against al-Qaeda.” Yet back in 2015, because of the Saudi invasion (with support from nine other Arab states), the possibility that the Pentagon could count on Houthi backing was not only off the table, senior Pentagon officials predicted that the tribe would strengthen its ties with their Shia co-religionists in Iran—something that, prior to the Saudi invasion, it hadn’t wanted to do. That’s why key segments of the U.S. military thought the Saudi invasion was a mistake.

Yemen- Houthis claim capture of thousands of troops in Saudi raid - Yemen's Houthi movement has said it carried out an attack near the border with the southwestern Saudi region of Najran and captured "thousands" of enemy troops including several Saudi army officers but there was no immediate confirmation from the authorities in Saudi Arabia. A spokesman for the Yemen-based rebels said in a statement on Saturday that three "enemy military brigades had fallen" in the attack, which he said was launched 72 hours earlier in the vicinity of Najran and was supported by the group's drone, missile and air defence units. Houthi-run Almasirah TV quoted the spokesman as saying they captured "thousands" of enemy troops, including many officers and soldiers of the Saudi army, as well as "hundreds of armoured vehicles". The Houthi military spokesperson said the operation reveals to Saudi Arabia that the Yemeni fighters are capable of further penetrating into Saudi territories "in case it continues its aggression against Yemen". Reporting from Sanaa, Al Jazeera's Mohammed al-Attab said the Houthis claimed to have carried out "sniper shooting and other tactics in order to further tighten their grip on the three military brigades" claimed to have been captured. "The Houthi military spokesperson revealed that those who have been captured will be put in undisclosed areas in order to protect them from Saudi airstrikes," he said. "They are assuring the families of the prisoners of war that they will be kept in a secret place in order to keep them safe from any harm." The Houthis, who control the northern part of Yemen, have recently stepped up their drone and missile attacks across the southern border of Saudi Arabia. The rebels claimed responsibility for a September 14 assault on two facilities run by Saudi's state oil company, Aramco. The attack slashed Saudi Arabia's crude oil output by half, accounting for about five percent of the world supply. However, the United States, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany and the UK said Iran was behind the attacks, ratcheting up already heightened tensions in the region. 

Houthis claim to have killed 500 Saudi soldiers in major attack - Houthi rebels in Yemen say they have killed 500 Saudi soldiers, captured a further 2,000 and seized a convoy of Saudi military vehicles.The extraordinary claims at a press conference on Sunday, involving still photographs and inconclusive videos of captured soldiers, many not in uniform, could not be corroborated, and there was no independent confirmation from Saudi Arabia.The Houthis, showing pictures of upturned Saudi vehicles and immobilised convoys, claimed the attacks had occurred over the past three days in the southern Najran region of Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen, and would continue with greater intensity.“Operation Victory from God is the largest military one since the brutal aggression began. The enemy suffered heavy losses … and wide swathes of territory were liberated in only a few days,” said the Houthi spokesman, Mohammed Abdul Salam.He also claimed hundreds of Saudi soldiers lay dead or injured on the battlefield, and Riyadh had little option but to consider how to withdraw. He said the Houthis would end their attacks if the Saudis took reciprocal measures.The attacks, if verified, would be a remarkable show of force inside Saudi Arabia and mark another embarrassment for the kingdom, after its US-made Patriot missile defence system failed to protect two Saudi Aramco oil sites from an attack by drones and cruise missiles earlier this month. On Saturday, the Houthis claimed they had captured three Saudi brigades – a major proportion of the kingdom’s army. The group also says it was responsible for the oil attacks, but this has been disputed by western and European governments.

Footage appears to show Canadian-made armoured vehicle captured by Yemen rebels in fighting with Saudis - Yemen’s Houthi rebels have released video footage of the aftermath of a battle with Saudi forces which appears to show a captured Canadian-made light armoured vehicle. The footage was released Sunday in what the rebels say started as an ambush inside Saudi Arabia but then turned into a major cross-border battle. The footage of the battle was shown on Houthi-run Al Masirah TV and Al Jazeera. The rebels claimed that the attack killed or wounded 500 Saudi soldiers. Saudi Arabia has not acknowledged the fighting and the Houthi claims have not been independently verified. The footage shows the captured light armoured vehicle, another destroyed light armoured vehicle as well as armoured trucks provided to the Saudis by the U.S. company Oshkosh. The footage also showed Saudi troops who were taken prisoner. Over the years, Saudi Arabia has purchased light armoured vehicles from Canada’s General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada in London, Ont. In 2014, the then Conservative government announced a deal worth an estimated $15 billion to sell Saudi Arabia more than 700 light armoured vehicles. That controversial deal was later approved by the Liberal government. A Saudi-led coalition, which has been provided with arms and intelligence from the U.S. and other western nations, intervened in Yemen in 2015 after the Houthis overthrew the government. Saudi Arabia has faced severe criticism for its role in the ongoing war in Yemen, with allegations it has conducted unlawful airstrikes on civilians.

Yemen's Houthi rebels release Saudi attack video - Yemen's Houthi rebels on Sunday broadcast footage they said was of a major attack on Saudi Arabia in August that killed or wounded 500 soldiers with thousands of others surrendering. Yahya Saree, a Houthi military spokesman, described an ambush on the Saudi forces that then developed into an "all-out" cross-border offensive that trapped the troops inside Saudi Arabia."More than 200 were killed in dozens of [missile and drone] strikes while trying to escape or surrender," Saree said.The fighting took place in the southern region of Najran with video images aired showing armoured vehicles hit by blasts and surrendering soldiers.Saudi Arabia has not yet responded to the Houthi claim. Al Jazeera was not independently able to verify the footage or claims broadcast on Houthi-run Al Masirah TV.Saree said the offensive 72 hours earlier had defeated three "enemy military brigades", leading to the capture of "thousands" of troops, including Saudi army officers and soldiers, and hundreds of armoured vehicles.He said the prisoners "will be treated according to the ethics and the customs on the basis of a deal to exchange the POWs with the aggressors."The video showed armoured vehicles, some ablaze, with stencilled Saudi markings, along with large piles of weapons and ammunition the rebels say they seized. The images also appeared to show bodies and men in Saudi military uniforms. Several identified themselves as Saudis.

Houthis announce release of hundreds of prisoners - Houthi rebels have announced the unconditional release of 350 prisoners, including three Saudi Arabians, days after the Yemeni group claimed to have captured thousands of Saudi troops following an incursion into Saudi Arabia, according to Houthi-run Al Masirah TV. A statement by the Houthi National Committee for Prisoners' Affairs (NCPA) carried by Al Masirah TV said the individuals were on the list of persons drawn up as part of the prisoner exchange deal agreed in Stockholm in December.The United Nations-brokered prisoner swap, one of the three pillars of the breakthrough deal, involving some 7,000 detainees on each side had stalled as the two sides - the Houthisand the Yemeni government - struggled to agree on its implementation."Our initiative proves our credibility in implementing the Sweden agreement and we call on the other party to take a comparable step," said Abdul Qader al-Murtada, head of the NCPA, in the statement carried by the Houthi-run broadcaster."We decided to release 350 prisoners because nothing from Sweden agreement have been achieved. The release is going take place today," the NCPA statement read.Separately, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which facilitated the release, put the number of those freed at 290.The detainees were taken in Houthi raids since 2014, when the rebels overran the capital, Sanaa, and much of the north.The UN Special Envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths - who supervised the Stockholm agreement - welcomed the offer to unilaterally release a number of detainees, saying he hoped it would lead to further progress on an agreed prisoner exchange deal. The Houthis said the release of the prisoners was a gesture of goodwill to the Saudi-UAE-led coalition, which has carried out the bombing in support of the internationally recognised government of Abd-Rabbu Mansur Hadi since 2015.

Three Saudi Brigades Annihilated in Devastating Houthi Offensive in Saudi Arabia — Many may have hitherto been led to believe that the Houthis were a ragtag armed force lacking in sophistication. Many, seeing the drone and missile attacks on Saudi oil plants, may have declared it to be a false-flag attack carried out by Riyadh to boost Aramco’s market value; either that or it was an operation carried out by Iran or even Israel. On Saturday September 28, the Houthis put paid to such speculation by confirming what many, like myself, have been writing for months; that is, that the asymmetrical tactics of the Houthis, combined with the conventional capabilities of the Yemeni army, are capable of bringing the Saudi kingdom of Mohammed Bin Salman to its knees. The Yemeni army’s missile forces are able to carry out highly complex attacks, no doubt as a result of reconnaissance provided by the local Shia population within the Kingdom that is against the House of Saud’s dictatorship. These Houthi sympathisers within Saudi Arabia helped in target identification, carried out reconnaissance within the plants, found the most vulnerable and impactful points, and passed this intelligence on to the Houthis and Yemeni army. These Yemeni forces employed locally produced means to severely degrade Saudi Arabia’s crude-oil-extraction and processing plants. The deadly strikes halved oil production and threatened to continue with other targets if the Saudi-conducted genocide in Yemen did not stop. On Saturday 29 the Houthis and the Yemeni army conducted an incredible conventional attack lasting three days that began from within Yemen’s borders. The operation would have involved months of intelligence gathering and operational planning. It was a far more complex attack than that conducted against Aramco’s oil facilities. Initial reports indicate that the forces of the Saudi-led coalition were lured into vulnerable positions and then, through a pincer movement conducted quickly within Saudi territory, the Houthis surrounded the town of Najran and its outskirts and got the better of three Saudi brigades numbering in the thousands and including dozens of senior officers as well as numerous combat vehicles. This event is a game changer, leaving the US, Mike Pompeo and the Israelis and Saudis unable to lay the blame on Iran as all this took place a long way from Iran. The large-scale operation was preceded by Yemeni rocket artillery targeting Jizan airport, with 10 missiles paralyzing any movements to and from the airport, including denying the possibility of air support for the encircled troops. The Houthis also hit the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh in a key operation that targeted Apache helicopters, forcing them to leave the area. Nearby military bases were also targeted so as to cut off any reinforcements and disrupt the chain of command. This led to the Saudi forces fleeing in disorganization. Images shown by the Houthis show a road in the middle of a valley on the outskirts of Najran with dozens of Saudi armored vehicles trying to flee while being attacked from both sides by Houthi RPGs together with heavy and light weapons. Visual confirmation of the debacle can be seen in the number of casualties as well as in the number of prisoners taken. Images show lines of Saudi prisoners walking under Yemeni guard towards prison camps. This is something extraordinary to behold: the Saudi army, the third largest purchaser of weapons in the world, getting comprehensively walloped by one of the poorest countries in the world. The numbers say it all: the Houthis were able to control more than 350 kilometers of Saudi territory. Given that the Saudi military budget is almost 90 billion dollars a year, this achievement is made all the more extraordinary.

MBS must shelve his vicious war in Yemen  -Never underestimate the power of blowback. Right now, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of the House of Saud, is staring at it, an ominous abyss opened by the Houthis in Yemen. This past weekend, Yemeni Armed Forces spokesman Brigadier Yahya al-Sari clinicallydescribed how Ansarallah, also known as the Houthi rebel movement, aided by what Yemenis describe as “popular committees,” captured three Saudi brigades of 2,400 – ragged – soldiers, plus Yemeni and Sudanese mercenaries as well as several hundred battle vehicles. At least 500 Saudi soldiers were killed, Ansarallah said. (A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition denied the claim). This was part of the significantly named Operation Nasrallah in Najran province, Saudi Arabia. The Houthis, who did learn a lot, tactically and strategically, from Hezbollah, duly praised mujahideen and ‘popular committees’ involved in Operation Nasrallah.Col. Pat Lang, in his blog, offers a particularly useful observation on the captured Saudi vehicles. Some belonged to the Saudi National Guard (SANG): “I suppose these troops were from the modernized SANG that the US has worked hard to train and equip for fifty years or more. The easy surrender of these Bedouins is very bad news for the Saudi monarchy.” Najran, the site of the successful raid, is a Shi’ite majority province. But unlike the Eastern province, concentrating the bulk of the Saudi oil industry, where the Shi’ites are Twelvers – believers in twelve divinely ordained leaders, awaiting the reappearance of the last of those twelve imams as the promised Mahdi – in Najran the majority are Ismailis. Until recently, they had been relatively accommodating to the rabidly anti-Shi’ite House of Saud.Not anymore. As I reported before, increasingly daring Houthi operations inside Saudi Arabia can only be successful with solid, on-the-ground intelligence. As for the captured, ragged Saudi soldiers, Mohamed Al-Bukhaiti, who is part of Ansarallah’s political wing, confirms they are mostly takfiris – true believers who think they see among their fellow Muslims legions of apostates, deserving of the death penalty – and jihadis. The capital Sana’a was taken over by the Houthi movement, and not only the Houthi tribe.This is essential to understand the fact that most of north Yemen has by now adhered to the Houthi movement – which also happens to double as the government of north Yemen. It’s not far-fetched to project that the Houthi movement may end up uniting the overwhelming majority of Yemen against the House of Saud.Al-Emad was keen to point out that among the dizzyingly complex Yemeni tribal mosaic, the only unifying factor is the fight against a foreign invader – and in this case serial bomber, responsible since 2015 for provoking the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world according to the UN.

Fire engulfs new Saudi high-speed rail station in Jeddah - Online videos showed what appeared to be major structural damage. The station is the centerpiece of a new multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project. A massive fire on Sunday ripped through a new high-speed train station leaving at least five people injured in Saudi Arabia's coastal city of Jeddah. Videos posted on social media showed black plumes of smoke billowing out of the Haramain train station and helicopters flying over the scene. Online videos showed nearly a dozen people on the roof of the structure. The fire department is currently fighting the blaze with air support, and has brought many sections of the blaze under control. Those injured have been taken to hospital, according to the official Twitter account of the Mecca region. It stated that 16 medical teams were working at the scene and had treated another four injured at the site. There was no immediate known cause of the fire. The €6.7 billion ($7.3 billion) Haramain Railway was inaugurated last September to connect the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina with the Red Sea city of Jeddah with electric trains traveling up to 300 kilometers per hour (186 miles per hour). Read more: Saudi Arabia offers foreign tourists visas for first time Officials described the 450-kilometer (280-mile) line as one of the most important transportation expansion projects in the kingdom's rail network and the biggest electric speed train project in the Middle East.

Map Shows "Four Times As Many Jihadist Militants" Around The World Than Before 9/11 - A recently produced map outlines that nearly two decades after 9/11 and in the wake of the so-called "war on terror" global militant jihadists are stronger than ever in terms of numbers. It's yet more confirmation that American interventionism abroad has actually done more to fuel Islamic terrorism than it has to stamp it out — Libya and Syria being foremost recent examples of Washington fueling jihad for half-baked, destabilizing regime change projects, to say nothing of Bush's Iraq war, which CIA officers themselves have admitted birthed ISIS in the first place.  The map published by the DC-based Center For Strategic and International Studies lays out just how expanded the global Salafi-Jihadist terrorism threat has become over the past few years.  There are nearly four times as many Salafi-Jihadist militants around the world today than before 9/11: https://t.co/0B8TleXYrf pic.twitter.com/1L378hIbdD  "Despite nearly two decades of U.S.-led counterterrorism operations, there are nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants today as there were on September 11, 2001," the prior CSIS study found.  By the numbers, they include—

• Syria: largest number of fighters at between 43,650 and 70,550 (most now in Idlib province)
• Afghanistan: between 27,000 and 64,060 and increasingly resurgent
• Pakistan: between 17,900 and 39,540
• Iraq: between 10,000 and 15,000
• Nigeria: between 3,450 and 6,900
• Somolia: between 3,095 and 7,240

Of course, it remains that many of the very think tanks highlighting the expanded jihadist threat use such numbers to argue, ironically enough, simply doing more of the same anytime there's a push from the administration to "bring the troops home".

 Iran's President Asserts Wherever America Has Gone, Terrorism Has Expanded - Publicly available evidence seems to indicate there is some truth to the Iranian’s president’s words. Take, for example, a recent article in the journal Environmental Pollution, which discusses the results of a study undertaken in Nasiriyah near Tallil Air Base.Over the years, Dr Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan has conducted several investigations in Iraq to better understand the affects of pollutants and toxic chemicals on the Iraqi people from the US-led war in Iraq.According to Savabieasfahani, the levels of thorium in children born with congenital disabilities near the Talil Base were up to 28 times higher than compared to children who were born without congenital disabilities and whom lived further away from the military base.The culprit behind these defects is depleted uranium (DU). For a significant period of time, DU was so attractive to U.S. and NATO militaries due to its dense nature, which allows it to pierce even armored trucks. It was used on a large scale during the first Gulf War, and has been used quite extensively by the U.S. ever since.The American military used some 944,000 rounds of DU bullets in Iraq and Kuwait during the first Gulf war, and was estimated to use 4,000,000 pounds in the 2003 invasion.Since the Iraq war, incidences of cancer and congenital defects have increased significantly. By detecting thorium in the teeth and hair of Iraqi children born with congenital disabilities near the base in question, the causative link between DU and these defects seems to be ever more apparent. Thorium is a decay-product of depleted uranium and is otherwise radioactive.As Truthout explains:“For years following the 2003 U.S-led invasion, Iraqi doctors raised alarms about increasing numbers of babies being born with congenital disabilities in areas of heavy fighting. Other peer-reviewed studies found dramatic increases in child cancer, leukemia, miscarriages and infant mortality in cities such as Fallujah, which saw the largest battles of the war. Scientists, Iraqi physicians and international observers have long suspected depleted uranium to be the culprit. In 2014, one Iraqi doctor told Truthout reporter Dahr Jamail that depleted uranium pollution amounted to ‘genocide.’” The U.S. military has doomed the futures of countless innocent children who probably wouldn’t have even been born during Saddam Hussein’s rule. For what? And what does it take to wake up the American public to the fact that just because the U.S. is not actively bombing Iraq into oblivion at this point in time, it does not mean that we turn our minds off from the fact a grave crime has been committed? Victims of that crime will continue feeling the effects of this collective punishment for decades to come. Will these victims receive justice?

Iran sentences man to death for spying for the CIA - (Reuters) - Iranian courts have sentenced one person to death for spying for the CIA and jailed two others for 10 years for the same crime, as well as imprisoning a fourth person for 10 years for spying for Britain, the judiciary said on Tuesday. The verdicts come amid spiraling tensions between Tehran and the United States since President Donald Trump last year withdrew from Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with major powers and reimposed sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy in order to force Tehran to renegotiate the pact. It was not immediately clear if any of the cases were linked to Iran’s announcement in July that it captured 17 spies working for the CIA. “One person has been sentenced to death for spying for America’s intelligence service ... but the ruling has been appealed,” judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili was quoted as saying by the judiciary’s news website Mizan. The other two men, identified as Ali Nefriyeh and Mohammad Ali Babapour, received final 10-year sentences for spying for the CIA, and were ordered to repay $55,000 they had received, he said. Mohammad Amin-Nasab was sentenced to 10 years in prison for spying for British intelligence, Esmaili said.

Pentagon shifts Mideast command center to US in preparation for war on Iran - In an action with ominous implications, the Pentagon over the weekend shifted the operations of the command and control center for its warplanes in the Middle East from its long-time base in Qatar to a South Carolina air base more than 7,000 miles away. The transfer of the so-called US Air Force Combined Air and Space Operations Center from the Al Udeid Air Base in the Qatari desert to South Carolina’s Shaw Air Force Base was carried out on Saturday. After a 24-hour period, operations were shifted back again to Al Udeid. The Washington Post, which was invited to witness the transfer and first reported on it Sunday, cited US commanders as indicating that the transfer, which amounted to a dress rehearsal, was carried out with some “urgency” due to “constant Iranian threats of targeting US bases in the region in case of any military conflict.” The report added that issue had become more pressing following the September 14 attacks on Saudi oil installations, which temporarily cut the kingdom’s production in half and sent oil prices soaring by 20 percent. While Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the attack, Washington, the Saudi monarchy and the major European imperialist powers have blamed Iran, while as yet providing no evidence to support their accusations. “Iran has indicated multiple times through multiple sources their intent to attack U.S. forces,” Col. Frederick Coleman, commander of the 609th Air and Space Operations Center, told the Post.

The U.S. Navy Isn't Ready to Take On Iran - Whatever lay behind the indecisive Trump administration response to the alleged Sept. 14 Iranian missile and drone strike on Saudi oil facilities, one thing is clear. The United States’ ability to project power into the Persian Gulf region via carrier strike groups, the go-to U.S. option in such situations for decades, is not what it used to be, nor what it might have been. Not long ago, a modern version of gunboat diplomacy—dispatching carriers or guided missile cruisers to the region to loiter menacingly offshore—could have decisively influenced events. In 1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton reacted to provocative Chinese war games off Taiwan by sending two carriers to the Taiwan Strait, leading Beijing to back down in a humiliation cited frequently today as a reason for China’s own naval buildup.  Today, however, such a deployment would no longer elicit the same response in a potential adversary. In part, the change reflects the closing of the enormous technological advantage the U.S. Navy had enjoyed for decades over any realistic rival. New classes of quiet diesel submarines and new developments in mine and torpedo technology make operations close to tense coastlines far more dangerous today than in the past. As a result, U.S. aircraft carriers are no longer immune from risk when entering waters within range of enemy forces.  More serious still is the deployment of Russian and Chinese area denial systems, like the so-called carrier killer DF-21 antiship missile developed in the last decade by China. Its range of over 1,000 miles far outstrips the range of any warplane on U.S. flight decks today. Sailing a U.S. carrier strike force through the Taiwan Strait these days—in a show of support for pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong, for instance—would risk catastrophe. Iran does not yet possess anything as sophisticated as China’s DF-21. However, its domestically produced Noor antiship missile (itself a reverse-engineered rip-off of an earlier Chinese cruise missile) is dangerous at over 100 miles. In 2016, the USS Mason, a destroyer ship, discovered as much when it was targeted by several Noor missiles apparently fired by Iran’s Houthi rebel allies in Yemen. The combination of these missiles and Iran’s fleet of fast and cheap patrol boats has been enough to keep the USS Lincoln out of the Persian Gulf as tensions between Iran and the United States increased this summer.  President Donald Trump’s options will be limited, likely confined to surface warships and submarines capable of launching long-range cruise missiles, warplanes based in politically sensitive and unreliable Middle Eastern countries, or strategic bombers such as the B-52 and B-2s based half a world away. Naval air power, which since World War II has been the main weapon in the U.S. arsenal in such scenarios, is quite suddenly nearly irrelevant.

 Iraqi PM For First Time Confirms Israel Responsible For Multiple Strikes On Iraq - For the first time Iraq's government has issued formal charges blaming Israel for a spate of attacks on Iraqi soil over the past months. Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said on Monday the result of weeks-long investigations into multiple airstrikes and violations of Iraq's airspace show Israel's military to be the culprit.  “Investigations into the targeting of some Popular Mobilization Forces positions indicate that Israel carried it out,” Abdul Mahdi told Al Jazeera. Though Tel Aviv was long suspected of prior 'mystery' airstrikes on Iran-backed paramilitary bases in July and August, with even Netanyahu strongly hinting responsibility in an Aug. 30 campaign speech, Mahdi's condemnation marks the first high level allegation from a top Iraqi official.  The 'mystery' explosions that have rocked ammunition depots and bases in and around Baghdad have been stepped up through September, including incidents on Sept. 9, 19, and 22, resulting in dozens of killed and wounded; and more recently last Friday on Imam Ali base near the border with Syria.In total international reports count nine strikes on Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) — in some cases while they were allegedly operating just across the country's western border with Syria. Iraq's prime minister also raised the spectre of war amid a broader standoff between Tel Aviv's and Tehran, saying “many indicators show that no one wants war in the region except for Israel,” according to a translation by Reuters.

Iraqi protesters gunned down as demonstrations and strikes spread across Middle East - For a second day in a row, Iraqi security forces on Wednesday responded to mass protests against unemployment, poor social services and government corruption with live ammunition, rubber bullets, water cannon and tear gas, reportedly leaving at least nine people killed and hundreds wounded. Both protesters and hospital employees said the real toll is far higher, as heavily armed troops were deployed alongside elite black-clad counterterrorism units and police. Witnesses reported the sustained crackle of automatic weapons fire, while black smoke hung over the city from burning tires at protesters’ barricades. Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, facing the worst crisis since he formed a government a year ago, convened a meeting of his National Security Council on Wednesday. Afterwards, he issued a statement affirming “the right to protest” and “freedom of expression,” while condemning alleged acts of “vandalism” against public and private property. He also paid tribute to the security forces and blamed the violence on “infiltrators” and “aggressors who ... deliberately created casualties.” In the streets, the security forces had clearly gotten the message. They used extreme force to drive protesters from Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and prevent them from approaching the heavily fortified Green Zone, the center of the Iraqi government as well as the location of the US and other Western embassies, along with the offices of military contractors. Counterterrorism troops also used live ammunition against protesters who attempted to storm Baghdad’s international airport. The murderous repression unleashed by the Iraqi security forces dramatically swelled the demonstrations, which began with a relatively small protest Tuesday. After that demonstration was broken up with excessive force, an appeal on social media brought thousands into the streets on Tuesday night, when more violent clashes erupted. As part of the repression, the government shut down the internet nationwide on Wednesday. Nonetheless, the demonstrations grew Wednesday, spreading throughout the country. Several thousands of people marched Wednesday night outside of the local administration building in the southern oil center of Basra. The government has sent its counterterrorism troops into the southern city of Nassiriya, where the authorities reportedly “lost control” amid gun battles and the burning of government buildings. Protesters also burned the government building in the Shia holy city of Najaf. The mass upheaval has shaken the government above all because it has spread throughout the heartland of Iraq’s Shia majority, the ostensible political base of the main ruling parties. It has also broken out without the leadership of any of the political parties. Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army fought US forces in Baghdad 15 years ago and who has in the past mobilized major demonstrations, was in Iran and played no apparent role in the demonstrations.

Martial Law Unfolding in Iraq: 30 Protesters Dead, Internet Blackout, 24-Hour Curfews — Now in their third day, mass anti-government protests across Iraq have resulted in 30 dead and over 1000 wounded, amid a brutal police crackdown which has involved unprepared security forces firing live rounds on demonstrators.Several major cities are now under curfew and the government has cut internet access for much of the country. In a signal of just how dire and growing the mayhem is, Iran has now sealed key border crossings with Iraq just ahead of an annual Shia pilgrimage this month, where crucial Iran-Iraq border crossings swell with pilgrims. Iraqi television confirmed the Khosravi border crossing was closed, with more potentially to follow, per Reuters:Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said last week 3 million Iranian pilgrims were expected to visit Kerbala for the religious ritual of Arbaeen, which marks the end of a 40-day mourning period for the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad.Baghdad is now under round-the-clock curfew as of Thursday, after unrest started Tuesday, reportedly driven chiefly by youth and fueled by popular anger over corruption, unemployment, and the lack of basic services. Government authorities have said extreme measures are necessary to prevent “infiltrators” from attacking police and public property. The AFP reports the latest Thursday night:Thousands of protesters clashed with riot police in Iraq’s capital and across the south on Thursday, the third day of mass rallies that have left 30 dead.“We’ll keep going until the government falls,” pledged 22-year-old Ali, an unemployed university graduate. Indeed though Baghdad officials including President Barham Salih have essentially admitted police regretfully early on used a “heavy-handed response” in a situation which unexpectedly spiraled “out of control.” Meanwhile, there is some evidence to suggest insurgents in some parts of the country used the opportunity to fire back on police. Late in the day Wednesday Reuters reported armed elements were active among the demonstrators in the south of the country, in what marked a major escalation:Curfews were imposed earlier in three southern cities while elite counter-terrorism troops opened fire on protesters trying to storm Baghdad airport and deployed to the southern city of Nassiriya after gunfights broke out between protesters and security forces, police sources said.According to figures from Iraq’s Human Rights Commission, over 1,000 have been injured and over 60 arrested, also as communications are more difficult, given about 75% of the country is without internet access, per cybersecurity monitor NetBlocks.

Iraq in flames -- Iraqi security forces opened fire on unarmed civilians for the fourth day in a row Friday as protesters poured into the streets once again in defiance of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s declaration of a round-the-clock curfew. The death toll was reported at 65 Friday night, with more expected to be killed in overnight clashes. The real number of dead is undoubtedly far higher. The number of wounded, from live ammunition, rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon, has been reported at over 1,500. Heavily armed soldiers, members of Iraq’s elite counterterrorism squads and riot police have been deployed in an attempt to prevent demonstrators from marching on central Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and on the Green Zone, the heavily fortified center of the Iraqi government, the US and other Western embassies and the various military contractors hired to prop up the regime. Snipers on rooftops have been deployed to pick off protesters. The government has shut down the internet across Iraq in its bid to suppress the organization of fresh protests. There have also been reports of masked death squads going to the homes of known activists and assassinating them. Thus far, these repressive measures have proved counterproductive, with every state killing fueling the popular anger against the government. Unrest has gripped the impoverished Shia neighborhoods of Sadr City, where more than a decade ago militias confronted American troops. Crowds there reportedly have set fire to government buildings as well as the offices of Shia-based parties that support the government. The protests, which have demanded jobs, improved living conditions and an end to corruption, are the largest and most widespread that have broken out in Iraq in the more than 16 years since Washington launched its war to topple the government of Saddam Hussein. Most of those confronting US-trained security forces in the streets are unemployed youth and young workers whose entire lives have been shaped by the criminal US war of aggression, the subsequent eight years of US occupation and the bitter sectarian conflicts instigated by Washington as part of its divide-and-rule strategy. The effects of the US war amounted to sociocide, i.e., the systematic destruction of an entire society. The number of Iraqis who lost their lives due to the war is estimated at well over a million. What had been among the most advanced healthcare, education and social welfare systems in the Middle East were demolished, along with the bulk of the country’s infrastructure.  Within three years of withdrawing most of US troops from Iraq, the Obama administration began sending another 5,000 back in to wage the so-called war against ISIS, which reduced the predominantly Sunni cities of Anbar province and Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, to rubble. Having spent trillions of dollars and sacrificed the lives of 4,500 troops—along with tens of thousands of wounded—Washington has proved utterly incapable of establishing a stable US puppet regime in Baghdad.

Turkey plans to occupy northeast Syria with $27 billion program - In its latest stunt apparently designed to encourage refugees to believe that Turkey will provide them housing that is nicer than what most people in Turkey have, Turkey has floated the idea of a $27 billion program for taking over part of northeast Syria. Calling this a “safe zone,” Turkey says that its security concerns give it a right to occupy part of Syria. Ankara has talked up the “safe zone”  for months, but only now has it floated an ambitious settlement program for 1 million Syrians with modern housing that is the largest of its sort in history. Iran’s Press TV, apparently representing the view of Iran’s government, argues that the plan means “carving out a patch of land in the Arab country for itself.” Ankara’s latest proposal is the building of 200,000 homes for more than 1 million Syrian refugees who currently reside in Turkey. Many of these refugees are from areas such as Aleppo, but Turkey doesn’t want to let them move back to areas closer to home, such as near Jarabulus or Idlib Province. Turkey wants to funnel them into an area along the northeastern border of the country where the US and the Syrian Democratic Forces are present. It’s goal is to demographically change the area from a historically Kurdish region, to one housing Turkish-supported Arab refugees in settlement-style towns, unconnected to the indigenous people and dependent on Turkey for support.  The size of the project would be ambitious for even the most wealthy and powerful countries, which Turkey is not. Yet, Ankara envisions building up to 140 towns, each with 5,000 residents, in ten new “districts.” These towns, according to photos published and pushed by Turkish media and picked up in other media, such as Iran’s Press TV and Arab News, will look like the most modern towns, more luxurious than most towns in Turkey. Turkey’s government says that its aim is to “settle 2 million Syrians, with the support of the international community, by providing a peace corridor 30 kilometers deep and 480 kilometers long in the first phase.” Acting as if there are no indigenous people in northeast Syria, Turkey plans a settlement program that brushes away the property rights of existing Syrian owners, and seeks to build model villages with 1,000 residences each, including houses, barns, youth centers and two mosques each. Each village will have a sports facility and two schools, with 16 classrooms each. Each house will be 100 square meters, according to the plan published in Hurriyet. This will require 92.6 million square meters of land, according to the article. Another 140 million square meters of agricultural land are needed. Hurriyet refers to this as “the settlements,” an indication that Turkey may be seeking to model its policies after Israel’s actions in the Golan and West Bank, except expanding them on a more ambitious and rapid scale. Like Israel, Turkey believes that it must take over part of Syria to create a safe zone the way Israel views the Golan. Unlike Israel, it hopes it can move 1 million people into an area of Syria rapidly without any international repercussions and actually get international support to do so.

Jihadists 'Storm' U.S. Air Base, Bomb Military Convoy in Surprise Somalia Attacks - Jihadists in Somalia have attacked a U.S. military base in the southern Lower Shabelle region of the country on Monday, while a second attack targeted a European peace-keeping envoy in the capital of Mogadishu. In the first attack, two cars packed with explosives were driven towards the Balegdole air base before being detonated at its gates. Bursts of gunfire then followed as jihadists tried to breach the base. Al-Shabab, Somalia's Al-Qaeda-linked insurgent group, said it was responsible for the attack in a statement and claimed its fighters had been successful in entering the base. "After breaching the perimeters of the heavily fortified base, the mujahideen [holy warriors] stormed the military complex, engaging the crusaders in an intense firefight," the statement said. Al-Shabab are known for often exaggerating their statements however, and a statement from the U.S. Ambassador to Somalia's office denied that entry was made. "The United States condemns the attacks today in Baledogle and Mogadishu," the statement said. "We commend the Somali security forces who repelled the attack against the Somali National Army (SNA) Base in Baledogle, Lower Shabelle region. "The security forces stopped this ultimately failed attack due to their alertness and swift response, not allowing the attackers to breach the outer defensive perimeters of the base." The Bolegole base, roughly 100 km (60 miles) west of Mogadishu, houses Somali special forces, U.S. special forces and Ugandan peace-keeping troops. In the second attack, a bomb blast targeted a peace-keeping envoy from Italy. The Italian Ministry of Defense confirmed that the convoy was hit by explosions, but stated that no injuries had been reported. Images of the attack seen by Newsweek showed that a light-armored vehicle had been sheared open from the attack and extensive damage had been caused to nearby buildings.

Anti-Sisi protesters return to Egypt’s streets in teeth of fierce repression -- In the teeth of a massive police state crackdown, Egyptian workers and youth took to the streets again Friday to demand an end to the six-year-old dictatorship of General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who seized power in a bloody 2013 coup. The protests, which followed similar demonstrations last week, were launched after Friday’s prayers and were largest in towns and cities outside of Cairo. The Egyptian capital was under a complete lockdown. Every street leading into Tahrir Square, the iconic scene of mass demonstrations during the Egyptian revolution that toppled the US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, was blockaded by police-military checkpoints. The regime also closed down subway stations in the center of the capital to further restrict movement. Streets in central Cairo were clogged with police buses, cars and armored vehicles, while uniformed riot police and heavily armed plainclothes thugs covering their faces with balaclavas roamed the area. At Cairo’s Al-Fateh mosque, a rallying point for the mass demonstrations in 2011, dozens of police vehicles and scores of police, some carrying assault rifles, were deployed at exits as prayers let out. The Interior Ministry even issued an order to doctors at Cairo hospitals to report any patients seeking treatment for injuries suffered in demonstrations. According to Middle East Eye, police were deployed to Kasr Al Ainy, one of Cairo’s main hospitals, to patrol wards and inspect ambulances as they arrived. While there were no demonstrations in central Cairo, at least 200 people were arrested there anyway. At some checkpoints, police were demanding people’s cellphones, checking to see if there was anything on them indicating sympathy for the anti-Sisi protests. Despite this crackdown, crowds marched and chanted slogans against the regime in a number of cities, including Luxor, Qena and Sohag, as well as al Warraq, an island in the center of the Nile river on the northern outskirts of metropolitan Cairo.

Nearly 2,000 arrested as Egypt braces for anti-Sisi protests Egypt is bracing itself for a second weekend of protests on Friday, with authorities stepping up arrests and tightening security in major cities amid calls for a "million-man march" against President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Egypt's Ministry of Interior warned on Thursday of "decisive" action against any attempts to "destabilise peace" as rights groups say nearly 2,000 people have been arrested since last weekend's rare protests demanding el-Sisi quit. Among those arrested was Hassan Nafaa, a political science professor at Cairo University and well-known columnist, who called for the president's departure in a Twitter post. "I have no doubt that the continuation of el-Sisi's absolute rule will lead to disaster," Nafaa said. "Egypt's interest requires his departure today before tomorrow." Rights group calls for 'immediate release' of Egyptian protesters (3:21) Nafaa's arrest on Wednesday followed the detention of Hazem Hosny, a spokesman for former army chief Sami Anan who was jailed last year for attempting to run against el-Sisi in a presidential election. Khaled Dawoud, the head of Al-Doustor Party who has been a vocal critic of the president's policies, was also arrested. Security forces have also deployed more troops to major cities, with police stopping and searching pedestrians on key thoroughfares and squares. Authorities have also blocked news websites and disrupted access to messaging platforms, according to monitoring groups. Last weekend's unprecedented display of dissent is a response to calls for action from a former Egyptian military contractor, Mohamed Ali. The part-time actor, who said he worked with the military for 15 years, accused el-Sisi and his aides of squandering public funds on vanity projects despite widespread poverty. In a series of videos posted online, he admitted to benefitting from government corruption, describing how his company, Amlak, was awarded lucrative state contracts without going through the proper bidding process. His description of opulent palaces and luxury hotels that he claimed to have built for el-Sisi - and for which he has yet to be paid - struck a nerve with many Egyptians living under harsh austerity measures imposed under a $12bn loan deal with the International Monetary Fund. The programme has led to an increase in poverty rates. Official figures show one in three Egyptians live below the poverty line.

 Dark skies: UN meeting reveals a world in a really bad mood (AP) — The planet is heating. Island nations are slipping away. A Pakistan-India nuclear war could be a “bloodbath.” Governments aren’t working together like they used to. Polarization is tearing us apart. Killing. Migration. Poverty. Corruption. Inequality. Sovereignty violations. Helplessness. Hopelessness. “The problems of our times are extraordinary,” Ibraham Mohamed Solih, president of the Maldives, an Indian Ocean island nation threatened by the rising waters of climate change, said at the U.N. General Assembly a few days ago. There are those mornings when you come into work and everyone seems cranky. That’s how it felt at the United Nations this past week during the annual gathering of world leaders. Speech after gloomy speech by leaders from all corners of the planet pointed toward one bleaker-than-thou conclusion: Humanity clearly needs a spa day.The United Nations was founded in an optimistic fervor after World War II’s devastation, on the notion that a cooperative body of countries could construct a brighter future by learning to get along. Though that hope remains a fundamental underpinning, the actual tenor these days seems to set a lower bar: Try to mitigate climate Armageddon, and prevent some of its 193 member nations’ diligent attempts to undermine and sometimes destroy each other.So words like “existential threat” were as much a part of the leader-speech landscape this past week as the usual references to “this august body.” “We are living in times when the magnitude and number of lasting crises is constantly increasing,” said Igor Dodon, Moldova’s president. “We have had enough wars. We don’t want new wars,” said Iraqi President Barham Salih, who would certainly know. And from Roch Marc Christian Kabore, president of Burkina Faso, came this understatement: “International news has been marked by tension.”

Pig Ebola Has Cost China Over $140 Billion As Locals Get Angry At Record High Pork Prices - There is a reason why an increasingly desperate Beijing is willing to suspend tariffs on US pork exports, and it has nothing to do with trade war de-escalation or concessions, and everything to do with preventing an angry and hungry mob from running rampant across China's streets.As Caixin reports, the widespread outbreak of African swine fever that has prompted China to slaughter millions of pigs has caused 1 trillion yuan ($140 billion) of direct losses, an industry expert estimates; if correct, the direct damage from the "pig ebola" is far greater than the monetary damages incurred from two years of escalating trade tariffs with the US.The shocking number was unveiled at a pig industry forum last Tuesday by Li Defa, who heads the College of Animal Science and Technology at China Agricultural University, and who notes that the upstream and downstream of the pork industry chain, such as pig feed and catering industry, were not included in the calculation, suggesting the full indirect losses from the crippling pork virus could be orders of magnitude greater. For over a year, China’s pork industry has been crippled by an outbreak of the deadly pig virus since at least August 2018, when the first case was reported in Northeast China’s Liaoning province. It has since spread to all provincial level regions in the country, wiping out between one-third and half of all Chinese hog stocks and sending pork prices to record highs.

Green Shoots- China's Caixin Mfg PMI Expands Fastest In 19 Months, But Doubts Remain - What a coincidence: economic green shoots appeared in China just in time for the start of the country's National Day and Golden Week holidays, as both the official and Caixin manufacturing PMIs rose in September. Specifically, the NBS manufacturing PMI increased to 49.8 in September and the Caixin manufacturing PMI rose to 51.4, with both readings coming in above expectations. Sub-indexes in the two surveys all pointed to stronger production, new orders and higher price pressures in the manufacturing sector. In contrast, the NBS non-manufacturing PMI edged down 0.1pp on the back of a weaker construction PMI. China's Caixin manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index, published on Monday, and which unlike the official PMI is a measurement of economic activity at smaller, privately-owned companies, showed China's factory activity expanded at the fastest pace in 19 months in Sept., with a reading of 51.4, up from 50.4 in Aug., the highest level since early 2018. And while China's official manufacturing PMI contracted for a fifth month in Sept, amid the ongoing threats of a China-US trade war, it printed slightly higher to 49.8, from 49.5 in Aug., if still below the 50-level that separates it from contraction and expansion. While there are conflicting signals of an economic rebound in China, and goalseeked number meant for political consumption will hardly change the narrative, manufacturers continue to deal with slowing domestic growth and an escalating trade war that has slowed global trade volumes. Trade talks between Washington and Beijing are expected to resume next week despite President Trump consideration to delist Chinese firms from US markets.Meanwhile, economists don't expect the slight manufacturing rebound in China to sustain into late year, but rather turn back down. 

China-Linked Hackers Target Tibetan Activists' Smartphones By Spoofing Amnesty International Officials - A hacking group linked to the Chinese government targeted Tibetan leaders between November 2018 and April 2019 - including those working for the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government - after posing as activists from Amnesty International and other organizations in order to trick them into clicking on malicious links on WhatsApp.  According to the digital rights group The Citizen Lab, "the links had the capacity to install spyware on iPhones and Android devices." The hacking attempts were carried out by the same group that previously targeted Uyghur Muslims in China, according to the Citizen Lab's report. Those hacks were publicized by Google researchers last month, and TechCrunch reported that the attack was carried out by a group linked to the Chinese government.At the time, Google researchers said the one-click hacks targeted iOS devices and that any iPhone user could be vulnerable. Apple downplayed that characterization, stating that they were already in the process of fixing exploits when Google uncovered the attacks and that only a narrow set of users were targeted. -Business InsiderThe vulnerabilities were patched for both iOS and Android devices, and none of the targeted Tibetans were affected by the malicious attempts as they had installed the updates. According to Citizen Lab: "Of the 17 intrusion attempts we observed against Tibetan targets, 12 contained links to the iOS exploit. All but one of the attempts were sent between November 11-14, 2018, with the last attempt sent on April 22, 2019."

China has quietly doubled troop levels in Hong Kong, envoys say - - Last month, Beijing moved thousands of troops across the border into this restive city. They came in on trucks and armored cars, by bus and by ship. The state news agency Xinhua described the operation as a routine “rotation” of the low-key force China has kept in Hong Kong since the city’s handover from Britain in 1997. No mention was made of the anti-government protests that have been shaking the metropolis since June. It was a plausible report: China has maintained a steady level of force in the territory for years, regularly swapping troops in and out. And days earlier, according to an audio recording obtained by Reuters, embattled Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam had told local businesspeople that China had “absolutely no plan” to order the army to put down the demonstrations. A month on, Asian and Western envoys in Hong Kong say they are certain the late-August deployment was not a rotation at all, but a reinforcement. Seven envoys who spoke to Reuters said they didn’t detect any significant number of existing forces in Hong Kong returning to the mainland in the days before or after the announcement. Three of the envoys said the contingent of Chinese military personnel in Hong Kong had more than doubled in size since the protests began. They estimated the number of military personnel is now between 10,000 and 12,000, up from 3,000 to 5,000 in the months before the reinforcement. As a result, the envoys believe, China has now assembled its largest-ever active force of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops and other anti-riot personnel and equipment in Hong Kong. Significantly, five of the diplomats say, the build-up includes elements of the People’s Armed Police (PAP), a mainland paramilitary anti-riot and internal security force under a separate command from the PLA. While Reuters was unable to determine the size of the PAP contingent, envoys say the bulk of the troops in Hong Kong are from the PLA. PAP forces would be likely to spearhead any crackdown if Beijing decides to intervene, according to foreign envoys and security analysts. These paramilitary troops are specially trained in non-lethal tactics and methods of riot suppression and crowd control. The envoys declined to say how exactly they determined that the recent troop movement was a reinforcement or how they arrived at their troop estimates. Reuters reporters visited the areas surrounding multiple PLA bases in Hong Kong and observed significantly increased movements by troops and armored vehicles at the facilities.

 Hong Kong Protesters Go on Rampage, Vow to Defy Government’s Mask Ban — Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam thought invoking a colonial-era emergency powers law to prohibit wearing masks in public might calm the increasingly violent protests that have rocked her city for more than four months now. But apparently, that was a miscalculation. Lam invoked the law Friday morning following a special meeting of the city’s executive council. “As the current situation has clearly given rise to a state of serious public danger, the executive council decided this morning to invoke the power under the emergency regulations ordinance and make a new regulation in the prohibition of face covering – which is essentially an anti-mask law.” The regulation “targets rioters” Lam said, which is why it contains “exemptions” for those with legitimate need to wear a mask (wearing face masks became common in Hong Kong after the 2003 SARS outbreak). SCMP’s sources said the new law could involve jail terms of up to one year or a fine of HK$25,000 (about $3,000), and will apply to lawful assemblies as well as unsanctioned gatherings.Though the regulation doesn’t take effect until midnight, Lam’s pronouncement sent hundreds of people into the streets for an impromptu protest. At Yoho Mall in Yuen Long, hundreds of mostly masked students gathered to chant: “Hongkongers, resist!”

 Undercover Cops Badly Beaten As Hong Kong Protesters Rampage Over 'Anti-Mask' Law - The backlash to Carrie Lam's "anti-mask law" intensified late in the Hong Kong evening, resulting in the entire MTR public transit network being closed down. Protesters are preparing what would be an 'illegal' demonstration on Saturday as they march from Causeway Bay into down town.From 1 pm on Saturday through the end of the day, airport-bound Express trains will be the only trains running. They will travel from Hong Kong station to Hong Kong International Airport. The organizers of the protest are encouraging demonstrators to wear Halloween masks in a show of defiance. However, legal experts familiar with Hong Kong's colonial-era laws said the edict will likely be extraordinarily difficult to enforce, and that a challenge in the courts could result in the ban being thrown out.As midnight approached on Friday, HK's High Court was still hearing two activists' applications to have the "anti-mask" law thrown out. Counsel for the government insisted that Lam had already explained the need for the law: To combat escalating public violence associated with the demonstrations.Ultimately, the bid to temporarily suspend the law failed, as the judges declined to grant a temporary suspension, which had been requested by protesters. Though once again as Friday night faded into Saturday morning, protests in HK turned violent, as one group set fire to a China Travel Services branch in Sha Tin.

Occupy Central was catalyst for the collapse of rule of law in Hong Kong, Chinese state media says A rally to mark the fifth anniversary of the Occupy Central movement ended in violence on Saturday night. Photo: David WongA rally to mark the fifth anniversary of the Occupy Central movement ended in violence on Saturday night. Photo: David Wong A rally to mark the fifth anniversary of the Occupy Central movement ended in violence on Saturday night. Photo: David Wong The 2014 Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong was the “starting point for the collapse of the rule of law” in the city, China’s state media said in a commentary published on Sunday, just hours after a rally to mark the fifth anniversary of the largely peaceful protest ended in violence. Occupy, which lasted for 79 days, “opened Pandora’s box, as a few people in Hong Kong used distorted concepts such as ‘achieving justice by violating the law’ to poison many young people”, Xinhua said in an article released by its bureau in the city. The leaders of the protest “tried to achieve a society that gradually breaks free of the rule of law … so that Hong Kong society will sink into chaos and they can achieve their political goals”, it said. Meanwhile, the “current protests surrounding the extradition bill that have been ongoing for more than three months amplified such an effect”, it said, adding that the “chaos brings direct harm to Hong Kong’s economy and security, and buries the seed of anarchy in people’s minds”. “In a society with the rule of law like Hong Kong, any claim, no matter how noble the target is, shall not be expressed in an illegal way, and it cannot resort to violence or crime.” The piece went on to say that in the Hong Kong court’s ruling on the Occupy movement, “the illegal nature of some so-called noble concepts have been clearly clarified, and the incitement and sponsors … have received the punishment they deserve”. The commentary called on people to step up and say “no” to illegal activities and violence, and to show their support for the city’s government and police. .

North Korea: ‘Grave moment’ as North tests missile fired from sea North Korea has confirmed it test-fired a new type of a ballistic missile, a significant escalation from the short-range tests it has conducted since May. The missile - which was able to carry a nuclear weapon - was the North's 11th test this year. But this one, fired from a platform at sea, was capable of being launched from a submarine. Being submarine-capable is important as it means North Korea could launch missiles far outside its territory. According to South Korean officials, the missile flew about 450km (280 miles) and reached an altitude of 910km before landing in the sea. That means the missile flew twice as high as the International Space Station, but previous North Korean tests have gone higher. It came down in the Sea of Japan, also known in South Korea as the East Sea. Japan said it landed in its exclusive economic zone - a band of 200km around Japanese territory. The test came hours after North Korea said nuclear talks with the US would resume. The missile was launched from the sea soon after 07:00 on Wednesday (22:00 GMT Tuesday), about 17km north-east of the coastal city of Wonsan. North Korea's state news agency KCNA said on Thursday the missile was a Pukguksong-3 test-fired at a high angle, designed to "contain external threat and bolster self-defence". It added there was "no adverse impact on the security of neighbouring countries". Unlike previous tests, there were no pictures of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the launch. In the previous 10 missile tests carried out this year, only short-range projectiles were fired. If the missile was launched on a standard trajectory, instead of a vertical one, it could have travelled around 1,900 km (1,200 miles). That would have put all of South Korea and Japan within range.

South Korean Consumer Prices Just Did Something They've Never Done Before - Underscoring the hit to domestic demand, as the economy grapples with collapsing exports, for the first time ever (data back to 1966), South Korean consumer prices "fell" year-over-year in September.The benchmark consumer-price index fell 0.4% in September from a year earlier after being flat in August - already the slowest pace on record in the country. The latest reading missed the median market forecast of a 0.3% decrease. Zooming in makes it even clearer that 2019's sudden shift to global easing has not helped... at all! Negative inflation is likely to add fuel to a growing debate over whether the risk of deflation is imminent in South Korea and what policy action needs to be taken, which is ironic since BOK Governor Lee last week dismissed concerns of deflation as “excessive.”Obviously, subdued inflation - alongside declining exports amid continued global trade tensions - has been stoking concerns about a possible recession, adding pressure on the central bank to ease policy further to support growth.The Bank of Korea in July cut interest rates for the first time in three years, lowering its 2019 growth and inflation forecasts to 2.2% and 0.7%, respectively, from its earlier estimates of 2.5% and 1.1%.Trade data also notably disappointed tonight with both exports and imports tumbling more than expected...

"It’s Almost Impossible To Buy": Japanese Bond Crash, Margin Call Send Shockwaves Around The Globe For a dramatic preview of what will happen in the blink of an eye to all those record low interest rates without the backstop of central banks and ravenous pension fund buying, look no further than what happened in Japan overnight where bond futures suffered the biggest one-day crash since August 2, 2016, sliding as much as 0.97 yen to 154.05, and triggering margin calls for investors after the worst 10-year debt auction in three years. More ominously, once the rout started it quickly spread outside of Japan, because as yields jumped, the sell-off spilled into US Treasuries and European debt. There were three things behind the swift collapse: the first catalyst was the Bank of Japan’s Monday decision to slash bond purchases in October for the four major maturity buckets in order to steepen the curve and avoid further flattening which Kuroda has repeatedly expressed concern about in the past; the BOJ had indicated it may even stop buying debt of more than 25 years. It also sought to anchor yields from the one-to-three year zone by raising purchases in a regular operation earlier in the day and lifting the purchase band for the sector in October. "The BOJ is showing its clear intention to correct distortions in the curve through flexible adjustments in market operations,” said Mari Iwashita, chief market economist at Daiwa. "While cutting the lower end of purchases in bonds maturing over 25 years to zero looks shocking, the BOJ will probably cut buying in this zone slowly." "The BOJ’s operation change had a huge psychological impact,” said Eiji Dohke, chief bond strategist at SBI Securities in Tokyo. “Investors are reluctant to buy given the risk of the BOJ skipping a purchase." Then, there was the announcement early on Tuesday morning by Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) that it was pivoting toward buying more FX-hedged foreign debt. Specifically, the world’s largest pension fund said it will consider currency-hedged overseas bond holdings as similar to domestic debt investments. That would allow GPIF to buy more foreign debt, as it’s already close to the 19% limit in its current mandate; and while good news for US Treasurys this was bad news for local JGBs.

India-Pakistan Nuclear War Could Kill 100 Million And Trigger Global Cooling - Every geopolitical analyst is currently observing and studying the developments that are occurring along the Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan. Any major flare-up in flighting between both countries could ignite a nuclear war that would kill hundreds of millions and trigger global cooling.  The scenario for nuclear armageddon between India and Pakistan was highlighted in a report by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com titled Pakistani Kashmir Chief: Standoff With India May Spark Nuclear Armageddon. Now, a new report in Science Advances, titled Rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India portend regional and global catastrophe, has modeled what a nuclear war could look like between both countries. "Pakistan and India may have 400 to 500 nuclear weapons by 2025 with yields from tested 12- to 45-kt values to a few hundred kilotons. If India uses 100 strategic weapons to attack urban centers and Pakistan uses 150, fatalities could reach 50 to 125 million people, and nuclear-ignited fires could release 16 to 36 Tg of black carbon in smoke, depending on yield," the study said. Alan Robock, a professor in environmental sciences at Rutgers University who co-authored the paper, said more than 100 million deaths on both sides of the LoC could be seen, followed by global mass starvation and global cooling.  "The smoke will rise into the upper troposphere, be self-lofted into the stratosphere, and spread globally within weeks. Surface sunlight will decline by 20 to 35%, cooling the global surface by 2° to 5°C and reducing precipitation by 15 to 30%, with larger regional impacts. Recovery takes more than 10 years. Net primary productivity declines 15 to 30% on land and 5 to 15% in oceans threatening mass starvation and additional worldwide collateral fatalities," the study continued. Some of the most dangerous hot flashes in decades between India and Pakistan have been seen this year. We've documented several instances earlier this year, where both countries were on the brink of a major conflict. The first was in February when Pakistan shot down Indian fighter jets. There have been other examples of flare-ups this summer. One example was when India decided to cluster bomb Pakistan several months ago.

Haiti: Police use tear gas, live ammunition on protesters Haitian police used tear gas and live ammunition on Friday to disperse protesters in the capital, as anger over the economic and political problems in the country continue to grow. At least four people died in clashes in recent days with many reports of injuries. Haitians are protesting widespread food and fuel shortages, a weakening currency, double-digit inflation and corruption accusations lodged against public officials in the impoverished Caribbean nation. Many are calling for President Jovenel Moise to stand down after what they say is a failure to address the myriad of problems. The protests on Friday were among the largest and most violent in months. In the wealthier neighbourhoods of Delmas and Petion Ville, angry crowds also looted several stores, banks and money transfer offices, ATMs and pharmacies. They also set a building on fire. Crowds stripped the abandoned police station in Cite Soleil, Port-au-Prince's poorest neighbourhood, of sheet metal roofing, furniture and police protection equipment. Al Jazeera's Manuel Rapalo, reporting from the capital, described a tense atmosphere. "In Port-Au-Prince, public services, shops and businesses are closed. Public transportation is on a standstill," he said. "Demonstrators have blocked roadways using anything in their disposal from debris to burning tires since early on Friday," he added. "Angry protesters blame the president of corruption and say that he is practically incapable to rule the country and the economy."

Canada Catches America's Cold - PMI Plunges To 4 Year Lows - As goes America, so goes Canada it seems. Following the collapse in both Manufacturing and Services survey data in the US, Canada's PMI just collapsed most since Feb 2016, back into contraction for the first time since March 2015. From a 12-month high of 60.6in August, Ivey PMI collapsed to a 4-year lows of 48.7... Under the hood things are mixed (but hurting in the most important areas)

• Ivey employment index decreased to 49.6 in September from 52.7 in prior month
• Ivey inventory index decreased to 50.5 in September from 54.8 in prior month
• Ivey supplier index increased to 50.2 in September from 49.9 in prior month
• Ivey prices index increased to 56.9 in September from 51.3 in prior month

 "The Darkening Outlook For Trade Is Discouraging:" WTO Sharply Lowers Global Outlook Amid Trade Conflicts  A synchronized global downturn and an escalating trade war with China has prompted the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reduce its global growth forecasts for 2019 and 2020. World merchandise trade volumes are expected to only expand by 1.2% in 2019, substantially slower than the 2.6% growth forecast in April. The 2020 global growth forecast is expected to be 2.7%, down from 3% previously.  "The darkening outlook for trade is discouraging but not unexpected. Beyond their direct effects, trade conflicts heighten uncertainty, which is leading some businesses to delay the productivity-enhancing investments that are essential to raising living standards," said WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo."Job creation may also be hampered as firms employ fewer workers to produce goods and services for export," he added.WTO economists said the global downturn is partly due to President Trump's trade war, but also "reflects country-specific cyclical and structural factors, including the shifting monetary policy stance in developed economies and Brexit-related uncertainty in the European Union." The economists were firm in their global outlook: "Macroeconomic risks are firmly tilted to the downside."   As shown in Chart 1, quarterly merchandise export and import volumes on a seasonally-adjusted basis in the world, developed and developing regions have dramatically stalled since 2018, with no signs of a turn up until next year.

Worldwide Semiconductor Sales Continue To Plunge -…A return to macro is on every money managers' mind this week as global equity futures plunge to a one-month low following US manufacturing activity tumbling to levels not seen since the last financial crisis.And more evidence of global slowdown was found in the latest report from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) on Tuesday, who warned, semiconductor sales are plunging around the world. SIA said worldwide sales of semiconductors were $34.2 billion in August, a 15.9% drop YoY. Monthly sales showed the August figure of $34.2 billion, was 2.5% higher than July 2019 total of $33.4 billion, these sales were compiled by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization. John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO, was rather pessimistic on the global semiconductor industry, indicating YoY changes in sales were disappointing in the Americas."While worldwide semiconductor sales remain well behind the totals reached in 2018, month-to-month sales increased in two consecutive months for the first time in nearly a year," said Neuffer. "Sales into the Americas market were mixed, decreasing significantly year-to-year but increasing more than any other region on a month-to-month basis."On a regional basis, MoM sales increased slightly in late summer. The Americas saw a 4.1% MoM increase from July to August, the Asia Pacific/All Other 3.8%, China 1.8%, Japan 1.1%, but a decline -.8% in Europe. However, it was the YoY sales that frightened Neuffer, who wasn't completely clear if a bottom would be seen in the global semiconductor industry this year. Semiconductor sales YoY in Europe were -8.6%, the Asia Pacific/All Other -9.2%, Japan -11.5%, China -15.7%, and Americas -28.8% for the August period.

Russia’s bid to ditch the US dollar is slowly working, but obstacles remain - In an effort to insulate the Russian economy from U.S. sanctions, the Kremlin has made “de-dollarization” a long-term priority, but will be forced to rely on the greenback for some time, according to economists. Since 2013, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has been trying to reduce the number of transactions conducted in U.S. dollars, either for domestic payments or foreign trade. Russia has repeatedly faced U.S. and EU sanctions since 2014 for reasons ranging from its annexation of Crimea to the poisoning of an ex-spy in the U.K. as well as online meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. A key reason for its emphasis on de-dollarization is that U.S. sanctions are extra-territorial — they target all companies using the U.S. dollar or operating stateside subsidiaries. Ditching reliance on the dollar is therefore seen as a way for Russia to circumvent sanctions, according to Agathe Demarais, Global Forecasting Director at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). “De-dollarization could benefit the euro and yuan above all, and the CBR is also increasing the share of its assets that are held in these two currencies,” Demarais told CNBC via email. In order to pre-empt potential sanctions that cut Russia off from international financial channels (such as SWIFT), Russia has also created a domestic bank payment system, Mir (which means both “peace” and “world” in Russian). It has also escalated efforts to sign currency swap agreements, which enables direct trade between two countries in local currencies, instead of the usual reliance on U.S. dollars. “Unsurprisingly, Russia has concluded currency swap deals with countries that currently have poor relations with the US, including Iran, Turkey and China,” Demarais added.

NATO Rejects Putin's Request To Ban Missile Deployments In Europe - At the end of this week NATO announced a bombshell that's gone largely underreported given the Ukraine transcript brouhaha and Democrats' push for impeachment. NATO officials said they've formally rejected a Russian request to prohibit placing missiles previously banned under the now defunct Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in Europe."NATO declined the proposal Thursday, because it says Russia still possesses missiles — for the SSC-8 system — that were banned under the INF pact," United Press International (UPI) reports.   The Russian request was made directly by President Putin, who has expressed fears of "a new arms race" following both Moscow and Washington pulling out of the landmark 1988 INF treaty; however,  NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungesu told the Financial Times:"Unless and until Russia verifiably destroys the SSC-8 system, this moratorium on deployments is not a real offer."The SSC-8 is a ground-launched cruise missile labeled by the US a “missile of concern” within Russia's arsenal. A series of tests of the system from a road-mobile launcher over the past years have brought down US condemnation and accusations the tests violated the INF. Thus NATO considers Putin's proposal is "not a credible offer". Oana Lungescu, Nato spokesperson, confirmed receipt of a letter from Russian authorities pitching the moratorium idea but said the western allies had “heard this proposal before” and saw it as “not a credible offer”. — FTIn June NATO issued Russia a 5-week deadline to destroy the SSC-8s, and any other treaty-violating missiles; however, Putin responded with more missile tests, citing similar Pentagon tests this summer.  While there's been no indicators that the US or NATO is moving forward with placing previously banned missiles in Europe, the fact that such a simple Russian request has been so publicly spurned is a deeply worrisome sign of a potential new arms race to come.

Protests Rage as Ukraine’s President Zelensky Allows Election in Donbass --Comedian turned president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky’s unlikely rise to power was based in large part on convincing voters that he would dramatically ease tensions with Russia and seek a peaceful resolution to the war in Donbass, raging since 2014. But now in a potentially explosive Maiden 2.0 scenario, hardcore Ukrainian nationalists have taken to the Kiev square which has come to symbolize resistance to Russia in order to protest the popular president’s dovish and rapprochement-signalling policies. Hours after Zelensky gave an unprecedented go ahead to allow a local election in Donbass which could result in Kiev granting a special status to the region, hundreds of nationalists flooded the square holding signs that read: “No to capitulation!”. Zelensky insisted all candidates and political parties should be allowed to run according to Ukrainian law, which has enraged the anti-Russian nationalists, who say Ukraine’s sovereignty is on the line. The new election has the blessing of Russia and European monitors. Both government and pro-Russian separatist forces have agreed to withdraw troops from key locations in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions next week to ensure “free and fair” elections, which international monitors will also observe.  One journalist and political commentator noted the neo-Nazi imagery used in this and other hardline nationalist protests in Kiev’s Maidan, which has for years tainted some of the country’s far right militias and political parties.

'Clear the Kikes From Ukraine!' Who Will Confront Kiev's Spiraling anti-Semitism Problem? -- "Clear the kikes from Odessa and Ukraine!" The first of these remarks was made by a leader of a Ukrainian far-right paramilitary organization. The other - by Ukraine's diplomatic consul based in Hamburg, Germany. That they are indistinguishable is a loud warning signal for how far anti-Semitism has penetrated politics in Ukraine. That might be counter-intuitive for the only state in the world, except for Israel, where the posts of president and prime minister are both held by people of Jewish descent. The remarks by Hamburg consul Vasiliy Marushchinets in a Facebook post last year caused enormous indignation in foreign diplomatic circles.He went on to write: "My God: Punish kikes," and "Babi Yar. Not kikes in 1941, but Ukrainians from 1918-1941 were killed here." And: "The Jews declared war against Germany back in March 1934," and "Death to anti-fascists."  His flagrant anti-Semitism is not an isolated example. That is clearer than ever reading the 23-page report on anti-Semitic incidents in Ukraine over the past year prepared by the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, the country’s Jewish community representative organization. The report’s depressing findings show that anti-Semitic tendencies are widespread across the right-wing political spectrum, among politicians of different party affiliations.

 Eurozone's manufacturing ends Q3 on a seven-year low, services at contagion risk - Manufacturing in the eurozone finished the third quarter in a deep contraction as both output and new orders fell, with entrepeneurs across the 19-country currency union bracing for more hardship ahead. The Purchasing Manager's Index (PMI) for manufacturing compiled by IHS Markit for September reached a seven-year low not seen since the height of the sovereign debt crisis in the 19-country currency area. On average, the PMI for September stood at 45.7 points, sharply down from 47.0 points in August. Still, any figures below the 50.0 points indicates that actually economy activity is contracting. Analysts at IHS Markit, which compiles the PMI manufacturing index, added that the industrial downturn was so severe that there was a risk that job destruction and pessimistic prospects would spread to the dominant services sector, around 80% of economic output. Manufacturing in the eurozone accounts for between 10% and 20% of GDP, depending on country. Germany’s export-oriented industry continues to be the hardest hit by geopolitical woes, with September’s reading as low as 41.7 points, a 123-month or 10-year low. Only three countries out of the eight measured posted positive readings – Greece, the Netherlands and France – while Ireland, Italy, Spain, Austria and Germany all posted falls. The sharp fall in September – dashing away hopes among chemicals executives that the final quarter could bring some sort of recovery – was due to decreases in all measures: output, new orders and purchasing, which would not bode well for employment or expectations ahead.

Norway Unexpectedly Pulls $400 Million From Sovereign Wealth Fund - While analysts focus on rumors that Germany might be heading toward fiscal stimulus, another Northern European economic powerhouse might already be preparing for a government spending spree. According to Bloomberg, which cited data from the Norwegian Treasury, the biggest oil and gas producer in Western Europe unexpectedly withdrew 3.6 billion kroner ($395 million) from its $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, one of the biggest piles of capital in the world.  This marked the first time money has ever been withdrawn from the fund, which was set up in 2016 to manage Norway's oil wealth. After oil prices crashed, the fund's size stagnated. But Norway was able to start depositing money again in June 2018, and, until August, had deposited at least some oil proceeds every month since. Then again, the fund's decisions often take the broader investing community by surprise.In an attempt to diversify away from energy, the fund dumped shares of "pure-play exploration companies" (a sizable chunk of its energy-related holdings) earlier this year. The fund also sold EM bonds to make more room for equities, another smart move that has paid off this year.Similarly, the decision to withdraw money from the fund last month was particularly unexpected because the Norwegian government said in its latest revised budget that it expected to deposit a total of 34 billion kroner ($3.7 billion) into the fund during 2019. As of August, the fund has seen net inflows of 19.9 billion kroner ($2.2 billion), putting the government slightly behind its goal for the year.Although the government refused to comment on the circumstances behind the withdrawal. But one possible motive can be found in the global oil market: Prices tumbled in August, sticking the Norwegian government with a hole in its budget. Benchmark Brent crude hit a seven-month low of about $56 a barrel in early August amid global growth concerns. That’s well below the government’s oil-price forecasts from its revised budget. The Norwegian government had forecast prices between $67 and $70 a barrel between August and the rest of the year.

Negative interest rates, by country - Today, Jean Pierre Mustier, chief executive of Italian lender UniCredit, called for banks to stop complaining about negative rates. Instead, he claimed, they are a “net positive” for European financials. The full story, from David Crow and Patrick Jenkins, is here. The standard position is that negative rates impose direct costs on banks (because they have to pay to hold reserves at the central bank), and indirect costs via the squeezing of the margin between borrowing and lending, especially if banks can’t charge negative rates on retail deposits.The ECB this month reacted to the former issue, by introducing a tiering system. It works as follows: any amount of reserves a bank holds at the central bank, up to six times its minimum reserve requirement, will be exempted from negative deposit facility rate. In a speech last week, Luis de Guindos, the central bank’s vice-president, said the system was introduced “in order to ensure that the accommodative monetary policy stance continues to translate into favourable lending conditions”. This, he went on, equates to annual savings for European banks of €4 billion. But how are these split across different countries?Much like the TLTRO program, where the ECB provides cheap funding (often at negative rates) to European lenders, and which has been heavily taken up in Italy, negative rates have different effects for different banking sectors. Eric Dor at the IESEG School of Management in France has estimated the cost reduction from the new policy on a country-by-country basis.As well as the new tiering system, the ECB cut interest rates from minus 0.4 per cent to minus 0.5 per cent this month. The below table shows the direct costs (in millions of euros) under various scenarios, based on a static balance sheet as of July, for major banking sectors. Italy, according to these estimates, moves to a position where negative rates impose no direct cost whatsoever on its banking system. And the biggest beneficiary in volume reduction is Germany, though it still weathers the highest costs. Whether this shows up in the escalating public debate about the ECB in that country remains to be seen.

Mark Carney’s Trojan Unicorn — Are Central Banks Considering Stealth Nationalization in Sovereign Digital Currencies? --Whether or not the purported explanation that the plot and characters of Wizard of Oz being an allegory for the Federal Reserve and the Gold Standard is correct, for anyone in finance the notion that central banks operate on a basis of smoke and mirrors certainly rings true. It’s not only that it’s all smoke and mirrors with the central banks. It’s that behind the smoke and mirrors, there’s just more smoke and mirrors. Usually, clues surface when central banks start opining on something that is so fundamentally a bad idea that it really ought to be left to shuffle off into a dark corner and die a quiet, unmourned, death. Something like sovereign digital currencies, for example. The FT has been trying (more on this later) to work out what central bank governors, like the Bank of England’s Mark Carney, meant when he came down from Mount Parnassus, to tell us all how central banks and governments will increasingly be required to consider the move to a digital reserve currency in a “multi polar world”. Carney was, here, entirely correct in principle. The US manages the US dollar primarily for the US’ interests. Certainly in terms of interest rates, the US Federal Reserve takes the needs of the US economy — as it perceives them — as the basis for how it operates monetary policy and who can use the US dollar, for what purposes. Reading between Carney’s lines, you can also intuit a political frustration that, on more than one occasion, the US will also operate the US dollar in pursuit of US geopolitical policy objectives. Even at some economic cost — and not just to the rest of the world, but potentially to the US itself, too. Carney didn’t mention in his speech about another problem, which is how central banks end up having to step in to support the commercial banks in times of financial stress — the FT spotted this angle, we’ll return to this more fully below.  Apart from hard-line free-market ideology, there is another, more subtle, impediment to any ideas about the implicit nationalisation of the payment system through a government-backed digital currency, which the banks could only access through an interface the central banks would have to provide to the currency’s (presumable) distributed ledger. Note that this is a key element of the digital sovereign currency idea – and why a digital sovereign currency would be defacto nationalisation of the payment system. Today, it is the commercial banks which control theirindividual ledgers which when taken in aggregate form what is in effect a single distributedledger. They – and add-on’s like the credit card schemes and interlopers such as PayPal – then create bespoke competing and overlapping interfaces. A digital sovereign currency could only have one distributed ledger (which the central bank would maintain) and one interface to it (which again, the central bank would specify and control).

No 10 denies claims Boris Johnson groped Sunday Times journalist - Boris Johnson’s first day at Conservative party conference as prime minister was overshadowed by allegations of sexual misbehaviour, as Downing Street was forced to deny allegations that he had groped a female journalist. After days of revelations about his relationship with American tech entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri, whose company received a public grant, Johnson was accused of grabbing the thighs of two women at a lunch while he was editor of the Spectator magazine.The Sunday Times journalist Charlotte Edwardes claimed that at a private lunch in 1999, Johnson groped her leg under a table, grabbing “enough inner flesh beneath his fingers” to make her “sit upright”. She also alleged that he did the same to another woman at the same event.Downing Street initially declined to comment on Sunday; but after senior ministers were peppered with questions about the alleged incident, a No 10 spokesperson said: “The allegation is untrue.”Sources said the quote related specifically to the allegation that Johnson put his hand on Edwardes’ knee.The prime minister is said to be furious at the claim, which Downing Street insiders privately described as “bollocks” and “nonsense”. Edwardes tweeted on Sunday night: “If the prime minister doesn’t recollect the incident then clearly I have a better memory than he does.”

Brussels loses faith in 'volatile' UK -   The EU and its 27 remaining member states have all but lost faith in the British political system to deliver clarity on Brexit any time soon, according to interviews with officials and diplomats.That has left most in Brussels expecting that the October 31 deadline will need to be extended, but still bracing for the chance of a no-deal catastrophe. And even if disaster is avoided, the EU27 are wondering if another postponement will serve any useful purpose.The unprecedented U.K. Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday that Prime Minister Boris Johnson illegally shut down parliament injected further confusion into what was already a bewildering and highly unpredictable situation.And it confirmed the sense among many in Brussels that the political situation in the U.K. has only grown more dysfunctional since Johnson took over as prime minister. His combative rhetoric in recent days — repeating talk of "surrender" and dismissing an MP's account of death threats she'd received as "humbug" — and the backlash against it has only added to the sense of uncontrolled chaos in London. Speaking to a meeting of EU27 ambassadors on Thursday, Michel Barnier, the EU Brexit negotiator, confirmed the obvious. “The situation is still very volatile in the U.K.,” Barnier said, according to a diplomat who was in the room.Barnier stressed that in New York, Johnson met several EU leaders including Council President Donald Tusk. But while meetings with London are continuing at technical level, Barnier said there was no real progress. “We were awaiting realistic proposals from the U.K. a month ago and that is still the case,” he said, according to the diplomat. The Frenchman also described the speech by U.K. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay in Madrid last week as “aggressive” even as he urged member states to remain calm. U.K. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay shakes hands with EU negotiator Michel Barnier in July this year | Francois Walschaerts/AFP via Getty ImagesIn the Spanish capital Barclay had challenged the EU not to assume the U.K. would return to the negotiating table "from a position of weakness” in the event of a no-deal on October 31 and he insisted that the Northern Ireland border problem could be solved during a post-Brexit transition period — a position the EU27 have long rejected.After his meeting with Barnier in Brussels on Friday, Barclay continued with the upbeat tone that Johnson and his ministers have stuck to since negotiations restarted. “We are now approaching the moment of truth in these negotiations," he said after the Brussels meeting, "We are committed to securing a deal. The prime minister has made clear he wants a deal but that has to be without the backstop. Parliament has rejected the backstop three times, I have been very clear with Michel Barnier and Task Force 50 in the negotiations, the backstop has to go. But with good will on both sides a deal can be done.”

Brexit: The Sound and Fury, and Boris Johnson’s choices -Beyond the Supreme Court ruling and the savage polarisation of the British body politic, there are two key questions for Ireland and the EU. Is Boris Johnson serious about reaching an agreement with the EU by the October European Council? If so, what will that deal look like? Let's take the second question first. Under Boris Johnson, the UK has abandoned some of the core objectives of the backstop: protecting the all-island economy, north-south cooperation, the integrity of the single market and avoiding a hard border and related checks and controls. "The objective for the UK now," says an EU official closely involved in the negotiations, "is to have as invisible a border as possible and reduce friction where you can. But there would still be, to all intents and purposes, a regulatory and customs border on the island of Ireland." The UK has put forward four technical "non-papers" in recent weeks, essentially testing ideas with the EU without committing to them. The main idea is an all-Ireland agri-food and animal health zone, aligned north and south under EU rules. This formed part of the original backstop. However, whereas the original envisaged broad alignment on other single market and customs union regulations, Johnson now wants alignment to be restricted to agri-food, and what are called sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) checks and controls. That would still leave industrial goods, customs, state aid and VAT rules. If those rules were different north and south there would be a regulatory and customs border. Under current UK proposals that problem would be addressed by technology, trusted trader schemes, exemptions from EU law and other facilitations, all worked out during a transition period after the Withdrawal Agreement was ratified. However, EU officials say these are simply "concepts" and the UK does not regard them as needing to be legally operable until later. The reason agri-food plays such a crucial part in the negotiations is because of its role in cross-border economic activity.

Boris Johnson to keep Irish backstop plan a secret until after next week’s Tory conference ‘to avoid a row with hardline Brexiteers’ Senior UK and EU sources said Mr Johnson is expected to come up with a fresh draft legal text by the end of next week.Officials on both sides suggest that the delay is an attempt to avoid the blueprint being leaked before conference, which starts in Manchester.Brussels diplomats think Mr Johnson is “playing for time” in the belief both sides will “jump together” at the last minute.A senior UK source said: “We know detailed texts need to be tabled and that will happen shortly.”And a top EU official told The Sun: “They don’t yet want to put things on paper that could infuriate the ERG or DUP.”Several EU countries back a cut-off date of the end of next week for a new plan.EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier dealt Mr Johnson a fresh blow saying his insistence progress is being made in talks has “no basis in reality”.  The Frenchman also revealed he can’t do a deal based on an alternative backstop plan as it falls “outside my mandate”.He made the admission to EU ambassadors on Thursday, according to a diplomatic note seen by The Sun.Mr Barnier met Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay in Brussels yesterday for more stalled talks.Afterwards Mr Barclay said: “There needs to be political will on both sides. We’re now approaching the moment of truth.”Mr Barnier told ambassadors that despite twice-weekly talks, Britain’s plans are not “a serious alternative to the backstop”.Instead, he said Mr Johnson has “given up” on former PM Theresa May’scommitment to avoid a hard border in Ireland. An EU diplomat told The Sun: “The whole British strategy is to wait until we blink. That’s it. But will we? I don’t think so.”

Cunning Nigel Farage could yet outfox everyone - You could hear the chanting across the car park. More than 1,000 people were streaming across the waterlogged fields into the exhibition centre wearing turquoise baseball caps and waxed jackets. There was homemade cake and tea. Richard Tice, the multi-millionaire Brexit Party chairman, with his 1950s matinee idol looks, was revving up the crowd. Behind him an assortment of candidates from air stewardesses and nurses to Evelyn Waugh’s grandson Alexander, were his back-up vocals. Then the party’s self-proclaimed agony aunt Ann Widdecombe swept on to the stage and the crowds went wild as she danced up and down shouting: “A deal is not leaving, that is merely moving from prison to house arrest.” Waugh was next. “If you want to see what happens when the shires get angry, you only have to read Lord of the Rings,” he roared. The hobbits gave him a standing ovation. Then Mr Tice, brandishing a pair of handcuffs, bellowed: “Do you want to be free?” It got very intense. Finally Nigel Farage stubbed out his cigarette as his bodyguards opened the entrance doors. The noise was stupendous. He sauntered down the aisle in his tweed jacket with velvet lapels. How he must have missed the limelight when he briefly left Ukip before joining this new party less than a year ago. Who do they hate? He only had to say a name and the audience booed at another enemy of the people. Xavier Bettel, the “pipsqueak” prime minister of Luxembourg; Jean-Claude Juncker; Tory MPs; Labour MPs; especially Liberal Democrat MPs; civil servants; the BBC; girly swots; “that ghastly little man called Bercow”; David Cameron; all Etonians; Oxbridge; judges; “political correctness gone mad” — the whole wicked, woke establishment in the distant metropolis with their Guatemalan avocados on toast. This audience was with Brenda from Bristol rather than Brenda Hale. “Wash your mouth out with soap and water if you say the words no-deal Brexit,” the leader said to laughter. “It’s a clean break we want. Even without the Irish backstop, May’s withdrawal agreement remains the worst deal in history.” The big question is, “Can we trust Boris?” he shouted. “No!” they screamed back. Mr Farage wants the next election to be about “parliament versus the people”, the “Remainer establishment versus the country”, not just Brussels. This was his eighth regional conference since he won the European elections in May and he has been fêted from Doncaster to Newport, Colchester to Telford. Exeter, a university city, voted to remain but the majority in the West Country wanted to leave the EU and they hate being called stupid. While Labour tore itself apart in Brighton and the Tories are divided on everything from Brexit to badgers, the Brexit Party has been quietly touring the country garnering the votes of the disaffected and disillusioned with its simplistic message. Its coffers are full, its online marketing slick, its MEPs and parliamentary candidates all agree, it doesn’t have members who might get uppity, just supporters who pay £25 to sign up. No one questions that Mr Farage is its unelected, self-appointed leader. A recent YouGov poll put the party on only 14 per cent from a high of 26 per cent before Mr Johnson took over, but that was after the prime minister promised to leave by Hallowe’en. The moment Mr Johnson can’t live up to that commitment, Mr Farage stands to win back the hardcore Leave votes.

 The Cost/Benefit Analysis of No Deal - Yves Smith -  Yves here. I anticipate readers will have fun with this No Deal analysis.  And some of the things Murphy lists as costs are benefits in the eyes of businesses,  like reducing worker and consumer safety standards. And I suspect most UK readers got the news….that Johnson was feted at the Conservative’s annual conference. From Politico:Boris Johnson faces trouble on every front, but to the Conservative grassroots, he is the hero they’ve been waiting for….“We have more members than ever before and more young people than ever before coming along, so it’s going to be a really positive, upbeat conference,” said Pamela Hall, the president of the Conservative grassroots board who chairs the conference. “I’ve never known us as united as we are at the moment. Everybody is fully behind the prime minister.” Andrew Colborne-Baber, who chairs the party board on memberships, announced Sunday morning that the party has 189,000 members, up from around 130,000 in early 2018. He attributed the boost in part to a new database which was more effective at preventing memberships from lapsing and also to Johnson. “There are a lot of people coming on board since the leadership election,” he said. Polls, too, look largely positive for the prime minister, with an Opinium survey for the Observer reporting the Tories holding a 12-point lead over Labour. By Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and a political economist. Originally published at Tax Research UK: I had a friend who has now decided to become a Brexit Party parliamentary candidate. There are some things friendship cannot survive. But I did try to work out what the advantages of his fervent No Deal enthusiasm might be, since the speech he showed me that he proposes to deliver on the stump only referred to deals we can already do with China and the USA, and what I consider to be some rather nasty racist tropes. So I drew myself a table. This is what I came up with in about fifteen minutes. Please feel free to add suggestions for both columns*.

Dismay in Brussels as Boris Johnson finally reveals Brexit plan - Boris Johnson appears to be fighting a losing battle to avoid Britain staying in the European Union beyond 31 October after Michel Barnier privately gave a scathing analysis of the prime minister’s new plan for the Irish border, describing it as a trap. The European commission also refused to go into the secretive and intensive “tunnel” talks with the UK’s negotiators before a crunch summit on 17 October from which the UK had hoped to deliver a breakthrough deal. Despite concerted attempts to avoid publicly trashing the UK proposals, there was dismay behind the scenes in Brussels after Johnson tabled his first concrete proposal for replacing the Irish backstop. The prime minister had set out the outline of the government’s offer in a speech to Tory party faithful in Manchester that also laid down the battle lines for a general election. On Wednesday night, he was hopeful a parliamentary majority could be assembled to back it. Johnson’s plan involves Northern Ireland leaving the EU’s customs union at the end of transition along with the rest of the UK, necessitating checks and controls on the island of Ireland. Northern Ireland would also stay aligned with EU standards on goods if Stormont agreed by December 2020, the end of the transition period, and then in a vote every four years. But the UK has also requested that both sides commit at treaty level “never to conduct checks at the border” even if Stormont vetoes the arrangements laid out in the new 44-page Irish protocol. Barnier said that this commitment would prevent Brussels from protecting its internal market if the Northern Ireland assembly blocked the arrangement in 2020 or at a later date. “The EU would then be trapped with no backstop to preserve the single market after Brexit,” he warned, according to someone present in the room. The Irish taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, issued a sombre statement after a phone call on Wednesday afternoon with Johnson. Varadkar warned the prime minister that the legal texts tabled “do not fully meet the agreed objectives of the backstop”..  Jean-Claude Juncker, the European commission president, told the prime minister in his phone call that there remained “problematic points”. It is understood that the European parliament’s Brexit steering group will say on Thursday that MEPs will not vote in support of the deal proposed by the UK government. “The reaction of the Brexit steering group was not positive,” the group’s coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, told reporters after a briefing from Barnier. “Not positive in that we don’t think really there are the safeguards that Ireland needs.” EU sources said that such were the flaws in the UK’s proposals that there appeared scant chance of agreement by a crunch EU summit on 17 October.

UK parliament to be suspended again from Tuesday — Prime Minister Boris Johnson said today he intends to ask the queen to suspend parliament from the evening of October 8, with the goal of bringing forward a fresh legislative agenda. Under the plans, MPs would be recalled for a queen’s speech on October 14 as Johnson had originally planned. If the British government secures a Brexit deal with EU leaders at the European Council summit on October 17-18, it will aim to introduce a Withdrawal Agreement Bill to be enacted by October 31. No. 10 Downing Street said in a statement that parliament would be prorogued for the “shortest time possible to enable all the necessary logistical preparations” for the queen’s speech, which include security checks near parliament and viewing stands in the House of Lords. “Through a queen’s speech, the Government will set out its plans for the NHS, schools, tackling crime, investing in infrastructure and building a strong economy. We will get Brexit done and continue delivering on these vital issues,” Johnson said.

Germany says any Brexit deal must prevent a hard Irish border (Reuters) - Germany welcomes Britain’s latest Brexit proposals and remains of the view that any deal must protect the European Union’s internal market and avoid a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, a German government spokesman said on Friday.  “For us, it remains the case that a settlement must secure the safeguarding of the internal market, a settlement must be operable, and it must avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland,” spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters.

Labour votes to abolish private schools at party conference -- Labour will pledge to abolish private schools if it wins the next election, after the party’s annual conference voted for a proposal to “integrate” them into the state sector. In a major policy shift, a motion approved by delegates at the gathering in Brighton said a government led by Jeremy Corbyn would “challenge the elite privilege of private schools” and claimed that “the ongoing existence of private schools is incompatible with Labour’s pledge to promote social justice”.It said the party would include in its next manifesto “a commitment to integrate all private schools into the state sector”.This would include scrapping independent schools’ charitable status and “all other public subsidies and tax privileges”.  Controversially, the party will also force universities to ensure that only 7 per cent of students they admit went to private schools – the same proportion as in the general population. And private schools’ property, land and other assets will be seized and “redistributed democratically and fairly across the country’s educational institutions”.

How Facial Recognition Technology Is Bringing Surveillance Capitalism to Our Streets --Last month it was revealed by the Financial Times that facial recognition cameras had been used to identify pedestrians in the Granary Square area of the new Kings Cross complex in London between 2016 and 2018.Argent, the developer and asset manager charged with the design and delivery of the site,admitted to the use of two CCTV cameras equipped with biometric technology to map facial features. These cameras then ran this information through a database supplied by the Metropolitan Police Service to check for matches.The estate at Kings Cross is a privately owned complex, but one that is used by thousands of members of the public every day. In addition to over 2,000 homes, the area hosts a variety of shops, hotels and music venues, as well as the world-renowned Central Saint Martins School of Art.Rightly, there has been a public outcry over the covert use of this technology. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has launched a subsequent investigation, whilst London Mayor Sadiq Khan has written to the development’s CEO seeking an explanation.Although it has garnered significant press attention, Kings Cross is just one example of how facial recognition technology is being rolled out across “public” spaces in London. Last month theEvening Standard revealed that planning permission has been granted by the City of London Corporation for the implementation of advanced surveillance cameras in The Barbican Centre, where 16 of the new 65 cameras will be capable of recognising faces, and possess an invasive two-way audio feature – “potentially allowing controllers to listen in”.Meanwhile similar projects have been approved at Liberty’s department store in Soho, and Hay’s Galleria on the South Bank. The Financial Times also exposed proposals for the installation of privately owned facial recognition cameras across the 92 acre estate at Canary Wharf.The same piece noted: “convenience stores such as Budgens, and supermarkets – including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer – all have cameras that are already, or soon will be, capable of facial recognition”. Just as we have been normalised to the 500,000 CCTV cameras operating across London today, facial recognition may soon become a ubiquitous norm of everyday life in the 21st century.