In its rush to reduce its headcount, Deutsche Bank apparently forgot which employees it laid off, and which employees still worked at the bank.
The FT reports that DB has launched an internal investigation into whether “confidential client data were compromised” after the bank realized that some former employees retained access to company systems and their corporate email accounts for weeks after being laid off.
One former equity sales person reportedly sent 450 messages via the company’s system after she was let go…and we doubt those messages were her merely saying one last goodbye to her treasured clients.
Around 50 traders in the London and New York offices were still able to access the bank’s systems and their emails for weeks after the first round of lay-offs started on July 8, according to people briefed on the compliance blunder. One equity salesperson sent 450 messages via remote access after she was let go.
News of the oversight doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the lender, which is trying to convince shareholders that it can pull off one of the most radical restructurings since the financial crisis.
The investigation, which is being led by head of compliance Jeremy Kirk, will examine whether there has been any collusion between laid off staff and those who remain at the bank.
So far, they haven’t found anything incriminating.
“Access to trading systems was turned off immediately for employees being put at risk of redundancy,” the bank said. “A small number of employees continued to have access to their work emails through personal devices for a limited period.”
“We have reviewed nearly all emails sent and have so far found no evidence of any price sensitive information being communicated or of any other wrongdoing,” he added.
“Access to work emails has now been fully revoked.”
The 50 equity traders in NYC and London who retained access to company email were just some of the 900 employees who have been let go. Over the next few years, DB intends to shrink its global headcount by 18,000.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/331uozS Tyler Durden
Not all people who worry about a replacement of civilizations are necessarily violent or even incorrect. They appear to be frightened folk, sent over the edge by matters they may feel beyond control. In Europe and the United States, they have witnessed wave upon wave of attacks by individuals and groups openly espousing violence in the name of religion. They seem to fear that their own governments are doing too little to protect them and their families from future attacks.
“What unites these groups ideologically is a belief that Europe is facing a ‘great replacement’ by Muslim and African immigrants. And they want something done about it.” — Marion MacGregor, “The push from Europe’s young new right”, Infomigrants.net; May 5, 2018.
Political correctness, often an extreme form of denial of reality, has made it increasingly hard for even the most reasonable and careful of thinkers to say anything critical about Islam… efforts to block fair criticism of aspects of Islam can become unjust forms of censorship.
The number of deaths is not always a guide to the impact of a tragedy. One of the most recent tragedies had a high, but far from record-making, toll of fatalities. First, and as a basis for comparison, it is worth noting that the November 2015 Islamic State attacks in Paris slaughtered 90 people in the Bataclan Theatre and more elsewhere in the city, for a total of 130 deaths. The Islamist truck attack on a single stretch of road in Nice on 14 July 2016 took no fewer than 86 lives. On Easter Sunday, 21 April 2019, around 253 innocent people, including many children, were slaughtered during radical Muslim attacks on churches and three hotels in Sri Lanka, the largest death toll since the nearly 3,000 on September 11, 2001.
Pictured: The wreckage of St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, Sri Lanka, on 21 April 2019, following a bomb attack earlier that day. (Photo by Stringer/Getty Images)
These all took their toll and will not soon be forgotten. Another attack recently took place that may have left a lasting impression, already changing how people think and act about our responses to these attacks and the people who perpetrate them, as we move more forcefully into a state of concerns on both sides of an increasingly dangerous stand-off between civilizations.
Most recently, 50 people were killed and another 50 were injured during an armed attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15, 2019.
The alleged killer was a 28-year-old Australian man, apparently a far-right activist named Brenton Harrison Tarrant. He was arrested while driving away from the second attack, possibly headed for another Islamic centre. Police Commissioner Mike Bush said that authorities “absolutely” believe they stopped the suspect “on the way to a further attack.” One target may have been the Ashburton Mosque, about an hour’s drive away. According to New Zealand’s News Hub:
There are several other targets within Christchurch that Tarrant may have considered while plotting his alleged crime. There are two Halal food outlets – a butchery and a supermarket – in the vicinity of the immobilised car. The most chilling possible target en route to Ashburton is the An-Nur Child Care Centre on Springs Road in Hornby in the city’s far west. The Centre is described as “the only Islamic early learning service in Christchurch”.
The same source said that Tarrant, in his written manifesto, identified the Ashburton Mosque as the next outlet for his hatred. He called the place a “desecration” because it had been converted from a church.
We must all be grateful that Tarrant was found and arrested before he could carry out further killings. But, as it stands, what he did in Christchurch will go down in history as the second — but largest — major attack in the West on Muslims peacefully at prayer in their house of worship.
When Baruch Goldstein, a far-right American-Israeli, killed 29 Muslim worshippers and wounded 125 in a 1994 massacre in the Ibrahimi Mosque inside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Israel, he was condemned outright by the Israeli government, the Israeli population, and Jews across the diaspora.
According to the New York Times, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “declared murderous settlers to be outcasts, alien to Israel and to Judaism.” Rabin even called Goldstein a “villainous Jew,” and a “Jewish Hamas member.”
“I am shamed over the disgrace imposed upon us by a degenerate murderer,” Rabin continued. “You are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism.”
As for Australia’s Brenton Tarrant, in early April, reports appeared concerning his close ties to some European anti-Muslim groups. According to the Washington Post:
The probes currently concentrate on any money trails leading back to the suspect…
But it also reflects wider examinations into a new crop of far-right groups whose rise has paralleled the increasing use of anti-immigrant fears to buoy right-wing political parties in the West.
Among the groups most adept at stitching together the various strands of nativist anger and suspicion is the French-rooted Identitarian Movement, which promotes an alarmist message that Muslim migrants will one day overrun Western culture…
The Identitarian Movement apparently echoed Tarrant’s anger toward Muslim migrants, and is now at the center of international investigations as authorities try to piece together the elements that shaped Tarrant’s views.
The Identitarian Movement may have seemed to many a minor and obscure political trend that came to public attention only after the revelation of Tarrant’s links to its French and Austrian branches.
Jason Wilson describes it as follows, starting with its Austrian movement:
Identitäre Bewegung Österreichs (IBÖ) is part of a larger far-right Identitarian movement, with branches in most western European countries, North America and New Zealand…
Organisations that affiliate themselves with Identitarianism include Génération Identitaire in France and Generazione Identitaria in Italy. The American Identity Movement in the United States (recently renamed from Identity Evropa and banned from Facebook on Thursday) participated in the Charlottesville rally, and recently leaked chat logs showed that their ranks include serving members of the US military. Identity Australia appears little more than a grouplet for now and the Dominion Movement in New Zealand claimed on its website to have disbanded in the wake of the mass murder at Christchurch.
The Charlottesville reference draws attention to another disturbing feature of Identitarianism: it is not just anti-Muslim, but anti-Jewish. White supremacists in the Charlottesville rally chanted “Jews will not replace us”:
The demonstration was suffused with anti-black racism, but also with anti-Semitism. Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like “blood and soil,” a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology….”
It gets more complex: In Europe, antisemitism is most often found within socialist and Muslim groups, but while Identitarians and their affiliates hold that as part of their philosophy, their attention is mainly focussed on Muslims, in particular on refugees and immigrants: “What unites these groups ideologically is a belief that Europe is facing a ‘great replacement’ by Muslim and African immigrants. And they want something done about it.”
These movements are mainly made up of young white men, like Tarrant. With regard to Muslims, they see themselves as modern heirs to the Christians who fought wars against Muslim invaders such as the Ottoman Turks. In 2012, French Génération Identitaire members briefly occupied a mosque in Poitiers. They did so on the anniversary of the famous 732 Battle of Poitiers (better known as the Battle of Tours), the game-changing occasion when the Frankish Prince Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, defeated a raiding force of Arab Muslims sent north from the Umayyad Caliphate that controlled the Iberian Peninsula. That battle has come to be regarded as the event that blocked the entry of Muslim invaders into the rest of Europe.
Tarrant clearly took concerns about Muslims to a pathological extreme, and was ordered to undergo testing for mental illness. According to the Associated Press, however:
Tarrant’s rifles contained the names of legendary Serbs and Montenegrins who fought against the 500-year-rule of the Muslim Ottomans in the Balkans, written in the Cyrillic alphabet used by the two Orthodox Christian nations.
In photographs from a now deleted Twitter account associated with the suspect that match the weaponry seen in his live-streamed video, there is a reference to “Vienna 1683”, the year the Ottoman Empire suffered a defeat in its siege of the city at the Battle of Kahlenberg. “Acre 1189”, a reference to the Crusades, is also written on the guns.
Four names of legendary Serbs who fought against the 500-year-rule of the Muslim Ottomans in the Balkans, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, are also seen on the gunman’s rifles….
The name Charles Martel, who white supremacists are said to credit with saving Europe from invading Muslims in 734, was also on the weapons.
These are not the only names or references on the rifles and ammunition; what is striking is that Tarrant had obviously done his homework. He knew where to visit, whom to celebrate, and the historical context into which to situate his own attacks.
Not all people who worry about a replacement of civilizations are necessarily violent or even incorrect. They appear to be frightened folk, sent over the edge by matters they may feel beyond control. In Europe and the United States, they have witnessed wave upon wave of attacks by individuals and groups openly espousing violence in the name of religion. They seem to fear that their own governments are doing too little to protect them and their families from future attacks.
Political correctness, often an extreme form of denial of reality, has made it increasingly hard for even the most reasonable and careful of thinkers to say anything critical about Islam. While it is reasonable to call out overt racism or brutal hate for Muslims — or anyone else — efforts to block fair criticism of aspects of Islam can become unjust forms of censorship.
Many members of society might well see this censorship as a denial of their concerns on topics such as Islamist terrorism, unintegrated newcomers entering what they consider “their” territory, and their anxieties about what seems to be uncontrolled mass immigration into their native countries.
When governments dismiss these fears and do not seem to offer positive solutions to manifest problems, many people might understandably feel helpless. While many Muslims protest the violence in Islam, when presidents and priests say, “Islam is a religion of peace”, events that people see around them (such as here, here, here and here), combined with indisputable facts about fundamentalist doctrine and political demands, seem to have convinced increasing members of the public that such a statement is simply not true.
Freedom of speech, the most readily available alternative to violence, is, in many places, being ruled illegal. When it is, social dislocation is likely to follow.
Many immigrants who do make efforts to fit in play vital roles to the point where many are indispensable. If, however, as some may claim, there has been failure to work hard for the full integration of Muslims, what should be done if many seem to want not to be integrated?
In 2015, on behalf of the British government, Dame Louise Casey produced a report on integration in the UK, in which she concluded that Muslims were the hardest ethnic and religious community to integrate. By 2017, she openly declaredthat government ministers had done absolutely nothing to advance social cohesion and integration.
Both extremist Muslims and all agitators seem to suffer from the same issue in their communities and personal lives: an unwillingness to change or to want to change.
Values considered Western — such as democracy, which is rejected as man-maderather than divinely made; adherence to human rights, unless they align with sharia; and equal justice under the law — simply do not seem to be among the highest priorities of many newcomers. Those who might disagree often seem unable to speak out.
Until extremists on all sides wish to adjust to life as it has developed in the past century, it seems as if both the hatred and violence will continue.
Our security services, already strained by Islamic terrorism, now face growing threats at a time when many former fighters from Islamic State, bitter from their defeat, have returned, or are trying to return, to several countries in Europe. Is it necessary to say how far this convergence of opposing views threatens Western civilization?
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has lived in both worlds, states:
“These efforts are well meaning, but they arise from a misguided conviction, held by many Western liberals, that retaliation against Muslims is more to be feared than Islamist violence itself…. In the process, we… marginalized dissident Muslims who were attempting to pursue real reform.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2MrshiM Tyler Durden
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, this is only the second time the day, which marks the time at which humanity has used up its allotment of natural planetary resources for the year, occurred in the month of July. It had occurred in August between 2010 and 2017.
The day, whose existence is highlighted by the NGO Global Footprint Network, means that all humans on Earth for this year have already used up more natural resources than mother nature can reproduce annually. Emissions, but also of resources like wood or fish and the use of land for crops, are among the things counted in when calculating Earth Overshoot Day.
Industrialized nations have the biggest share in pushing its date forward, as seen in the organization’s country profiles. The U.S. is the biggest offender.
If all nations lived like U.S. residents, the resources of five Earths would be needed each year in order for the natural environment to regenerate. The U.S. overshoot day is therefore on March 15.
Australia, which had been ahead of the U.S. for some years, now had its overshoot day on March 31, with 4.1 “Earths” used annually.
India was among the countries whose style of living would use up less than a whole Earth each year if practiced globally, which also has to do with poverty still being widespread in the country.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Otpbh3 Tyler Durden
The European elections were a sobering experience for the Tories. Their support fell to only 10 per cent of the vote and I already know of several large-scale Tory donors who switched to the Brexit Party overnight. Arguably, the Conservatives’ future is already in doubt. Suddenly, it is ‘do-or-die’ not just for Brexit, but for the Conservative Party as well.
Mr Johnson should realize that he is going to have to risk his longed-for position as PM to ensure Brexit is enacted properly. There is no prospect of a meaningful Brexit thanks to the views of most sitting MPs. And any attempt to prorogue Parliament will lead to the PM being brought down by his own side. The inescapable truth, therefore, is that he must hold an Autumn general election. That is his only way out. Doing so will take enormous courage. Inevitably, it will trigger a split in the Conservative Party. But the country is crying out for leadership and a resolution to the Brexit crisis.
Even on Brexit, he was very late to the cause. He will have a lot of convincing to do to persuade us that an early election will lead to a clean-break Brexit on 31 October.
If he is able to convince us, then together we would electorally smash the Labour Party, he would assume a big working majority, and he would go down as one of the great leaders in British history. All this is possible, but is Boris Johnson brave enough?
Johnson Should Accept
Johnson should accept this offer, just not quite yet. I propose mid-September.
Johnson should delay long enough there is no mathematical chance an election can stop Brexit.
By Common’s math, assuming an election is on a Thursday, an election is already too late to stop Brexit. But there is no requirement for a Thursday election.
My calculation says BJ can seek an election any time after September 10 secure that it cannot be held in time to prevent Brexit on October 31.
Johnson Bounce
The Tories have had a bounce following Johnson’s election. And his message is “Deliver Brexit – Do or Die.
What’s Jeremy Corbyn going to offer? Another referendum!
A year-long investigation that examined tens of thousands of leaked emails has revealed the secret inner workings of Australia’s biggest casino, Crown. The investigation, a collaborative effort led by 60 Minutes Australia, highlighted links to Chinese crime bosses and communist party figures in addition to drugs syndicates, money laundering and alleged sex trafficking rings.
After setting up offices across mainland China in 2010, Crown offered big incentives to its staff to break Chinese law to lure high rollers. When authorities closed in, the company reportedly abandoned its employees.
Crown employee Jenny Jiang, along with of her 18 colleagues, were arrested on October 13 and 14, 2016 and held in custody, convicted of breaching mainland Chinese laws that ban gambling and its promotion. She lives in Shanghai and now has a criminal record in China. As a Crown employee, her pay was based on incentives that were paid out when their high roller customers reached “appraisal targets” by gambling billions of dollars.
Jiang claimed that Crown’s promise to bring revenue to the Australian government led to hundreds of visas being stamped for Chinese nationals because they promised to gamble tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on trips to casinos.
EXCLUSIVE: #60Mins and @Ageinvestigates can reveal Former Border Force Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg says he was encouraged by several members of parliament to fast track Crown’s Chinese high-rollers through Australian borders. pic.twitter.com/HuVgDjKVxS
Jiang became a whistleblower that refused a $60,000 payment from Crown for her silence.
The investigation highlighted that Crown was prepared to cooperate with Asian organized crime syndicates, including the Triads and the most powerful drug trafficking syndicate in the world, in order to encourage business at their casinos. Current and former government officials also said that Crown helped bring criminals through the nation’s border in a way that raised serious national security concerns for Australia.
Chinese high rollers and criminals would look for ways to either “clean” money or smuggle it out of the country. They would work with “junket operators”, who had access to offshore funds and would provide luxury services to high rollers including non-negotiable casino chips. Many of these “junket operators” were familiar with the territory in Macau, the only place in China where you can legally bet in a casino.
From there, Crown casino would pay out winnings and unspent money. The junket operator got a commission and the high rollers and criminals would leave the casino with “clean” money.
Junket operators would then “balance the ledger” by having Australian debts repaid in China. Since Chinese courts don’t recognize gambling debts, this would occasionally lead to junkets seeking “alternatives” to collecting on debts, including violence.
In 2013, when authorities looked into one Melbourne financial adviser who was licensed by Crown to work as a representative for an Asian junket operator, Roy Moo, they found CCTV video of him passing bundles of $50 notes from a plastic shopping bag to a Crown staff member.
He claimed that “Crown offered its junkets a financial service with all the hallmarks of an underground banking operation.”
The money wound up totaling $969,000 and wound up being the proceeds of a drug syndicate’s trafficking operation in Melbourne and Sydney.
Crown said: “Crown does not comment on its business operations with particular individuals or businesses. However, it has a ‘comprehensive’ anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing program in place which is subject to regulatory supervision by AUSTRAC.”
You can watch the entire investigation here:
In Australia, there was some outrage over how the segment was promoted by 60 Minutes, who, in teasers called it a story that would “rock the foundation of Australia”. Viewers noted that a similar investigation had also taken place in 2017 by ABC and some said that the story was “overhyped”.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ypH3hK Tyler Durden
Back in 2016, theNew York Post ran a story alleging that convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had moved beyond having his assistants “troll local high schools” for girls, and instead had begun “importing his playmates from Russia.”
One of the men who allegedly “procured” such girls for Epstein and other affluent men is Peter Listerman, was reportedly “running scared” when reporters approached him earlier this month at a film festival asking questions about his ties to Epstein, according to a report from the Daily Beast Monday.
According to the report, Listerman’s reputation for “matchmaking,” in which he would connect rich men to young models, has been notorious for decades, citing multiple interviews wherein Listerman brags about the number of women he’s hooked up with rich men.
The 10th annual Odesa International Film Festival in Ukraine, has been described as a haven for young Russian and Ukrainian models who partake in events organized for the festival’s Fashion Weekend. It was here reporters from the Daily Beast were able to find Listerman and question him about allegations that had connected Epstein with young foreign girls. According to the report, Listerman, whom the reporter was able to find based on his social media posts from the party, first responded to questions by attempting to turn the situation into a joke.
“I invented myths and fairy tales to entertain people,” Listerman said.
But when reporters refused to relent about his supposed role in exploiting teen models, Listerman refused to respond, eventually blocking the Daily Beast reporter from his Instagram and Facebook pages. But the online news outlet did catch up with model Krista Goncharova, who provided further details regarding Listerman’s reputation and behavior, referring to him as “the world famous seller of young models to oligarchs.”
Listerman began sending Goncharova private messages in 2016, allegedly trying lure her to become one of his girls.
“I had enough of a brain to turn him down when I was a minor but many girls look for a chance to meet with him, say yes to his offers, as he is paying them much more than [$334], the average of what we make per day working as professional models in Europe,” she said.
It’s doubtful that any of the Russians or Ukrainians that Page Six noticed around Epstein were there to be life partners; and, as for Goncharova herself, the Daily Beast concludes by noting that after a lifetime of modeling, at 24 she is disillusioned and says she is planning to quit the business.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2SMHhJa Tyler Durden
The price of China’s favorite food is about to hit all time highs.
As a result of the decimation of Chinese pig herds, which have been crippled by the ongoing spread of so-called “pig ebola”, i.e. African swine fever which has crippled domestic pork production, RaboBank expects China’s pork prices to hit a record high by the fourth quarter of 2019 even as imports continue to surge.
Last Tuesday China’s customs data showed that pork imports in June surged from the previous year, as the world’s top consumer of the meat stocked up on supplies after African swine fever swept across the country’s pig herds. China brought in 160,467 tonnes of pork in June, up 62.8% from the same month last year, according to data from the General Administration of Customs. This was down 14% from 187,459 tonnes imported in May.
China’s pork imports for the first six months of the year came in at 818,703 tonnes, up 26.3% from a year earlier according to Reuters. Meanwhile, pork prices rose by nearly 30% in June compared with a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, with the spread of African swine fever showing no sign of abating, causing domestic production to plunge.
Retail pork prices have also increased in recent weeks but at a slower pace than whole sale prices, with prices up 34.6% from a year earlier at 27.29 yuan per kg as of July 10. And while China’s agriculture ministry is investigating local veterinary authorities in 10 provinces as it tries to slow the ongoing spread of the deadly African swine fever virus, few analysts expect it to succeed, and instead see prices rising even higher:
“China’s pork and hog prices are likely to break the previous record high in 2016 by the fourth quarter,” said Pan Chenjun, senior analyst for animal protein at Rabobank. He also expects pork production to fall by 30% or about 16 million tonnes, leaving a gaping hole in the country’s protein supply. Analysts warn the disease could hit some farms more than once, and ratings agency Fitch forecasts pork output will stay below 2018 levels through 2021.
Rabobank pointed out that Chinese data showed that sow, or mother pig, inventory had dropped 26.7% and the number of hogs had fallen 25.8% at the end of June compared with a year ago. But it believes that the herd losses in specific regions are much worse, down by 40 to 60 per cent since last August. For 2019, the bank expects the total herd loss to exceed 50 per cent.
Since the first African swine fever outbreak in Liaoning province in August 2018, the disease has affected animals across the country, forcing China to cull more than 1.1 million pigs.
China began to import more pork in March when domestic wholesale prices started to rise. Imports of US pork – which fell 75% to 1,609 tonnes between July and December 2018 after China retaliated with tariffs in response to US duties on Chinese goods – have soared. Since January, imports from the US have more than tripled from 5,788 tonnes to 17,603 tonnes in May. While US pork imports to China face a 62% tariff, Bloomberg has cited unnamed sources saying that Beijing has approved duty waivers for some Chinese companies.
African swine fever will also put downward pressure on middle-class consumer spending, which Beijing is counting on to help boost growth in an economy that is expanding at its slowest pace in nearly three decades. China’s middle class accounts for around 400 million people, or 28.6% of the 1.4 billion population.
According to SCMP, economists at Capital Economics warned that Chinese consumption growth will be weighed down in the near term by consumer price inflation which is set to reach an eight-year high, due in large part to rising pork prices resulting from African swine fever.
“This will drag down real income growth and likely lead to a further deterioration in consumer sentiment,” they said in a report this month.
This also means that China is facing its first stagflationary episode since 2011: last month, China’s consumer price index
rose 2.7% Y/Y, driven by higher food prices in pork and fruits, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. And with spending curtailed, China’s economy will likely continue to contract even as prices of food stables rise.
* * *
Meanwhile, and as a result, prices for other meats including chicken and duck, are also expected to rise substantially, putting further pressure on the discretionary spending of Chinese consumers.
One direct – and soon to be very rich – beneficiary of China’s pig ebola are duck farmers. As the SCMP reports, on a 30-hectare (74-acre) plot of land in China’s Shandong province poultry hub, more than half a million white-feathered ducks are busy eating, chattering and laying eggs to produce cheap meat for thousands of factory canteens.
With birds already packed into around 60 open-sided buildings, farm owner Shenghe Group is expanding further, aiming to raise output by 30 per cent this year to capture record profits as a plunge in pig numbers shrinks production of pork, China’s favourite meat.
“The market prospects are very good now because of African swine fever,” said Shenghe Chairman Wang Shuhong, whose firm sells about 300,000 ducklings a day for fattening and slaughter.
Expect demand for ducks to soar, for the simple reason that the deadly pig disease has already reduced China’s hog herd by more than a quarter, according to official data, however as many as half of the country’s breeding sows are thought to have died or been slaughtered to cope with disease outbreaks.
A farmer surrounded by ducklings at a duck farm on the outskirts of Jiaxing in Zhejiang province on April 5, 2011. Photo: Reuters
Meanwhile, soaring pork prices have already fueled a surge in poultry meat demand. Chicken breast is about 20% more expensive than a year ago, while duck breast has nearly tripled in price to 14,600 yuan (US$2,125) a tonne, according to Shenghe. While this is still only about half the cost of pork, but such prices are unheard of in China, where breast is typically the cheapest part of the bird.
As the SCMP also reports, about 80% of the world’s ducks are raised in China, but are traditionally eaten in the south, where fried duck tongues, braised feet and spicy duck neck are popular snacks, and duck intestines make up a hotpot.
In recent years, as pork prices spiked, more ducks have been processed for use by cost-conscious catering firms, supplying large canteens feeding schools, factories, businesses and the military. These buyers are now switching as much pricey pork as they can to duck.
A procurement manager with a catering firm that supplies about 100 large clients around China said he has replaced about 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the pork on menus with either chicken or duck meat. He declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.
“We may switch even more. But our concern is that the poultry price is now going up as well,” he said.
The price of day-old ducklings, sold by farms like Shenghe, has hovered around 6 yuan, three times the usual level, since July last year. While the torrid price surge eased last month as farmers held off restocking during hot summer weather, they are rising again and set to go higher, said Dong Xiaobo, China general manager for French genetics company Orvia, the No. 2 supplier of breeding ducks.
Orvia is sold out six months ahead and has even had calls from pig farmers considering raising ducks after losing their hogs to African swine fever.
“I’ve never seen this in our 10 years in this market,” said Dong.
As swine fever continues to spread, China’s vice-premier Hu Chunhua has urged poultry farmers to help fill the protein gap to maintain social and economic stability.
Meanwhile, with output of about 5 million tonnes last year, less than half China’s chicken production, duck meat has plenty of room for growth, especially since the barrier to entry is lower for ducks than broiler chickens and breeding stock is more available, said Rabobank analysts.
Ironically, any rapid expansion carries its own disease risks, as in densely stocked farms, diseases like bird flu, several strains of which are circulating in China, will spread easily.And it remains to be seen whether duck farmers can hold on to a bigger share of the meat market when pork output recovers. As a reminder, in 2012 and 2016, duck farmers were forced out of the industry in droves when overproduction killed profits, and most people still want more pork dishes than any other meat, said the catering company manager.
But Shenghe’s Wang, who is planning to expand downstream with a slaughterhouse later this year, is not worried. “Pork output won’t go up in the next three years and will take at least five years to recover,” he said.
The bottom line: as China’s pork farmers face a dismal future, their duck farming friends are making more money than ever.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2SOifcR Tyler Durden
When considering the possibility of great-power conflict in the near future, it is difficult to bypass space as one of the main areas of strategic focus for the major powers.The United States, Russia and China all have cutting-edge programs for the militarization of space, though with a big difference.
Donald Trump’s announcement of a “Space Force” is by no means a new idea. During the Reagan presidency, a similar idea was proposed in the form of the famous “Star Wars“ program, formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. It aimed to do away with the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) by positioning anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) interceptors in low-Earth orbit in order for them to be able to easily intercept ballistic missiles during their entry into orbit and before their re-entry phase. The costs and technology at the time proved prohibitive for the program, but military planners retained the dream of negating the concept of MAD in Washington’s favor, especially with the dawning of the unipolar era following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The decisions taken in the years since, such as the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002 during Bush’s presidency and from the INF Treaty during Trump’s, follows Reagan in trying to invalidate MAD, a balance of terror that has served to maintain a strategic stability.
This hope of doing away with MAD so that the unthinkable may become thinkable has guided the missile developments of Russia and China, which through the development of hypersonic missiles aim to nullify the US’s ABM systems and thereby make the thought of an unreciprocated nuclear first strike MAD again. With Russia’s recent successes in testing hypersoning technologies, and the fast-tracking of other new strategic weaponsannounced by Putin less than 12 months ago, strategic stability seems to have been restored through Russia’s strengthened deterrence posture.
The weaponization of space is a less known and talked about aspect of Washington’s mad attempts to make mutually assured destruction no longer mutual and therefore thinkable. During the peak of the unipolar moment, the idea of the Pentagon and the lobbyists of the military-industrial complex was to develop the so-called Prompt Global Strike system, which envisioned being able to deliver an air strike with conventional weapons anywhere in the world in the space of an hour. The dream (or delusion) of the US was to have the unique ability to determine the course of events around the globe within an hour. Such experimental craft as the Orbital Test Vehicle seem to confirm that serious efforts have been underway to realize this objective.
Neither China nor Russia has been sitting idly by waiting to be struck undefended. Russia’s development of its S-500 system has been quite timely. The S-500 system is often considered an upgrade to the better-known S-400 system, but these are in reality different systems with different aims and objectives. The main task of the S-500 is to engage long-distance targets in low-Earth orbit. We are therefore talking about the ability to take out military or any future ABM satellites as those originally conceived with Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.
Unlike Washington, Moscow and Beijing do not appear to be developing space-based weaponry; they are certainly not going to increase their military budgets to create a space force. On the contrary, both countries have been working for more than a decade on a proposed Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) treaty that seeks to ban the weaponization of space. The aims are summarized as follows:
“Under the draft treaty submitted to the [Conference on Disarmament] by Russia in 2008, State Parties would have to refrain from carrying out such weapons and threatening to use objects in outer space. State Parties would also agree to practice agreed confidence-building measures.
A PAROS treaty would complement and reaffirm the importance of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which aims to preserve space for peaceful uses by prohibiting the use of space weapons, and technology related to ‘missile defense’. The treaty would prevent any nation from gaining a military advantage in outer space.”
The intentions of the draft treaty clearly go against Washington’s plans. It is therefore not surprising that Washington has no intention of acceding to PAROS, and it is probably only a matter of time before Washington withdraws from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
Trump is looking at things from a practical point of view. He wants to give a major boost to the military-industrial complex, which is salivating at the prospect of being showered with tens or even hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars in a quest to weaponize space. But the policy makers in Washington and in think-tanks look at the weaponization of space from a different perspective. They look at it from the point of view of Washington as a superpower that must seek to prolong its unipolar moment through the use of force, even from space. While it is delusional nonsense, it has nevertheless been the prevailing outlook in Washington for at least the last 25 years.
The reason why China and Russia have proposed and continue to discuss the PAROS lies in their political and military philosophies that contrast with that of the US. As an imperial power bent on global domination, the US is always looking for ways to subjugate and dominate what it considers to be its underlings, while Russia and China act to hold back and counterbalance US aggression, in the process serving to enhance global stability.
The proposal for the non-militarization of space is the latest example of what unites and guides the Eurasian strategy of China and Russia without having any illusions about Washington’s intentions. The development of the SR-72 system seems to confirm that Washington wants to also bridge the gap with its Eurasian competitors in the field of hypersonic technology in addition to wishing to weaponize space.
Realistically, however, global powers in a multipolar context will seek to defend their territorial and economic sovereignty with every means at their disposal. Likewise, those seeking global hegemony will try to exploit any existing domain to gain an advantage over their rivals.
China and Russia seek to weaponize distance and speed to make any possible US attack on them impracticable, both in terms of the logistics required and the revivified cost-benefit calculus of MAD. The US, on the other hand, is trying to weaponize all conceivable domains of conflict by all means possible, hoping to be able to find a chink in its opponents’ armor.
Beijing and Moscow seem to have studied extensively how to respond. All the various defensive systems produced in recent years, from hypersonic anti-ship missiles to multi-layered defense systems like the S-400, S-500 and A-135/A-235, seem to meet the challenge.
Beijing fears US naval strength, and while seeking to achieve parity and surpass the US in the future, it aims above all to prevent the use of aircraft carriers as launching platforms through the employment of defensive area-denial weapons. In this sense, speed (Mach 10) and extending the range of Chinese anti-ship missiles (DF-21) are fundamental to the success of this strategy. Similarly, Moscow intends to seal Eurasia’s skies, and the S-500 seems to be the final flourish, able to protect up to 800 kilometers above sea level.
The weaponization of space is the latest issue that the US is exploiting for various political purposes. Be that as it may, this creates an adversarial environment that compels the US’s peer competitors to develop weapons capable of countering US belligerency. Instead of sitting down and defining the parameters of major-power interaction so as to reduce the likelihood of war, we are witnessing an intentional US policy of pursuing an arms race in every possible domain of warfare.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/314DZnO Tyler Durden
A massive, unexplained cloud of radiation that swept across Europe in 2017 has been traced to one of Russia’s largest nuclear facilities, according to NewScientist.
Located between the Volga river and the Ural mountains, the leak coming from the Mayak nuclear development facility released up to 100 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere as the Fukushima disaster.
Italian scientists were the first to raise the alarm on 2 October, when they noticed a burst of the radioactive ruthenium-106 in the atmosphere. This was quickly corroborated by other monitoring laboratories across Europe.
Georg Steinhauser at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany says he was “stunned” when he first noticed the event. Routine surveillance detects several radiation leaks each year, mostly of extremely low levels of radionuclides used in medicine. But this event was different.
“The ruthenium-106 was one of a kind. We had never measured anything like this before,” says Steinhauser. –NewScientist
After the radioactivity was detected, the Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Security in Paris soon concluded that the most likely source of the leak was the Mayak facility – something Russian officials denied at the time, instead suggesting that the source may have been emissions from a radionuclide satellite battery burning up during re-entry.
The team which tracked down the source of the emission ruled out a satellite because no space organizations reported missing any at the time, and the pattern of radiation in the atmosphere didn’t match that of a satellite’s reentry.
The report claims that despite being so much higher than the Fukushima release, the radiation level in the Mayak incident wasn’t high enough to impact human health.
A nuclear fuel processing facility in Russia looks to have been been the source of the leak
ITAR-TASS News Agency / Alamy Stock Photo
After further investigation of 1300 measurements from hundreds of monitoring stations across Europe, Steinhauser and colleagues found that radiation levels were “between 30 and 100 times higher than those measured after Fukushima.”
The leak was unusual because the release was limited to radioactive ruthenium. “If there is a reactor accident, one would expect the release of radioactive isotopes of many different elements,” says Steinhauser. Exactly why such a specific element was released remained a mystery until Steinhauser learned that an Italian nuclear research facility had ordered a consignment of cerium-144 from Mayak before the incident. “There are several indications that the release of ruthenium-106 was linked to this order,” he says. –NewScientist
“This was indeed quite alarming,” said Steinhauser.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KahO8I Tyler Durden
Upon hearing that a man dressed in a military-style outfit was shooting people with an assault rifle at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California on Sunday, I imagine that there were at least some Californians saying to themselves, “That’s impossible. It’s illegal in California to take an assault rifle into a public festival.” Indeed, according to Wikipedia, “The gun laws of California are some of the most restrictive in the United States.”
So, what are gun-control advocates in California going to do now? Make their gun laws even more restrictive?
For 20 years, I have been writing that people who are going to kill other people with guns don’t give a hoot about gun laws. After all, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, if a person doesn’t care about obeying a law against murder, he’s not going to care about violating a law against taking an assault rifle into a food festival.
But ordinary, law-abiding people do care about obeying gun laws. That’s because many of these laws make it a felony offense to violate them. That means jail time, big fines, and a serious criminal record. Even when it’s just a misdemeanor offense, oftentimes a conviction can also mean jail time.
For most people, violating the law in order to have a means of self-defense is just not worth the risk. The chances of being caught in a place where some mass murderer is indiscriminately shooting people is relatively low and, therefore, not enough to justify the risk of a felony conviction if caught with, say, a concealed handgun for self-defense.
Thus, as we learn, once again, gun-control laws destroy people’s natural, God-given right of self-defense by disarming them, while, at the same time, do nothing to dissuade a mass murderer from wreaking his deadly mayhem on innocent, disarmed victims.
[ZH: And judging by the avalanche of virtue-signaling demands that “enough is enough” and “gun reform” is needed immediately by any and all politicians able to fog a mirror, that is exactly what we see…]
U.S. Sen Kamala Harris
“Simply horrific. I’m grateful to the first responders who are on the scene in Gilroy, and my thoughts are with that community tonight. Our country has a gun violence epidemic that we cannot tolerate.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
“This brutal killing targeting children and families enjoying a day of community breaks the heart of America. We thank the heroic first responders who provided aid and support to those in need, and we send our prayers to all who are mourning the lives that were cruelly cut short by this shocking attack.
“Enough is enough. Congress has a responsibility to every family torn apart by gun violence to act, and help advance a future that is finally free from this senseless violence. Every day the Senate refuses to act is a stain on the conscience of our nation.
“May it bring some measure of comfort to the friends and loved ones of those whose lives were cut short that all of America mourns with and prays for them during this sad time.”
U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin
“My heart breaks for all of our Bay Area neighbors who attended the Gilroy Garlic Festival. We need gun reform and we need it now. Enough is enough.”
Assemblyman Marc Berman, D-Palo Alto
“Instead of sending racist tweets and stoking hate in America, how about Donald Trump put in a real day of work for once and bring legislative leaders together to find real solutions to the gun violence epidemic that’s plaguing our communities? Or is it more thoughts & prayers?”
Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland
“As news unfolds of another tragic mass shooting — at the Gilroy Garlic Fest— our communities weep, we grapple with both anger and heartbreak, and we hold our children closer. We send love to those whose lives are forever changed — we must match it with political courage to end this epidemic.”
Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda
“Unacceptable. Thoughts and prayers are not enough. Bold action on gun safety is required.You’ve (President Donald Trump) failed to adequately address gun violence even as mass shootings have repeatedly occurred on your watch. Unless you will act to make the US safe from gun violence, don’t talk. Action.”
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
“Our hearts go out to the victims of the shooting in Gilroy. It is devastating that families cannot enjoy a community festival without fear of gun violence. We have a moral imperative to end this epidemic.”
Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco
“No more thoughts and prayers. Time to take more action so we can go to work, school and festivals in peace without fear of getting shot.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco
My heart goes out to the people of Gilroy, to the victims of this act of domestic terrorism, and to the families and community that will be impacted forever. Our country must take action — must stop ignoring — the flood of guns plaguing our country. These murders are avoidable.
“We’ve dramatically tightened access in California to guns whose purpose is to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. But, we can’t do it alone. Congress must act and take this tidal wave of gun violence seriously. Too many people, too many of our kids, are dying.”
Of course, the deeper question is why this sort of thing continues to happen in the United States.
Here is my personal thesis as to the series of mass killings in America, one that I have set out in previous articles.
Keep in mind that I am not a psychiatrist and, therefore, that this is just a personal theory. But I remain convinced that it is a valid one.
I believe that America’s forever wars, sanctions, embargoes, and assassinations overseas are triggering some sort of mechanism within the minds of people who are bit off kilter mentally, which is causing them to wreak the same sort of violent and deadly mayhem here at home that the U.S. government, specifically the Pentagon and the CIA, is wreaking in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
For some 30 years, U.S. officials have led the American people into believing that all the death and destructive wreaked on people overseas would have no effect on American society. After all, since the killings happen thousands of miles away from American shores, how could that affect the American people?
For three decades, there have been two separate worlds.
One world is thousands of miles away and entails constantly killing people with sanctions, embargoes, bombs, shootings, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, occupations, undeclared wars, coups, and alliances with violent dictators. Hundreds of thousands of people killed, maimed, or exiled or have their homes and businesses destroyed by U.S. forces.
The other world is here at home. Americans go to work. They go on vacation. They go to sports events and concerts. They engage in their hobbies. And whenever they see a person in military uniform, they go out of their way to thank him for his service, which purportedly consists of protecting the freedoms here at home by killing people abroad.
But the truth is that the freedom of the American people has never been threatened by any of the hundreds of thousands of people they have killed overseas. At worst, Americans have been threatened by terrorist strikes in retaliation for the death and destruction the U.S. government wreaks overseas.
Through it all, there has been a remarkable lack of concern for the sanctity of human life over there. Who cares, for example, about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi who have been killed at the hands of U.S. forces, beginning with the Persian Gulf War, continuing through the 11 years of deadly sanctions, followed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq based on those supposed WMDs? The deaths of all those people just don’t matter.
During the many years of the Iraq occupation (labeled “Operation Iraqi Freedom”), church ministers all across the country exhorted their congregations to pray for U.S. troops in Iraq but never for their victims, even though it is undisputed that neither the Iraqi people nor their government ever attacked the United States. Even while constantly reminding people of the sanctity of life when it comes to the unborn, church ministers have forgotten that in the eyes of God, the lives of the born, including the foreign born, is just as sacred as the lives of the unborn.
U.S. sanctions and embargoes target innocent foreign citizens with death, with the aim of achieving a political end, i.e., regime change. And there is never an upward limit on the number of people who can be killed in the process of trying to achieve that political end. Any number of deaths is considered “worth it,” the words used by U.S. Ambassador to UN Madeleine Albright to justify the deaths of half-a –million Iraqi children from U.S. sanctions.
What does all this have to do with the California shooting and, for that matter, other instances of mass violence in America?
I believe that when a nation’s government has been killing people continuously for three decades, all that death and destruction is inevitably going to seep into the subconscious of individual citizens, even though it’s happening thousands of miles away and even though the government tries to keep us immune from it. Most of us can handle it but my thesis is that there are some people who are a bit off-kilter mentally who cannot handle it. I believe that the massive death and destruction ultimately triggers something within them that causes them to mirror here in the United States what the U.S. government is doing overseas. In their off-kilter minds, they are unable to do what U.S. officials do — place a high value on the sanctity of American life and no value on foreign life. For the off-kilter people, all life is equally valueless. The fact that some of these mass killers are military veterans and may even have participated in the oversea death, destruction, and mayhem makes the psychological situation even more problematic.
There is an easy way to test my thesis: bring the forever wars to an immediate end and bring all U.S. soldiers home immediately. Even if my thesis isn’t correct, it’s the morally right thing to do anyway.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LNtiCk Tyler Durden
