© APNew York Stock Exchange President Stacey Cunningham consults with specialist Peter Giacchi, left, on the floor of the NYSE, Monday, March 9, 2020.
Global stocks plunged yesterday in the worst sell-off since the global financial crisis of 2008, with indications that worse may still be yet to come as reflected in the fall in Asian markets when trading began today.
Yesterday, after falls across the Asia-Pacific, where the Tokyo and Sydney markets dropped by around 7 percent and similar sell-offs in Europe, Wall Street plunged on opening.
The fall was so large that it triggered a circuit breaker that suspended trading for 15 minutes in order to try to halt panic selling.The fall continued throughout the day with the Dow closing more than 2,000 points down,
its largest one-day point fall in history. There was a drop of more than 7 percent in all market indexes, taking Wall Street close to entering a bear market — defined as
a 20 percent fall — since its high in mid-February.
The downturn, initiated by the economic impact of the coronavirus, entered a new stage over the weekend with Saudi Arabia launching an oil price war. It boosted production and offered discount prices, following the breakdown of an agreement with Russia to limit supply and maintain prices.
The decision sent oil prices tumbling by between 25 and 30 percent when markets opened this week.
Bill Chappell
NPRWed, 11 Mar 2020 16:38 UTC
© Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty ImagesWorld Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus gestures during a press briefing on evolution of new coronavirus epidemic on January 29, 2020 in Geneva.
The COVID-19 viral disease that has swept into at least 114 countries and killed more than 4,000 people is now officially a pandemic, the World Health Organization announced Wednesday.
"This is the first pandemic caused by coronavirus," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Eight countries — including the U.S. — are now each reporting more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19, caused by the virus that has infected more than 120,000 people worldwide.
A severe outbreak in Italy has now caused more than 630 deaths there, and the country's case total continues to rise sharply. It's now at 10,000 cases,
second only to China. There are 9,000 cases in Iran, and more than 7,700 in South Korea.
Those countries are all imposing drastic measures in an attempt to slow the spread of the COVID-19 illness, which has a higher fatality rate for elderly people and those with underlying health conditions.
"In the Americas, Honduras, Jamaica and Panama are all confirming coronavirus infections for the first time," NPR's Jason Beaubien reports. "Elsewhere Mongolia and Cyprus are also now reporting cases."
Comment: "Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death," the director-general
said. Judging by the way people are behaving worldwide, it's safe to say that the word can and will case unreasonable fear. But in the words of that most helpful of books, the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
don't panic. And if you simply can't
not panic, at least keep your head on straight and do so responsibly.
Meanwhile in Iran, 63 new deaths have been
recorded, including
five members of the IRGC. In Palestine, with its first case outside of Bethlehem (brining the total to 29), the PA is considering
shutting the border. Schools, universities, banks, hotels, restaurants all remain closed. The PA has
arrested some locals for spreading false information about the virus, including false reports about cases in cities with no confirmed cases. A similar
false report in India about the virus being transmitted through white meat led one poultry farmer to destroy nearly $800k worth of chickens and eggs:
Though unfounded, the rumor has spread like wildfire on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, prompting many to drop chicken and eggs from their daily diet, while sending poultry sales plummeting by up to 80 percent across India, the third-largest producer of eggs and fourth-largest of chickens in the world.
Moscow has
banned large-scale events, and Kiev plans to
close schools and universities. Italy has
suspended mortgage payments after the entire country was placed on lockdown yesterday.
Here's how Italians are
shopping to stock up during the lockdown:
UK Health Minister Nadine Dorries tested
positive days after meeting with PM Johnson. Merkel put on her precognition hat to
predict that up to 70% of Germans will contract the virus if no vaccine is developed. Norway
cancelled NATO's Arctic Cold Response exercises. And the CFR
cancelled their coronavirus-themed conference in NYC - how fitting! Also in NY, the state has
deployed the National Guard to set up a containment area. Nancy Pelosi
shut down Nadler's request to flee DC (several lawmakers have already self-quarantined after coming in contact with individuals with the virus). Meanwhile the Trump administration is
considering a payroll tax holiday, promising to support businesses in covering paid time off for employees on sick-leave, as well as a promise that insurers will cover all coronavirus costs.
Panic is a strong force, you could even say it's elemental. So, to repeat, your mind is your own. Don't let something else run it for you.
See also:
RTWed, 11 Mar 2020 00:24 UTC
© Pixabay / succo
Democrat and Republican House leaders have paused their partisan sniping to do the real work of governing:
keeping unpopular surveillance programs, including roving NSA wiretaps and access to metadata, alive indefinitely.With just four days to go before congressional authorization for the controversial provisions expires, a bipartisan contingent has swooped in to save the NSA from experiencing one second of separation anxiety from Americans' private communications.
Committee heads from both sides of the aisle wrangled enough votes within their own parties to deliver a reauthorization bill on Tuesday night which they believe will pass the entire House on Wednesday.
Lawmakers reportedly sweated for months over the legislation, which extends key elements of the USA Freedom Act, the 2015 replacement for the NSA's "StellarWind" program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden - even though the NSA itself no longer uses the program. Indeed, it was the Trump administration, not Congress, that pleaded for its reauthorization, on the offchance it might be needed again in the future.
Dr. Richard Cheng claims high-dose Vitamin C has been officially included in the Shanghai Government Covid-19 treatment plan and that initial results from the IVC trial on Covid-19 is positive.
Does vitamin C cure Coronavirus? No? Can vitamin C treat Coronavirus? We can't say it does, but at the same time, we can't say it doesn't either. This is why
multiple clinical trials are underway in China to investigate whether or not vitamin C infusion has any effect against Coronavirus and those infected with it. The idea that vitamin C may help in treating the Coronavirus, at least here in the west, seems to be dubbed as 'fake news,' which is odd given the fact that authorities should be mentioning that at this point it's inconclusive.
There remains to be a clear yes or no answer but researchers are hypothesizing that it might have a positive effect which is why in Shanghai, China,
vitamin C is being named as part of their overall treatment plan, with official clinical trials underway.
Last month, the US National Library of Medicine posted the information about
their clinical trials on their website. The title of one of the trials is "Vitamin C Infusion for the Treatment of Severe 2019-nCoV Infected Pneumonia." The sponsor is ZhiYong Peng, and the responsible party is Zhongnan Hospital in Wuhan University (ZNWU).
Great find by
Joe L:
...new study ... claims that of the 1,099 Chinese people who contracted 2019-nCoV which were studied, 85.4% (927 people) were never-smokers, while only 12.6% (137 people) were current smokers and only 1.9% (21 people) were ex-smokers.
Here's
a link to the pdf study. And here's part of Table 1 from the study (click to enlarge):
Comment: It's probably not as high a figure as that because the rate of smoking in China - across both sexes - is around 25%. It's certain that way more men than women smoke in China, but as we saw above, figures vary.
Using a different assumption then than the author used above, that just 25% of the population of Wuhan are smokers, then the sample of clinical data from this study suggests that
non-smokers are nearly 3 times more likely than smokers and ex-smokers to become infected.
However, something else to be factored back into this is that the above clinical data from Wuhan shows that
just 41.8% of the case studies in the study sample were female. It's early days, but if this outbreak plays out
like MERS and SARS did, then it too will affect (that is, infect and make ill) more men than women.
Depending on the extent to which it does so, this sex difference would increase our assumption of the percentage of smokers in Wuhan and thus push the figure back up to
3 or >3 times more likely than smokers and ex-smokers to become infected.
By the way, an even more interesting
study of clinical data from Wuhan - though from a much smaller sample of 140 patients - found that
just 1.4% of people hospitalized by the virus were current smokers...
For more on the health benefits of smoking tobacco, see:
We've had a couple of people BTL take issue with us regarding the case fatality rate (CFR) of the 1918 Spanish Flu. Citing Wikipedia and the CDC we gave that rate as being between 10-20%. A couple of commenters, however, insisted the actual CFR was 2-3%, and this led us to look further.
What we found was quite interesting.
This is the
pre-February 22 2020 opening paragraph of the 'Mortality' section on the Wiki page for the Spanish flu (our emphasis):
The global mortality rate from the 1918-1919 pandemic is not known, but an estimated 10% to 20% of those who were infected died (case-fatality ratio). About a third of the world population was infected, and 3% to 6% of the entire global population of over 1800 million[51] died.[2]
Comment: These changes to the Wikipedia page clearly show a manipulation for the purpose of making the coronavirus appear more dangerous than it actually is. Now why would they want to do something like that?
See also:
© Alan Light – CC BY 2.0
"America deserves a Commander-in-Chief who knows what that sacrifice means and who will honor the sacred promise we make to our veterans."
- Pete Buttigieg January 6, 2020
#CIAPete has been trending on social media this past month as stories and commentaries have emerged telling and re-telling Pete Buttigieg's role as a naval intelligence officer in Afghanistan, his duties in his assignment in Kabul as a member of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, and his relationship to CIA colleagues. This would be all rather amusing and just another dust speck of non-sense in the vast universe of inanity that is the US presidential race, if it were not for Buttigieg's
own use of his time in uniform and in Afghanistan as a cudgel to
silence others from both an
informed and
moral perspective on issues of foreign policy and war.
Buttigieg worked alongside CIA officers in a multi-agency organization in Kabul, hence the hashtag #CIAPete. According to his own autobiography he didn't spend much time working on intelligence and fighting the Taliban,
but rather worked as a driver, chauffeuring other officers during an admitted eight hour work day in Kabul. As someone who did three deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, I know very few military officers who experienced 8 hour work days in either country, nearly all officers I knew, including myself, worked 12-18 hour days - and there were plenty of times, especially during my second deployment, that 20 hour days were common. That Buttigieg was a driver in Afghanistan is more telling than anything else about Buttigieg's time in Afghanistan, more so since he speaks so assuredly and confidently of his time in Afghanistan as he runs for president and uses that experience to pronounce himself as personally informed about matters of war and peace.
With the commodity world still smarting from the Nov 2014 Saudi decision to (temporarily) break apart OPEC, and flood the market with oil in (failed) hopes of crushing US shale producers (who survived thanks to generous banks extending loan terms and even more generous buyers of junk bonds), which nonetheless resulted in a painful manufacturing recession as the price of Brent cratered as low as the mid-$20's in late 2015/early 2016, on Saturday,
Saudi Arabia launched its second scorched earth, or rather scorched oil campaign in 6 years. And this time there will be blood.Following Friday's shocking collapse of OPEC+, when Russia and Riyadh were unable to reach an agreement during the OPEC+ summit in Vienna which was seeking up to 1.5 million b/d in further oil production cuts, on Saturday Saudi Arabia kick started what
Bloomberg called an all-out oil war, slashing official pricing for its crude and
making the deepest cuts in at least 20 years on its main grades, in an effort to push as many barrels into the market as possible.
My father, a well-educated lawyer with a very sophisticated mind, used to advise me to "keep it simple." By simple he didn't mean simplistic. He meant fundamentally logical and to the point. So I will do that here and stick to some simple realities, now that understanding what is going on in the world has become an idiot's game played by the corporate mass media to confuse people.
I have been writing about the dangers of technology for many years. Not all technology, of course, for the pencil I am writing this with is a technology, and an amazing and underappreciated one. I am referring to the techno-scientific, digital, high-tech sort, the world of computers, cell phones, genetic engineering, biological weapons development, etc. You know, all the stuff that has made our lives better and easier.
Two of the major problems the world faces - world destruction with nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the earth's ecology and atmosphere - are the result of the marriage of science and technique that has given birth to the technological "babies" (Little Boy and Fat Man) that were used by the U.S. to massacre hundreds of thousands of Japanese and now threaten to incinerate everyone, and the chemical and toxic inventions that have despoiled the earth, air, and water and continue to kill people worldwide through America's endless war-making and industrial applications.
Hilo Glazer
HaaretzFri, 06 Mar 2020 22:09 UTC
© Eliyahu HershkovitzIsraeli snipers on the Gaza border
I know exactly how many knees I've hit, says Eden, who completed his service in the Israel Defense Forces as a sniper in its Golani infantry brigade six months ago. For much of the time, he was stationed along the border with the Gaza Strip. His assignment: to repel Palestinian demonstrators who approached the fence.
"I kept the casing of every round I fired," he says. "I have them in my room. So I don't have to make an estimate - I know: 52 definite hits."
But there are also "non-definite" hits, right?"There were incidents when the bullet didn't stop and also hit the knee of someone behind [the one I aimed at]. Those are mistakes that happen."
Comment: See also: