There’s a Supermoon Solar Eclipse This Friday the 13th for the First Time in 43 Years. It will be mostly visible from the Pacific and India Ocean regions!
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Here we go again. There is another thick African dust cloud heading for Houston. This cloud will be just as thick if not thicker than the cloud that turned Houston’s sky hazy gray at the end of June. The thickest part of the cloud will be passing over Houston Sunday and Monday. If you didn’t notice any health impacts last time, then you’ll probably be okay this time, too.
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Every quarter the Institute of International Finance publishes a new number of the total amount of global debt outstanding, and every quarter the result is the same: a new record high…
But that’s not all.. The IIF Then released a Stark Warning!
What was surprising about the report – certainly not the latest all time high debt numbers, those are now standard – is that the IIF voiced a strongly negative opinion of recent developments in the debt arena.
“The pace is indeed a cause for concern,” warned IIF’s Managing Director Hung Tran during a call with reporters. “The problem with the pace and speed is if you borrow or if you lend very quickly, the quality of the credit tends to suffer.” It also means more governments, businesses and individuals have been borrowing that could have trouble paying the money back, or merely paying interest on it as rates rise.
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An ancient tablet engraved with 13 verses of the Odyssey has been unearthed in southern Greece in what is possibly the earliest-recorded trace of the epic poem, the culture ministry said Tuesday.
The clay slab is believed to date back to the third century, during the Roman era.
“If this date is confirmed, the tablet could be the oldest written record of Homer’s work ever discovered” in Greece, a ministry statement said.
The extract, taken from book 14, describes the return of Ulysses to his home island of Ithaca.
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From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East to Southern California, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week. Large areas of heat pressure or heat domes scattered around the hemisphere led to the sweltering temperatures.
Washington on Tuesday issued a list of thousands of Chinese imports that the Trump administration wants to target with new tariffs. In response, China accused the United States of bullying and warned it would hit back.
“Unfortunately the markets haven’t come to grips with the current levels of trade policies and tariffs,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley FBR in New York
Hurricane “Chris” has strengthened into a Category 2 as it moves northeastward over the open Atlantic Ocean. There are currently no coastal watches or warnings in effect but interests in Atlantic Canada should monitor its progress.
At 09:00 UTC on July 11, the center of Hurricane “Chris” was located about 510 km (315 miles) E of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina and 1 885 km (1 175 miles) SW of Cape Race, Newfoundland, Canada.
E. coli was found in water at a zipline attraction after nearly 550 visitors to the attraction reported illness, and authorities think the estimate may be low.
Initials tests confirmed the presence of E. coli and other bacteria in a well water sample at Climb Works Zip Line Canopy Tour, health officials told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
People who became ill drank water served out of coolers along the course, WVLT reported.
The Tennessee Department of Health sent more than 2,000 surveys to those who reserved tours online, to determine if they became sick after visiting.
Of the 808 who responded, 548 indicted they had become ill. People who became ill had visited the attraction between mid-June and early July.
The Trump administration escalated a mounting trade war with China on Tuesday by publishing a list of $200 billion worth of Chinese goods that it proposes to hit with an additional 10 percent tariff.
Tropical Storm Chris became the second hurricane of the 2018 Atlantic season at 5 pm EDT Tuesday afternoon. Located about 200 miles east-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, Chris was packing top sustained winds of 85 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). Chris underwent a striking burst of intensification on Tuesday, giving every appearance of being a hurricane hours before that status became official. In a flight Tuesday afternoon, hurricane hunters found a central pressure of 980 mb, with flight-level winds as strong as 88 knots (101 mph). The stepped frequency microwave radiometer aboard the hurricane-hunter flight detected near-surface winds of 84 – 89 mph, which supports the NHC intensity estimate of 85 mph.
Physicists have observed the Higgs boson decaying into a pair of b quarks, confirming the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs boson is an elementary particle essential to the Standard Model. It is associated with the Higgs field, an energy field that gives particles their mass. Scientists use particle accelerators to smash particles against each other, yielding a variety of exotic and subatomic particles. ATLAS is one of six particle accelerators at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider facilities in Switzerland.
Trump on Tuesday issued full pardons to Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond, the father-and-son duo whose imprisonment sparked an armed takeover of a federal facility led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has issued a stark warning to humanity: advances in artificial intelligence could lead to a world which humans will no longer be able to understand — and we should start preparing now.
What if machines learn to communicate with each other? What if they begin to establish their own objectives? What if they become so intelligent that they are making decisions beyond the capacity of the human mind?
Those are some of the questions the 95-year-old Kissinger poses in a piece published by the Atlantic under the apocalyptic headline: ‘How The Enlightenment Ends.’
An Israeli organization said Tuesday that it hopes to become the first non-governmental entity to land a spacecraft on the moon when it attempts to launch a module later this year.
SpaceIL and the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries plan to launch their unmanned craft in December, the team said at a press conference at an IAI facility outside Tel Aviv. If successful, Israel would become the fourth country to land a craft on the moon, after the U.S., the Soviet Union and China.
Turn on the TV or spend any time on Twitter and you will be comfortably, numbly, reassured that everything is awesome – stocks are up (well FANGs are up), confidence is up (as is credit card debt), and the economy is “SOARING” (as long as you don’t pay attention to the weakness in income growth). However, reality is that the so-called economic data that the mainstream relies upon is ‘soft’ survey-based perceptions skewed by ‘hope’ and ‘expectations’, and while that is rising once again, ‘hard’ real economic data continues to languish awkwardly unchanged from the start of President Trump’s reign..
The Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone National Park erupted for the eleventh time in 2018 on Friday, July 6, 2018, at 1:37 p.m. and the eruption lasted 32 minutes.
USGS said the geyser has decided to follow a semi-regular pattern of erupting every 6-8 days over the past two months; however, it has been 20 days 20 hours 42 minutes since the last eruption on June 15.
Mexico placed its capital and 10 states on alert after thieves stole a vehicle with a container full of radioactive materials. A private company employee left it in the back of his pickup truck.
“If you see the container, don’t open it,” the head of the nation’s civil protection agency Luis Felipe Puente tweeted on Sunday as he announced the alert. The agency, tasked with securing the public’s well-being, reported that the stolen substance presents a “low risk” but can cause cancer and other permanent health damage to any person who might try to open the container or be in contact with it “for a few hours.”
With the US and China contemplating their next moves in what is now officially a trade war, a parallel narrative is developing in the world of energy where Asian oil refiners are racing to secure crude supplies in anticipation of an escalating trade war between the US and China, even as Trump demands all US allies cut Iran oil exports to zero by November 4 following sanctions aimed at shutting the country out of oil markets.
Concerned that the situation will deteriorate before it gets better, Asian refiners are moving swiftly to secure supplies with South Korea leading the way. Under pressure from Washington, Seoul has already halted all orders of Iranian oil, according to sources, even as it braces from spillover effects from the U.S.-China tit-for-tat on trade.
Here’s why I’m harping so much on strategy: the US is operating without a viable one.
We neither have a compelling Vision of where we want to go, nor any sense of the Resources required to change with the many transitions underway around us.
The current ‘strategy’ (if we can be so generous as to call it that), is nothing more than “business-as-usual” (BAU).
The US is assuming it is always going to have more cars and trucks on the road this year than last year, more goods sold, a larger economy, more jobs, and the world’s most powerful military. That’s the BAU model. And it has largely worked for the past century.
But it can’t work going forward. And the longer we pursue it, the more of our future prosperity we ruin.
Why? Because the future of everything is dependent on energy. More specifically: net energy.
Having a powerful military consumes a tremendous annual quantity of energy. The US military eats up 100 million barrels of oil each year. By itself, America’s Department of Defense is the 34th largest consumer of oil in the world.
The internet was built through a vast network of copper wires. In the future, it could be diamonds.
Researchers at Princeton University are creating diamonds that they think will be able to store and transmit micro-messages called “qubits.”
In a press release, they explain that their man-made diamonds could be used to build the new super-secure — and super-smart — internet of the future, called the quantum internet.
One of the vehicles involved in a crash that shut down a section of Interstate 66 in northern Virginia on Sunday morning had fled after a Secret Service officer tried to initiate a traffic stop in Washington, D.C.
The driver of the suspect vehicle fled the scene and remains at large.
“Today at 4:35 am, a Secret Service Uniformed Division Officer observed a vehicle traveling in the wrong direction on I Street NW, Washington, DC,” the Secret Service said in a statement tweeted by NBC Washington reporter/anchor Adam Tuss. “The Uniformed Division Officer attempted to initiate a traffic stop of the suspect vehicle; however, the vehicle failed to yield and exited onto I-66 traveling westbound in the eastbound lanes.
The volcanic unrest continues around the world with new eruptions occurring around the world. The latest are the explosions of Agung volcano (Indonesia), Anak Krakatau (Indonesia), Mayon volcano (Philippines), the volcanic unrest of White Island (New Zealand). Finally some updates on the Kilauea eruption (Hawaii) and the Fuego eruption (Guatemala).
Hundreds of thousands of US citizens may have to scrap their holiday plans, the Internal Revenue Service said, as it is enforcing a law allowing authorities to revoke and deny passports to those owing over $51,000 in unpaid taxes.
Some 362,000 people may fall under the scope of the 2015 law as early as the end of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing an IRS spokesperson.
The Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, which became a law in December 2015, allows the State Department and the IRS to refuse to issue passports to those with “seriously delinquent” debts that are defined as “an unpaid, legally enforceable federal tax liability” of more than $51,000, including interest and penalties. That rule envisions denying first-time passport applications, as well as the renewal of the travel document. In a worst-case scenario, a valid passport can be revoked by the State Department.
Record-breaking torrential rains struck western Japan, causing at least 44 deaths and leaving dozens injured. The authorities have ordered mass evacuations in the affected areas.
Others regions have witnessed excessive heat. Parts of the united states seeing both within the past week.
BREAKING: Tropical Depression Three has formed offshore of the North & South Carolina coastline. The storm is forecast to meander and strengthen into a hurricane. Interests along the coast of North Carolina should monitor the progress of this system. pic.twitter.com/uAqVaXb0O6
