The development of the Philippine convention industry became official government policy in 1976, a milestone year that marked the establishment of Southeast Asia's first full-fledged convention center, the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC); and the creation of the Philippine Convention Bureau (PCB) as a government corporation dedicated to the promotion of Philippines as a meetings and convention destination. That same year, the Philippines successfully played host to the International Monetary Fund - World Bank Joint Conference that signaled the entry of the Philippines into the world conventions market.
Since then, the Philippines has hosted some of the biggest and most important international and regional meetings, conferences, conventions, congresses, and events that have made its capital city, Manila, one of the acknowledged "Convention Cities" of the world.
The Philippine Convention Bureau (PCB) was later reorganized in 1987 to become the Philippine Convention and Visitors Corporation, now known as Tourism Promotions Board (TPB), in response to market developments which embraced the new, more specialized, and quality-oriented Incentive Travel Industry. In recent years, the meetings, conventions, and incentive travel industry evolved into an even wider representation of several specialized sector of tourism to encompass exhibition and events. The convention industry now became known by the acronym: MICE, which stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions/Events.
The Tourism Promotions Board (TPB) is a corporate body attached to the Philippine Department of Tourism (PDOT) that is responsible for marketing and promoting the Philippines as a global tourism destination. Specifically, it shall market the Philippines as a major convention destination in Asia, taking charge of attracting, promoting, facilitating, and servicing large-scale events, international fairs and conventions, congresses, sports competitions, expositions and the like.
Its Conventions and Incentive Travel (CIT) Unit in particular, provides comprehensive information, technical assistance and guidance to planners, organizers, association and corporate executives, government and non-government institutions, and other entities who seek an ideal venue for their meetings, incentive travel groups, conventions, exhibitions and events.
Aggressive Philippine participation in MICE-specific international trade shows and expositions, the conduct of sales missions abroad; and the organization of regular MICE Buyer Invitational Programs to the Philippines.
Matching international account leads with local counterparts with the potential to bid; technical assistance in the planning, preparation, and submission of Philippine Bid Proposals; active assistance in soliciting multisectoral support and in drawing up a total package of benefits and privileges for Bid Presentions before international decision making Boards and entities.
Coordination between the international Host Committee and the Local Counterpart Organization; assistance in matching the international organization's requirements with suitable Philippine facilities and services; locating and endorsing PDOT/TPB-accredited and professional MICE suppliers; and in liaising with government and other relevant local entities for necessary permits, endorsements and authorities.
Provision of an adequate supply of specialized information materials on the Philippines as an ideal destination for MICE groups, marketing paraphernalia like audio visual presentations, Delegates' bags and kits, giveaways, specially printed materials and other materials as required.
Coordination and organization of technical visits of international MICE Clients in relation to a bid or a hosted/booked MICE account.
Assistance in promoting attendance to booked events through its network of foreign and domestic offices.
As Asia's pioneer in conventions, the Philippines can easily host an international event with expertise and creative approaches. More importantly, though, it offers the added incentive of discovering 7,107 island experiences: breathtaking natural wonders that range from the golden sunset of Manila Bay to the virgin rain forests and mysterious underground rivers of Palawan; from historic Intramuros and Vigan to the graceful mosques and indigenous tribes of Muslim Mindanao; from golfing greens to 44,097 square meters of coral reef dive sites teeming with marine life; from innumerable pristine white-sand beaches to the wonder that is the Banaue Rice Terraces.
But however each visitor experiences the Philippines, what shines through is the genuine warmth and gracious hospitality that comes naturally from the heart of every Filipino. This is the heartware, the extra touch which adds a special, welcoming spark to each guest's stay. It is an added perk that makes any convention or incentive trip to the Philippines a memory that will last a lifetime.
An architectural landmark on its own, housing works of various Filipino master artists in painting, the Philippine International Convention Center made history as Asia's first convention center, setting a trend that led to countries to build their own.
It provides the perfect venue for every gathering and purpose. It offers excellent facilities for meetings, conventions, exhibits and special events – a Plenary Hall that can seat more than 3,500; an elegant Reception Hall, Exhibit Areas and other meeting rooms.
The country's newest and largest privately-run exhibition and convention center, SMX is a world-class venue for international exhibitions, large-scale local trade events, major medical and other industry conventions and corporate functions.
It is an integral part of the Mall of Asia Complex, an innovative business and leisure park that addresses the needs of every event organizer. Its proximity to the Mall of Asia integrates business with recreation, shopping and entertainment.
With future development plans for hotels and a 12,000-seat Arena, the Mall of Asia Complex is envisioned to be the "New Convention Destination in Asia."
In the Philippines, World Trade Center Metro Manila is the first world-class exhibition center which was inaugurated on November 1996. The first of two exhibition halls cover a total floor space of 8,300 square meters.
Set to be added to the complex in the near future is another exhibition hall, a high-rise office/commercial building, as well as a hotel. It will house the offices and club facilities such as restaurants, lounges and other amenities.
Total Floor Area 10,810 sq.m.
Total Exhibition Area 8,300 sq.m.
The Cebu Convention Center (Cebu International Convention Center, CICC) is a structure built by the Cebu Provincial Government in time for the 12th Asean Summit in January 2007 and the 2nd East Asia Summit.
It is a three-story structure with a gross floor area of 28,000 square meters and situated on 3.8 hectares of land in Mandaue City.
The Cebu Convention Center features an International Media Center, a large Plenary Hall, an Exhibition Hall, and several Meeting Rooms. The Cebu International Convention Center is an ideal venue for conventions, meetings, trade shows, business conferences, sports, corporate events, expositions and other special events.
Aside from these world-class convention and exhibition facilities for international events, several hotels and resorts in Metro Manila and key cities in the Philippines have ballrooms, meeting rooms and similar facilities that can accommodate small and medium-sized events.


Converged infrastructure equipment is designed for ease of use, and EMC's latest product emulates the easiest tech toys around by including an app store.
You won't be able to download games or photo apps for the VSPEX Blue, but a range of applications will be offered for the integrated compute-storage-networking system, including data backup and recovery.
The VSPEX Blue is based on VMware's EVO:Rail platform, a software-only appliance that VMware leaves to partner companies to implement in hardware systems. Dell, Super Micro and other vendors already sell EVO:Rail systems. Like the high-end Vblock platforms that VMware builds in its VCE partnership with EMC and Cisco, these systems include all the components of enterprise IT infrastructure in one box, but they are designed for smaller deployments and not customized at the factory.
Converged systems are designed to make it easier to deploy more IT capacity as needs rapidly change. They can save IT shops the time and effort of planning, configuring and testing a variety of new hardware and software every time demand for capacity grows.
A major selling point of VSPEX Blue is that you can switch it on and start provisioning virtual machines in less than 15 minutes, according to EMC. There are just two choices to make when buying a box: 128GB or 192GB of memory, and copper or fiber network interfaces. Each 2U appliance comes with four server blades and 14.4TB of storage and is designed to run about 100 virtual machines or 250 virtual desktops. The platform can scale out to a maximum of four systems.
But ease of purchase and setup is the calling card of all EVO:Rail systems. The key thing that will set EMC's appliance apart from others is the VSPEX Blue Market, said Chad Dunn, senior director of VSPEX operations. It lets IT departments customize the appliance while not having to make a series of choices ahead of time, the typical process for Vblocks and larger EMC VSPEX systems.
"This is much more of a consumer-like mode," Dunn said. VSPEX Blue Market is no iTunes Apple Store with 1 million-plus apps, though. "It'll take us a while to get there. Maybe never," he said.
The VSPEX Blue Market will offer just three applications when the systems start shipping on Feb. 17. EMC CloudArray Gateway lets enterprises turn public cloud storage into an extra tier of capacity, EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines is designed to protect against application outages, and VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced provides disk-based backup and recovery.
Future offerings could include applications such as virus-scanning tools or software for purchasing capacity from public cloud services, Dunn said. They may come from third parties, but all will be validated by EMC.
All applications in the store will be available free, either for trial periods or for a maximum of 15 VMs, with paid versions available for broader use.
In addition to the VSPEX Blue Market, EMC will beef up the systems with its own management software and EMC Secure Remote Support, which can include remote system monitoring by EMC to detect and address possible failures before they happen, Dunn said.
The VSPEX Blue will be sold only through certain channel partners, who will determine prices, he said. However, the systems will be comparable in price to other EVO:Rail products, Dunn said.


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Upcoming on MBE and KCRW Presents
Written by Rachel Reynolds May. 28, 2010 Live Performances
BRMC
Tues, June 1, KCRW DJs were early champions of garage rockers Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and our love affair with their music has never faltered. We welcome the band back to our studios to play songs from their new album — one of their best yet — on Morning Becomes Eclectic at 11:15am.
Wed, June 2, Three of LA's best singer-songwriters have teamed up to form the Living Sisters. Inara George of The Bird & The Bee, Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond and singer Eleni Mandell will harmonize on a beautiful set of songs on Morning Becomes Eclectic at 11:15am.
Mon, June 7, Denmark's dynamic duo Quadron was on every KCRW DJ's playlist last year and we're pleased to finally get them in studio for their U.S. radio debut performance of their sexy electronic soul on Morning Becomes Eclectic at 11:15am.
Tues, June 8, Local duo Jogger craft songs from sonic scraps with meticulous attention to detail. Experience their future-folk beats on Morning Becomes Eclectic at 11:15am.
Wed, June 9, Tune in for an energetic set of rollicking rock from Long Beach's Delta Spirit. They'll play songs from their freshly minted release on Morning Becomes Eclectic at 11:15am.
Fri, May 28, SIMIAN MOBILE DISCO (DJ SET) AT CONTROL AT THE AVALON.
Mon, May 31, The Moth Story Slam at Air Conditioned Lounge.
Wed, June 2, The Moth Grand Slam at the Echoplex.
Wed, June 2, The Living Sisters at The Hotel Café.
Wed, June 2, SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS AT THE ECHO.
Fri, June 4, FIRST FRIDAYS FEATURING PEANUT BUTTER WOLF AND NEON INDIAN AT THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM.
Fri, June 4, LOCAL NATIVES AT THE TROUBADOUR.
Sun, June 6, THE XX AT THE WILTERN.
Wed, June 9, Hot Hot Heat at the Bootleg Theatre.
Wed, June 9, Karen Elson at Spaceland.
Fri, June 11, HENRY ROLLINS: FREQUENT FLYER TOUR AT LARGO AT THE CORONET.
Sat, June 12, HENRY ROLLINS: FREQUENT FLYER TOUR AT LARGO AT THE CORONET.
Sat, June 12, "Summer Nights" an evening hosted by our own DJ Dan Wilcox plus Hot Hot Heat at One Colorado — in the heart of historic Pasadena.
Sat, June 12, Fitz and the Tantrums at the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa.
Thur, June 17, Fitz and the Tantrums at Spaceland.
Sat, June 19, IMOGEN HEAP AT THE GREEK THEATRE.
Sat, June 19, Jamie Lidell at the El Rey Theatre.
Sun, June 20, KCRW's WORLD FESTIVAL FEATURES BAABA MAAL, YEASAYER, TINARIWEN, FOOL'S GOLD and PLAYING FOR CHANGE AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL.
Mon, June 21, Imogen Heap at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara.
Tues, June 22, Jo Hamilton at Hotel Café.
Tues, June 22, STARS AT THE TROUBADOUR.
Thur, June 24, FAT FREDDY'S DROP AT THE MUSIC BOX AT THE HENRY FONDA.
Sat, June 26, SHARON JONES AND THE DAP KINGS AT THE WILTERN.
Sat, June 26, "Summer Nights" an evening hosted by our own DJ Chris Douridas plus local favorites Everest at One Colorado — in the heart of historic Pasadena.
Sun, June 27, KCRW's WORLD FESTIVAL FEATURES GOLDFRAPP, ORQUESTA BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB featuring OMARA PORTUONDO and TUNEYARDS AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL. Tom Schnabel hosts.
Thur, July 1, Also I Like to Rock with Saint Motel and Kitten plus our own Dan Wilcox manning the turntables in the courtyard of the Hammer Museum.
Thur, July 8, Also I Like to Rock with Admiral Radley and The Happy Hollows plus our own Anne Litt handling the turntables in the courtyard of the Hammer Museum.
Thur, July 15, Also I Like to Rock with Fitz & The Tantrums plus a very special guest and our own Garth Trinidad handling the turntables in the courtyard of the Hammer Museum.
Thur, July 22, Also I Like to Rock with Voxhaul Broadcast and Chasing Kings plus our own Chuck P. handling the turntables in the courtyard of the Hammer Museum.
Sun, July 25, KCRW's WORLD FESTIVAL BRINGS REGGAE NIGHT IX FEATURING JIMMY CLIFF, SLY & ROBBIE, AND TARRIS RILEY AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL. Jeremy Sole hosts.
Wed, August 11, Frazey Ford at the Hotel Café.
Thur, August 12, My Morning Jacket at the Greek. Avi Buffalo open.
Sun, September 19, KCRW's WORLD FESTIVAL BRINGS VIVA MEXICO! FEATURING CALEXICO, OZOMATLI, LOS SUPER SEVEN, MEXICAN INSTITUTE OF SOUND, MARIACHI REYNA LOS ANGELES AND GRANDEZA MEXICANA FOLK BALLET COMPANY AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL. Raul Campos hosts.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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HAVE WE LEARNT THE LESSONS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL
| Etiquetas: The Great Recession
Have we learnt the lessons of the financial crisis
Gillian Tett looks at why the warning signs were missed and where the next crash may strike
© Stephen McLaren
One day in the early summer of 2007, I received an email out of the blue from an erudite Japanese central banker called Hiroshi Nakaso. "I am somewhat concerned," he began in typically understated manner, before warning that a financial crisis was about to explode because of problems in the American mortgage and credit market.
I was astonished. That was not because I disagreed with Nakaso's analysis: by June 2007, I had been writing about the credit sector for a couple of years as the FT's capital markets editor in London, and was uneasy. But I was surprised that it was Nakaso raising the alarm.
Tucked on the other side of the globe in Tokyo, he was working in the grey, fortress-like building that houses the Bank of Japan. His counterparts in the American and European central banks, close to the subprime markets, were not sounding concerned.
On the contrary, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, had spent the previous decade celebrating the (seeming) triumph of western capital markets. And Greenspan's successor, Ben Bernanke, had just declared that problems in the subprime mortgage market were so "limited" they would not create "significant spillovers".
So why was Nakaso pessimistic? "Déjà vu", he replied. A decade earlier, back in 1997, Nakaso had been working at the Japanese Central Bank when Tokyo plunged into its terrible banking crisis, sparked by $1tn of bad loans left by Japan's 1980s real estate baburu keiki, or bubble.
We had met in that tumultuous period: I was then a Tokyo correspondent for the FT and we sometimes discussed the crisis over onigiri rice parcels and green tea. By the time I left Japan, in 2000, the crisis had mostly passed; westerners considered it a footnote in global financial history that reflected a peculiarly Japanese failure. Nobody at the Fed or on Wall Street dreamt that American finance might ever suffer the same humiliation as Japan. Nor did the luminaries in the City of London.
But Nasako had learnt, from bitter experience, about the perils of banker hubris. He knew that government officials often downplayed problems — both to themselves and to voters — and noticed that money markets were behaving in ways that suggested that investors and institutions were losing trust in each other. That created "striking similarities . . . with the early stages of our own financial crisis [in Japan]," he told me. "The crisis management skills of central banks and financial authorities will be truly tested."
He was right. A few weeks later, in August 2007, the American and European financial systems did start to implode, as a result of the mortgage risk. The denouement did not happen quickly. But by the autumn of 2008 a slow-burn crunch had turned into a full-blown global crisis, epitomised by the dramatic collapse of Lehman Brothers and rescue of AIG. I felt deeply grateful for Nakaso's insight.
But when I look back at that period now, I also feel frustrated. The International Monetary Fund calculates that between 1970 and 2011, the world has suffered 147 banking crises. Some were tiny: few today remember the 1994 bank crisis in Bolivia. Others were huge: The US 2007-08 crisis was so big that it raised public debt by 24 per cent of gross domestic product; for the 1997 Japanese crisis, the debt hit was 42 per cent.
But whatever their statistical size, crises share two things. First, the pre-crisis period is marked by hubris, greed, opacity — and a tunnel vision among financiers that makes it impossible for them to assess risks. Second, when the crisis hits, there is a sudden loss of trust, among investors, governments, institutions or all three. If you want to understand financial crises, then, it pays to remember that the roots of the word "credit" comes from the Latin "credere", meaning "to believe": finance does not work without faith. The irony, though, is that too much trust creates bubbles that (almost) inevitably burst.
Though it is 10 years since the Lehman Collapse, the questions are still pressing: why do we appear destined to suffer crises over and over again? Why can't we learn from the past? And what does that mean for where the global system is heading today? After Japan and America, which part of the world will produce the next drama?
Photographs in this story are from 'The Crash' by Stephen McLaren, which will be published by Hoxton Mini Press on September 27. The images, shot in London, document the aftermath of the global financial crash. hoxtonminipress.com/products/the-crash
When I started writing about western capital markets in early 2005, I was not expecting another Japan-style shock. Far from it: like many others, I initially thought I was witnessing the financial equivalent of the internet revolution, a wave of wild innovation that would improve all our lives.
It seemed a reasonable bet. For centuries, the craft of banking has revolved around the relatively simple business of collecting deposits from companies, governments or consumers, and then lending the money out. Thus, in the 1980s Japanese bubble banks lent money to real estate developments; so too in the Savings and Loans boom in America during the same decade.
But while previous generations of bankers had hung on to their loans, like farmers tending a crop, in the late 20th century financiers became more like butchers making sausages. They started to buy loans from anywhere they could (including each other), chop these up, and then repackage them into new instruments that could be sold to investors with fancy names such as "collateralised debt obligations" (CDOs).
Every innovation revolution needs a sales patter, and this was no exception: the bankers told themselves that this slicing and dicing would make the financial system much safer. The idea was a modern twist on the old adage, "a problem shared is a problem halved". In the past, banks had gone bust when borrowers defaulted because the pain was concentrated in one place; slicing and dicing spread the pain among so many investors that it would be easier to absorb. Or so the theory went.
But there was a catch. Since the techniques that bankers were using to slice and dice the loans were desperately opaque, it was hard for anyone to know who held the risks. Worse still, because bankers were so excited about repackaging debt, they were stimulating a new mania for making loans, seemingly with government blessing. What all this financial innovation concealed was an old-fashioned credit boom, particularly in American subprime mortgages.
Initially, few seemed concerned about these developments. No surprise, perhaps. This corner of finance was so geeky and tribal that most voters and politicians had scant idea that a revolution was under way. In any case, almost every unsustainable boom starts with the idea that innovators have found a new frontier. In the 18th-century South Sea Bubble, this was a mythical new country; in the 1840s railway mania or 1990s internet bubble, it was technology. In 2005 it was finance itself. "There is a dynamic which pushes banking and the penumbra of banking to excess, over and over again," says Paul Tucker, the former deputy governor of the Bank of England. "People actually have got fairly good short-term specific memories [but] they just haven't got good long-term memories, particularly when the technology of banking changes."
Complexity made this worse. At a conference I attended later that year, hundreds of bankers met in a concrete, mural-filled municipal hall in southern France to discuss the securitisation — aka slicing-and-dicing — game. For two days they unveiled power-points drenched in Greek letters, algorithms and jargon, like a cult speaking a secretive holy language. But as the presentations unfolded, it was clear that very few investors or regulators — or even the bankers themselves — truly understood how the products worked. To the outside world the revolution seemed to be driven by computers; but it was also driven by blind trust.
It was easy to see why the bankers accepted this: the bubble was making them rich. "There was huge complacency on all sides," says Bill Winters, former co-head of JPMorgan Banking and now chief executive of Standard Chartered. "The governments threw a huge pot of honey into the middle of the table and told everyone we don't have to think about the bees."
What was more surprising was that regulators also seemed reluctant to rock the boat. For some, the strength of the economy created a sense of complacency; for others, faith in free-market economics — and pride in western finance — made it inconceivable that Japan's story might offer a warning lesson. "I originally assumed that people would act in a wholly rational way," Greenspan recently observed. "That turned out to be wrong."
Fast-forward to 2007, and another financial conference in Barcelona. By then the mania was intense: every room was filled to capacity with chino-clad financiers; the parties were studded with "champagne salutes", toasting the innovations; the graphs in the triumphant power points only went up. On the sidelines of the conference, some bankers had formed a reggae-style amateur band, called "Da Leverage". "It's a joke," one banker said. It looked uncannily similar to the baburu days in Tokyo, when people sprinkled gold leaf on their sushi and nobody imagined that real estate prices might fall.
When trust in the system finally did start to crack, a few days after the Barcelona event, the first signs came not in America but in Europe: BNP Paribas in France and IKB bank in Germany each announced problems with their holdings of US mortgage bonds. The technical reasons were complex. But essentially the problem was akin to a food-poisoning scare. As 2007 wore on, it became clear that significant numbers of American borrowers were defaulting on their mortgages; but because debt had been sliced and diced into new products, nobody knew where the poisonous risks sat in the financial food chain. So investors simply shunned all sliced-and-diced products. That caused the markets to seize up.
The authorities tried to rebuild confidence. But shattered trust is hard to restore — particularly when governments or bankers try to sweep problems under the carpet, say with creative accounting tricks. "You can put rotten meat in the freezer to stop it smelling — but its still rotten," one Japanese official joked to me as he watched American attempts to reassure the markets, turning to some of the same tricks the Tokyo government had once tried — and failed — to use a decade before.
It was a hopeless task: the "slicing and dicing" process had left American, European and Asian markets so closely entwined that any panic was highly contagious. Month by month trust drained away: investors lost faith in the value of mortgage bonds, the judgment of rating agencies and the balance sheets of banks. When Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, investors stopped believing that any institution was truly safe. For a terrifying couple of weeks credit vanished in America. The crisis only stopped when eventually the government stepped in: it recapitalised the banks, forcing them to recognise their losses, closed weak lenders, stopped many of the crazy acronym-soaked credit practices and flooded the markets with liquidity. In essence, this meant that Uncle Sam itself was now providing new pillars of faith — and trust — for the system.
The measures shocked many voters — and investors. But not my friends in Tokyo: Japan had eventually used similar moves itself to end its own 1990s crisis; so had many of the governments involved in the other 147 crises that the IMF has identified. The only surprise of 2008, perhaps, was that American officials and investors were so deeply shocked to become just another chapter in this history. Or as Ray Dalio, the creator of Bridgewater hedge fund (and one of the few who predicted it), observes: "These crises happen again and again. We can understand the mechanics, if we want. But can we learn?"
A couple of weeks ago I caught up with Nakaso again by phone. Since we first met in Tokyo two decades ago, a lot of financial water has flowed under the bridge. I have moved to America with the FT; he became deputy governor of the Bank of Japan, and then recently retired to join a research group in Tokyo.
"So do you think the financial system is healthier now?" I asked. Nakaso gave — as ever — a carefully balanced answer. Yes, some parts of finance were stronger: after the 2008 crisis the American government recapitalised their banks, and stopped the crazier practices of the credit boom. "The US authorities never thought that the Japanese experience could happen in their own country, but they eventually did learn the lessons [from Japan] and they reacted quicker than the Japanese did," Nakaso observed. They were also more resolute than the European authorities. "The Europeans have been slower to do the things they needed to do," says Henry Paulson, the former US Treasury secretary.
But finance is still not entirely "fixed": non-bank investors have been taking dangerous risks, partly because super-loose monetary policy has made borrowing so cheap. And then there is the issue that the bankers joked about in Barcelona with their "Da Leverage" band: debt. One remarkable feature of the past decade is that between 2007 and 2017, the ratio of global debt to GDP jumped from 179 per cent to 217 per cent, according for the Bank for International Settlements.
This borrowing binge has not occurred in the areas of finance that caused the last crisis, such as subprime loans. Instead, the debt boom is among risky companies and governments, ranging from Turkey (which already faces a financial crunch) to America (where borrowing has accelerated under the administration of Donald Trump.) Meanwhile in China, gross public and private debt has doubled in the past decade to about 300 per cent of GDP. This surpasses even Japan's wild 1980s debt binge.
So will China spark the next crisis? After all, I suggested to Nakaso, there are so many echoes of 1980s Japan: hubris; opacity; ambitious elites and breathtakingly rapid economic change.
"Maybe not," Nakaso observed. He pointed out that while the debt numbers look worrying, China has some powerful strengths: fat currency reserves and a government that can act in a deft, resolute manner to fight a crisis, without being distracted by voters. "Using a central bank's balance sheet is problematic for democratic countries."
China has another crucial weapon: government officials in Beijing are obsessively interested in history; they want to understand other peoples' disasters, to work out how to avoid them. "One of the great strengths of China today is that they are very thoughtful," Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary under Barack Obama, recently observed. Or as Dalio echoes: "The Chinese are great at history — the [government] understands the mechanics of crises and it's so much easier for them to make decisions, politically, than in the United States."
"The Chinese have come to see us a number of times to talk about the Japanese financial crisis," Nakaso observed, over the phone. What advice did the Japanese officials give? "The key message was prepare for the worst — [and] be vigilant. If you see the crisis you have to be quite bold."
Will it be enough? Can China learn enough lessons to avoid the fate of Japan in 1997 — or America a decade ago? That trillion-dollar question will not be answered for several years. But the one thing that is already crystal clear is that if Beijing does ever succumb to its own boom and bust, the implications for the global economy could be devastating. "The world is much more dependent on China today than it was on Japan in 1990s," says Winters. Never before have those financial history books mattered quite so much.
Photographs in this story are from 'The Crash' by Stephen McLaren, which will be published by Hoxton Mini Press on September 27. The images, shot in London, document the aftermath of the global financial crash
Gillian Tett is the FT's US managing editor
THE FED´S IN A BOX AND PEOPLE ARE STARTING TO NOTICE / DOLLAR COLLAPSE
| Etiquetas: Government Debt Markets, The Fed
The Fed's In A Box And People Are Starting To Notice
It's long been an article of faith in the sound money community that the Fed, by bailing out every dysfunctional financial entity in sight, would eventually be forced to choose between the deflationary collapse of a mountain of bad debt and the inflationary chaos of a plunging currency.
That generation-defining crossroad is finally in sight.
On one hand, a tight labor market is pushing inflation to levels that normally call for higher interest rates:
Today's Fed-heads are old enough to remember the 1970s, when failure to get inflation under control produced a decade-long monetary crisis that was only resolved with (not exaggerating here) interest rates approaching 20%.
On the other hand, the yield curve – the difference between long-term and short-term interest rates – is trending towards zero and will, if it keeps falling, invert, meaning that short rates will exceed long. When this has happened in the past a recession has ensued.
With a system this highly leveraged it's completely possible that the next recession will threaten the whole fiat currency/globalization/fractional reserve banking world. No one at the Fed wants to preside over that, leading some to view rising inflation as the lesser of two evils. See Atlanta Fed Chief Pledges to Oppose Hike Inverting Yield Curve.
A lot of people seem to be aware of the Fed's dilemma. Here's an excerpt from a recent Reuters article on the subject:
Fed's Powell between a rock and hard place: Ignore the yield curve or tight job market?
Unemployment near a 20-year low screams at the U.S. Federal Reserve to raise interest rates or risk a too-hot economy. The bond market, not far from a state that typically precedes a recession, says not so fast.
The decision of which to heed looms large when the Fed's interest-rate setters meet next week. Which path they follow will begin to define whether Chairman Jerome Powell engineers a sustained, recession-free era of full employment, or spoils the party with interest rate increases that prove too much for the economy to swallow.
New Fed staff research and Powell's own remarks seem to put more weight on the risks of super-tight labor markets, which could mean a shift up in the Fed's rate outlook and a tougher tone in its rhetoric.
Goldman Sachs economists, for instance, contend the Fed's "optimal" rate path is "well above market pricing under a broad range of assumptions." They see four increases likely next year, while investors expect only one or two, a significant gap.
Sounds like the Fed is choosing door number one, focusing on inflation and tightening policy to counter it. That's what it has typically done since the 1970s.
But this time, as I said, the risks are a lot higher. First, higher interest rates will, other things being equal, make the dollar stronger. This is a very big deal for the emerging market countries that have borrowed trillions of US dollars and will now have to pay off those loans in ever-more-expensive currency. Since they've borrowed most of these dollars from developed-world banks, that means trillions of dollars of potentially non-performing loans, leading to yet another massive bailout of European and American banks and the financial instability that that implies.
Second — and far more systemically dangerous — corporate, government and consumer debt (especially student debt) are all at record levels. Send the economy back into recession with higher interest rates, and government tax revenues, corporate sales and profits, and personal incomes all fall at the same time interest costs are soaring because of those higher rates.
So from emerging markets to US corporations to Washington's budget to consumers' balance sheets, the next recession might be death spirals all the way down. Which means rising interest rates will beget much, much lower rates before too long.
THE POT OF GOLD AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW: WHAT TO MAKE OF CRYPTOCURRRENCIES AND BLOCKCHAINS / THE ECONOMIST
| Etiquetas: Bitcoins, Blockchains, Cryptocurrencies, Investment Strategies
The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow
What to make of cryptocurrencies and blockchains
Cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology, blockchains, have been hyped to the skies. Tim Cross offers a realist's guide
JOSEPH KENNEDY, John F. Kennedy's father, supposedly said that when he started getting share tips from his shoeshine boy, he knew it was time to sell. That was in the late 1920s. One investor in cryptocurrencies recalled that remark when he saw advertisements on the London Underground that seemed to suggest pensioners invest in bitcoin. "Be More Brenda," said the poster, featuring a white-haired lady claiming to have bought bitcoin in under ten minutes.
Cryptocurrencies are everywhere. According to one survey, 5% of Americans hold some cryptocurrencies—not bad for a financial product that is only a decade old. Bitcoin is the best-known, and in 2017 the dramatic rise in its price—from $3,000 in September to almost $19,000 by December—made headlines.
It was invented in 2008 by a reclusive cryptographer going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. He was dissatisfied with the conventional financial system, so he wanted to create an electronic version of cash that did not rely on a central operator and was free from direct control by a government or central bank. The idea took off. These days anyone who wants to get into cryptocurrencies can weigh the relative merits of bitcoin, ether, Monero, Dash, Litecoin and thousands of others. Many of those who bought in early have, on paper at least, made astonishing gains. Bitcoin's price in 2010 was around 6 American cents. Even at its current price of $6,470, it would provide an early investor with a handsome profit—though not nearly as handsome as if he had sold at the peak last December.
In keeping with their do-it-yourself image, cryptocurrencies have given rise to initial coin offerings (ICOs), a way for cryptocurrency companies to crowdfund themselves. Cash is pouring in. According to one estimate, from Coinschedule, a firm that tracks such things, by early August 706 ICOs had raised almost $18bn from a mix of institutional investors and individuals this year. That compares with just 221 ICOs in the whole of 2017, raising $3.7bn.
Many of those startups hope to capture the benefits of blockchains, the technology that underlies cryptocurrencies. In essence, a blockchain is a database designed to be distributed among many users, to be immutable, to work without oversight from any central authority and to dispense with the need for its users to trust each other. These qualities, it is argued, make it suitable for a huge variety of new and exciting business applications, which many companies are now trying to explore.
For example, a blockchain's immutability and distributed nature would seem perfect for streamlining supply chains. A widget manufacturer in one country, its shipping agent, its customer in another country and customs authorities on both the sending and the receiving end could all use the same database to track the widget. Another promising idea might be to provide an incorruptible record of transactions covering anything from property deeds to the provenance of diamonds.
According to Crunchbase, an industry consultancy, in the first five months of this year a total of more than $1.3bn of venture capital was invested in blockchain startups. KPMG, a large consultancy firm, reckons that the amount of money venture capitalists want to invest in such things outstrips the opportunities to do so. Established companies are rushing to catch up. Technology firms such as IBM, Oracle and Amazon are giving their customers the chance to experiment with blockchains. KPMG offers a service to advise clients on blockchains, as do most of its rivals. Diar, a consultancy specialising in cryptocurrencies, lists dozens of blockchain-related patent applications, filed by companies as diverse as Bank of America, Intel, a chipmaker, RWE, an electricity firm, and British Telecom.
A bit of a let-down
This Technology Quarterly will take a more sceptical view. It will point out that, despite a decade of development, bitcoin has failed in its stated objective: to become a usable currency. Security is poor (according to one estimate, around 14% of the supply of big cryptocurrencies has been compromised); its decentralised nature inevitably makes it slow; there is no consumer protection; and the price is so volatile that not many people would want to use it as a means of exchange for goods and services. Other cryptocurrencies suffer from similar problems. Few merchants accept them.
At the same time the technology's built-in antipathy to regulation has attracted plenty of people who feel the same way for the wrong reasons. Some cryptocurrencies amount to Ponzi schemes, and unscrupulous ICO operators have swindled investors. America's authorities are investigating allegations of widespread price manipulation. Social-media firms have banned advertisements for ICOs amid concerns about fraud. Anyone thinking of investing in such instruments will need to do a lot of homework first.
Other drawbacks of bitcoin and such like are becoming increasingly apparent, too. The "mining" process required to verify all transactions is hugely power-hungry. Data centres have sprung up from Mongolia to Quebec, collectively consuming as much electricity as entire countries to run a system that cannot manage more than a handful of transactions per second.
The potential applications for the underlying blockchain technology look rather more attractive, but progress in developing them has been slower than hoped, and some apparent successes turn out to have been exaggerated. Because they are power-hungry and slow, the blockchains that drive cryptocurrencies have to be remodelled for use in business, which can make them less distinctive and more like other databases. Though the excitement surrounding the technology has provided a useful push to get interested parties around the table and start talking, most blockchain projects are still at the exploratory stage.
Putting a business on a blockchain is as complicated as any other big IT project. Those involved in the planning stage still have to ask the usual questions. What exactly is it meant to do? Why would an individual company want to sign up to such a shared venture? Who will design the system? Who will be in charge if things go wrong? And once a decision is made to build such a system, there will still be a lot of grunt work to be done. All this suggests that, whatever the benefits of blockchains, they will not arrive overnight.
One problem, says Gary Barnett, an analyst at GlobalData, a consultancy, is mutual incomprehension between insiders and outsiders. "There's a 'two tribes' vibe about a lot of this," he says. Because blockchains and cryptocurrencies are notoriously complicated, non-experts from other industries can end up confused by techno-speak, whereas advocates of the technologies are so excited by the potential that they give insufficient attention to important details of the industries they are aiming to revolutionise.
To understand the pros and cons of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, the best way is to start with bitcoin itself.
THE TOIL TO DISCOVER "NEW PHYSICS" AFTER HIGGS BOSON BREAKTHROUGH / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL
| Etiquetas: Science And Technology
The toil to discover 'new physics' after Higgs boson breakthrough
Six years after Cern scientists found the 'god particle', progress is slow
Clive Cookson
Nothing new has emerged, even after the Large Hadron Collider's operating power was almost doubled in 2015 © AFP
The summer of 2012 was the most glorious in the history of high-energy physics. To huge public acclaim, Cern, the European physics centre near Geneva, announced the discovery of the Higgs boson— frequently called the "god particle" in the media — which gives matter its mass.
Higgs particles emerged from the subatomic debris of trillions of collisions between hydrogen nuclei travelling at almost the speed of light around the world's most powerful atom smasher, Cern's $8bn Large Hadron Collider. Their detection after the LHC had been running for less than three years gave a finishing touch to the so-called Standard Model of physics, which provides an internally consistent description of some — but not all — of the fundamental forces and particles in our universe.
After the Higgs triumph, everyone associated with Cern hoped the LHC would move quickly on to make discoveries in what scientists often call "new physics", helping to explain phenomena beyond the scope of the Standard Model.
One priority is to elucidate the dark matter and dark energy that appear to dominate the universe but remain a complete mystery. Another is to explore the supersymmetry theory, which holds that a panoply of "superparticles" overlays the subatomic particles described in the Standard Model. A third is to understand why the universe consists of matter rather than anti-matter.
Sadly, nothing new has emerged, even after the LHC's operating power was almost doubled in 2015. Physicists have only been able to dot i's and cross t's within the Standard Model. Just this week, for instance, Cern announced the first detection of the predicted decay of the shortlived Higgs boson into a pair of "bottom quarks". That is big news for Higgs researchers, but there have been no more discoveries to excite people beyond the world of particle physics.
Scientists who study the LHC's vast data sets — accumulating at about a quadrillion bytes per day — have occasionally seen tantalising hints of new physics. But these have evaporated on further analysis, before reaching the level of statistical significance that would allow the researchers to claim a discovery. Although something exciting might leap out of the data, few physicists expect this to happen in the near future.
The biggest physics announcement since Higgs took place in 2016, far from Cern. A $1bn facility in the US for the first time detected gravitational waves, generated by a cataclysmic collision between black holes in the distant universe. Further discoveries in the past two years, including a neutron star collision, show that gravitational waves could open up a window into the most energetic events in the universe — perhaps including its birth in the Big Bang.
In retrospect, senior Cern scientists do seem to have been over-enthusiastic about the prospects for new physics as they celebrated the Higgs discovery. While some theories suggested that new particles would soon show up at the LHC, other versions would require collisions with more energy than even the upgraded collider can provide.
But it would be wrong to write off the LHC as a failure, even if it does nothing more than complete the Standard Model.
As Cern physicist Tim Gershon of Warwick university puts it, the Higgs can act as a "novel microscope" into the universe on the smallest scales through its interactions with other particles and forces. That is analogous to the idea that new gravitational wave telescopes will probe the largest cosmological scales.
With more than 20 years of life still left in the LHC — and several further upgrades planned to increase both the number and energy of collisions in its 27km ring — the prospects of moving firmly into new scientific territory remain excellent.
In addition to these hardware improvements, some physicists are beginning to change the way they handle LHC data. Until now everyone has concentrated on "targeted searches", scouring the fallout from trillions of collisions for signs of specific particles predicted by theorists.
For instance, the hypothetical "neutralino" is a candidate to be a constituent of dark matter and to play a role in supersymmetry. New "general searches" would look for any anomaly that does not fit the Standard Model, increasing the chance of discovering something unexpected. Although the information processing challenge is immense, advocates of this approach are relying on artificial intelligence and machine learning to spot novel patterns in the data.
Looking further ahead, the world's high energy physicists are already planning an even more powerful successor to the LHC, to come on stream in the late 2030s. Candidate designs include the Future Circular Collider with a 100km ring, and the straight International Linear Collider, which is about 40km long.
But it is hard to see governments committing billions of dollars to build a machine on that scale until the LHC comes up with some new physics for it to investigate. The field needs another achievement that can be greeted with as much acclaim as the Higgs discovery.
MICROWAVE WEAPONS ARE PRIME SUSPECT IN ILLS OF U.S. EMBASSY WORKERS / THE NEW YORK TIMES
| Etiquetas: China, Cuba, U.S. Economic And Political, Wars
Microwave Weapons Are Prime Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
Doctors and scientists say microwave strikes may have caused sonic delusions and very real brain damage among embassy staff and family members.
By William J. Broad
U.S. Marines outside the embassy in Havana in February. Diplomats working here reported strange noises and mysterious symptoms that doctors and scientists say may have resulted from strikes with microwave weapons.CreditCreditAdalberto Roque/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control.
More recently, the American military itself sought to develop microwave arms that could invisibly beam painfully loud booms and even spoken words into people's heads. The aims were to disable attackers and wage psychological warfare.
Now, doctors and scientists say such unconventional weapons may have caused the baffling symptoms and ailments that, starting in late 2016, hit more than three dozen American diplomats and family members in Cuba and China. The Cuban incidents resulted in a diplomatic rupture between Havana and Washington.
The medical team that examined 21 affected diplomats from Cuba made no mention of microwaves in its detailed report published in JAMA in March. But Douglas H. Smith, the study's lead author and director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a recent interview that microwaves were now considered a main suspect and that the team was increasingly sure the diplomats had suffered brain injury.
"Everybody was relatively skeptical at first," he said, "and everyone now agrees there's something there." Dr. Smith remarked that the diplomats and doctors jokingly refer to the trauma as the immaculate concussion.
Strikes with microwaves, some experts now argue, more plausibly explain reports of painful sounds, ills and traumas than do other possible culprits — sonic attacks, viral infections and contagious anxiety.
In particular, a growing number of analysts cite an eerie phenomenon known as the Frey effect, named after Allan H. Frey, an American scientist. Long ago, he found that microwaves can trick the brain into perceiving what seem to be ordinary sounds.
The false sensations, the experts say, may account for a defining symptom of the diplomatic incidents — the perception of loud noises, including ringing, buzzing and grinding. Initially, experts cited those symptoms as evidence of stealthy attacks with sonic weapons.
Members of Jason, a secretive group of elite scientists that helps the federal government assess new threats to national security, say it has been scrutinizing the diplomatic mystery this summer and weighing possible explanations, including microwaves.
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Asked about the microwave theory of the case, the State Department said the investigation had yet to identify the cause or source of the attacks. And the F.B.I. declined to comment on the status of the investigation or any theories.
The microwave idea teems with unanswered questions. Who fired the beams? The Russian government? The Cuban government? A rogue Cuban faction sympathetic to Moscow? And, if so, where did the attackers get the unconventional arms?
At his home outside Washington, Mr. Frey, the scientist who uncovered the neural phenomenon, said federal investigators have questioned him on the diplomatic riddle and that microwave radiation is considered a possible cause.
Mr. Frey, now 83, has traveled widely and long served as a contractor and a consultant to a number of federal agencies. He speculated that Cubans aligned with Russia, the nation's longtime ally, might have launched microwave strikes in attempts to undermine developing ties between Cuba and the United States.
"It's a possibility," he said at his kitchen table. "In dictatorships, you often have factions that think nothing of going against the general policy if it suits their needs. I think that's a perfectly viable explanation."
Developing a new class of weapons
Allan H. Frey, at his home outside Washington. In 1960, he stumbled on an acoustic effect of microwaves that was eventually named after him.CreditAlex Wroblewski for The New York Times
Microwaves are ubiquitous in modern life. The short radio waves power radars, cook foods, relay messages and link cellphones to antenna towers. They're a form of electromagnetic radiation on the same spectrum as light and X-rays, only at the opposite end.
While radio broadcasting can employ waves a mile or more in length, microwaves range in size from roughly a foot to a tiny fraction of an inch. They're seen as harmless in such everyday uses as microwaving foods. But their diminutive size also enables tight focusing, as when dish antennas turn disorganized rays into concentrated beams.
The dimensions of the human head, scientists say, make it a fairly good antenna for picking up microwave signals.
Mr. Frey, a biologist, said he stumbled on the acoustic effect in 1960 while working for General Electric's Advanced Electronics Center at Cornell University. A man who measured radar signals at a nearby G.E. facility came up to him at a meeting and confided that he could hear the beam's pulses — zip, zip, zip.
Intrigued, Mr. Frey traveled to the man's workplace in Syracuse and positioned himself in a radar beam. "Lo," he recalled, "I could hear it, too."
Mr. Frey's resulting papers — reporting that even deaf people could hear the false sounds — founded a new field of study on radiation's neural impacts. Mr. Frey's first paper, in 1961, reported that power densities 160 times lower than "the standard maximum safe level for continuous exposure" could induce the sonic delusions.
His second paper, in 1962, pinpointed the brain's receptor site as the temporal lobes, which extend beneath the temples. Each lobe bears a small region — the auditory cortex — that processes nerve signals from the outer and inner ears.
Investigators raced to confirm and extend Mr. Frey's findings. At first they named the phenomenon after him, but eventually called it the microwave auditory effect and, in time, more generally, radio-frequency hearing.
The Soviets took notice. Not long after his initial discoveries, Mr. Frey said, he was invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences to visit and lecture. Toward the end, in a surprise, he was taken outside Moscow to a military base surrounded by armed guards and barbed-wire fences.
"They had me visiting the various labs and discussing the problems," including the neural impacts of microwaves, Mr. Frey recalled. "I got an inside look at their classified program."
Moscow was so intrigued by the prospect of mind control that it adopted a special terminology for the overall class of envisioned arms, calling them psychophysical and psychotronic.
Soviet research on microwaves for "internal sound perception," the Defense Intelligence Agency warned in 1976, showed great promise for "disrupting the behavior patterns of military or diplomatic personnel."
Furtively, globally, the threat grew.
The National Security Agency gave Mark S. Zaid, a Washington lawyer who routinely gets security clearances to discuss classified matters, a statement on how a foreign power built a weapon "designed to bathe a target's living quarters in microwaves, causing numerous physical effects, including a damaged nervous system."
Mr. Zaid said a N.S.A. client of his who traveled there watched in disbelief as his nervous system later unraveled, starting with control of his fingers.
The high-pitched chirping that diplomats heard while working at the Consulate General of the United States in Guangzhou, China, might be explained by a phenomenon known as the Frey effect — radio-frequency hearing.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Washington, too, foresaw new kinds of arms.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Air Force scientists sought to beam comprehensible speech into the heads of adversaries. Their novel approach won a patent in 2002, and an update in 2003. Both were assigned to the Air Force secretary, helping limit the idea's dissemination.
The lead inventor said the research team had "experimentally demonstrated" that the "signal is intelligible." As for the invention's uses, an Air Force disclosure form listed the first application as "Psychological Warfare."
The Navy sought to paralyze. The Frey effect was to induce sounds powerful enough to cause painful discomfort and, if needed, leave targets unable to move. The weapon, the Navy noted, would have a "low probability of fatalities or permanent injuries."
In a twist, the 2003 contract was awarded to microwave experts who had emigrated to the United States from Russia and Ukraine.
It is unknown if Washington deploys such arms. But the Pentagon built a related weapon known as the Active Denial System, hailing it in a video. It fires an invisible beam meant to deter mobs and attackers with fiery sensations.
Russia, China and many European states are seen as having the know-how to make basic microwave weapons that can debilitate, sow noise or even kill. Advanced powers, experts say, might accomplish more nuanced aims such as beaming spoken words into people's heads. Only intelligence agencies know which nations actually possess and use such unfamiliar arms.
The basic weapon might look like a satellite dish. In theory, such a device might be hand-held or mounted in a van, car, boat or helicopter. Microwave arms are seen as typically working over relatively short distances — across the length of a few rooms or blocks. High-powered ones might be able to fire beams across several football fields, or even for several miles.
The episode in Cuba
The Soviet collapse in 1991 cut Russia's main ties to Cuba, a longtime ally just 90 miles from the United States. The shaky economy forced Moscow to stop providing Havana with large amounts of oil and other aid.
Vladimir Putin, as Russia's president and prime minister, sought to recover the economic, political and strategic clout that the Soviets had lost. In December 2000, months after the start of his first presidential term, Mr. Putin flew to the island nation. It was the first visit by a Soviet or Russian leader since the Cold War.
He also sought to resurrect Soviet work on psychoactive arms. In 2012, he declared that Russia would pursue "new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals," including psychophysical weapons.
In July 2014, Mr. Putin again visited Cuba. This time he brought a gift — the cancellation of some $30 billion in Cuban debt. The two nations signed a dozen accords.
A Russian spy ship, Viktor Leonov, docked in Havana on the eve of the beginning of reconciliation talks between Cuba and the United States in early 2015, and did so again in subsequent years. Moscow and Havana grew so close that in late 2016, the two nations signed a sweeping pact on defense and technology cooperation.
Raul Castro, president of Cuba, with Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, at a welcoming ceremony for Mr. Putin in Havana in 2014.CreditIsmael Francisco/Associated Press
In Havana's harbor, men fishing near the Russian warship, Viktor, Leonov, in 2015.CreditRamon Espinosa/Associated Press
As a candidate, Donald Trump faulted the Obama administration's normalization policy as "a very weak agreement" and threatened to scrap it on reaching the White House. Weeks after he won the election, in late November 2016, the American embassy in Havana found itself battling a mysterious crisis.
Diplomats and their families recounted high-pitched sounds in homes and hotel rooms at times intense enough to incapacitate. Long-term, the symptoms included nausea, crushing headaches, fatigue, dizziness, sleep problems and hearing loss.
The State Department filed diplomatic protests, and the Cuban government denied involvement. In May, the F.B.I. opened an investigation and its agents began visiting Havana a half year after the incidents began. The last major one hit that summer, in August, giving the agents relatively little time to gather clues.
In September 2017, the Trump administration warned travelers away from Cuba and ordered home roughly half the diplomatic personnel.
Rex W. Tillerson, who was then the secretary of state, said the embassy's staff had been targeted deliberately. But he refrained from blaming Cuba, and federal officials held out the possibility that a third party may have been responsible.
In early October, President Trump expelled 15 Cuban diplomats, producing a chill between the nations. Administration critics said the White House was using the health issue as a pretext to end President Barack Obama's reconciliation policy.
The day after the expulsions, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a closed, top secret hearing on the Cuba situation. Three State Department officials testified, as did an unnamed senior official of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Hypothesis
Beatrice A. Golomb, a medical doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, here in a beachside office, argues that microwave strikes can explain the diplomatic ills.CreditTara Pixley for The New York Times
Early this year, in January, the spooky impact of microwaves on the human brain never came up during an open Senate hearing on the Cuba crisis.
But in a scientific paper that same month, James C. Lin of the University of Illinois, a leading investigator of the Frey effect, described the diplomatic ills as plausibly arising from microwave beams. Dr. Lin is the editor-in-chief of Bio Electro Magnetics, a peer-reviewed journal that explores the effects of radio waves and electromagnetic fields on living things.
In his paper, he said high-intensity beams of microwaves could have caused the diplomats to experience not just loud noises but nausea, headaches and vertigo, as well as possible brain-tissue injury. The beams, he added, could be fired covertly, hitting "only the intended target."
In February, ProPublica in a lengthy investigation mentioned that federal investigators were weighing the microwave theory. Separately, it told of an intriguing find. The wife of a member of the embassy staff, it reported, had looked outside her home after hearing the disturbing sounds and seen a van speeding away.
A dish antenna could fit easily into a small van.
The medical team that studied the Cuba diplomats ascribed the symptoms in the March JAMA study to "an unknown energy source" that was highly directional. Some personnel, it noted, had covered their ears and heads but experienced no sound reduction. The team said the diplomats appeared to have developed signs of concussion without having received any blows to the head.
In May, reports emerged that American diplomats in China had suffered similar traumas. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the medical details of the two groups "very similar" and "entirely consistent" with one another. By late June, the State Department had evacuated at least 11 Americans from China.
To date, the most detailed medical case for microwave strikes has been made by Beatrice A. Golomb, a medical doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. In a forthcoming paper to be published in October in Neural Computation, a peer-reviewed journal of the MIT Press, she lays out potential medical evidence for Cuban microwave strikes.
She compared the symptoms of the diplomats in Cuba to those reported for individuals said to be suffering from radio-frequency sickness. The health responses of the two groups, Dr. Golomb wrote, "conform closely."
In closing, she argued that "numerous highly specific features" of the diplomatic incidents "fit the hypothesis" of a microwave attack, including the Frey-type production of disturbing sounds.
Scientists still disagree over what hit the diplomats. Last month, JAMA ran four letters critical of the March study, some faulting the report for ruling out mass hysteria.
But Mr. Zaid, the Washington lawyer, who represents eight of the diplomats and family members, said microwave attacks may have injured his clients.
"It's sort of naïve to think this just started now," he said. Globally, he added, covert strikes with the potent beams appear to have been going on for decades.
Francisco Palmieri, a State Department official, was asked during the open Senate hearing if "attacks against U.S. personnel in Cuba" had been raised with Moscow.
"That is a very good question," Mr. Palmieri replied. But addressing it, he added, would require "a classified setting."
For his part, Mr. Frey says he doubts the case will be solved anytime soon. The novelty of the crisis, its sporadic nature and the foreign setting made it hard for federal investigators to gather clues and draw conclusions, he said, much less file charges.
"Based on what I know," he remarked, "it will remain a mystery."
William J. Broad is a science journalist and senior writer. He joined The Times in 1983, and has shared two Pulitzer Prizes with his colleagues, as well as an Emmy Award and a DuPont Award. @WilliamJBroad
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PHILADELPHIA (AP) - A lawyer for Meek Mill is asking a Philadelphia judge to recuse herself before he appeals the rapper's sentence of two to four years in prison.
Common Pleas Judge Genece Brinkley sentenced Mill last week for violating probation in a nearly decade-old gun and drug case.
On Tuesday, his lawyers asked Brinkley to step down, saying she stepped out of her judicial bounds numerous times. Among the examples cited was the judge suggesting Mill record a version of the Boyz II Men song "On Bended Knee" and specifically mention the judge in it. The lawyer says after Mill declined, the judge replied: "Suit yourself."
On Monday night, former Philadelphia 76er Julius Erving, Eagles player Malcolm Jenkins and rapper Rick Ross were among hundreds of people gathered to protest Mill's imprisonment.


Barog is a village situated in Bilaspur Sadar Block of Bilaspur district in Himachal Pradesh. Placed in rural area of Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh, it is one of the 454 villages of Bilaspur Sadar Block of Bilaspur district. As per the administration records, the village code of Barog is 5519772. The village has 33 houses.
According to Census 2011, Barog 's population is 185. Out of this, 98 are males while the females count 87 here. This village has 20 children in the age bracket of 0-6 years. Out of this 11 are boys and 9 are girls.
Literacy ratio in Barog village is 70%. 130 out of total 185 population is educated here. In males the literacy rate is 76% as 75 males out of total 98 are educated while female literacy ratio is 63% as 55 out of total 87 females are literate in this Village.
The Negative portion is that illiteracy rate of Barog village is 29%. Here 55 out of total 185 persons are illiterate. Male illiteracy ratio here is 23% as 23 males out of total 98 are illiterate. In females the illiteracy rate is 36% and 32 out of total 87 females are illiterate in this village.
The count of working people of Barog village is 39 however 146 are non-working. And out of 39 employed person 0 persons are totally dependent on cultivation.


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Grande-Entrée est une localité située sur l'île de la Grande Entrée, dans l'archipel des îles de la Madeleine.

Géographie

Grande-Entrée se trouve sur l'île de la Grande Entrée, au nord-est de l'archipel. Elle est située sur une péninsule, entre la lagune de la Grande Entrée, au nord, et la mer au sud.

La localité constitue l'une des deux extrémités de la route 199, l'autre étant Havre-Aubert, au sud-ouest de l'archipel.

Histoire

La colonisation de Grande-Entrée, parmi les plus tardives de l'archipel, remonte aux années 1870. L'endroit devient toutefois rapidement un port de pêche important. Grande-Entrée est désignée « capitale québécoise du homard » en 1994, son port abritant environ une centaine de homardiers.

Tourisme

 Centre d'interprétation du phoque

Notes et références

Voir aussi

Articles connexes
 Île de la Grande Entrée
 Îles de la Madeleine

Localité des Îles de la Madeleine

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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We utilize the Insight Millennium II Surface EMG testing to evaluate the patterns of nerve activity radiating out from the spine through the back, allowing us to better diagnose abnormal neurological and musculo-skeletal conditions. This second generation subluxation testing technology objectively helps us: (1) Detect areas of nerve disturbance, (2) Document and monitor your results, and (3) Deliver the appropriate Chiropractic care.
Deep tissue, craniosacral, myofascial release, acupressure, sports, and cross fiber techniques release muscle spasm, improve circulation and reduce the effects of stress.
Operating out of this office is Kathryn Tooker, L.Ac., who provides our patients with one of the oldest, "newest" forms of wellness medicine: Acupuncture. Today in most western cultures Acupuncture is considered a "new alternative" medicine. In reality Acupuncture (and its related Moxibustion) are practiced medical treatments that are over 5,000 years old. Very basically, Acupuncture is the insertion of very fine needles, (sometimes in conjunction with electrical stimulus), on the body's surface, in order to influence physiological functioning of the body. Acupuncture can also be used in conjunction with heat produced by burning specific herbs, this is called Moxibustion. In addition, a non-invasive method of massage therapy, called Acupressure, can also be effective.
We can custom fit supports and appliances to assist your body in its healing process.


text:
Rizin 33: Bantamweight contenders sound off ahead of tournament finale
Four of Asia's top bantamweight fighters converge on the Saitama Super Arena on New Year's Eve looking to end 2021 with a new accolade on their resume – Rizin FF Bantamweight Grand Prix Champion.
In the first semi-final, former Rizin bantamweight champion Kai Asakura takes on former King of Pancrase challenger Kenta Takizawa, with the former champ keen to score a quickfire victory and progress to the main event final unscathed and as fresh as possible.
Speaking after making weight for the event, Asakura said, "My opponent has a wide range of kicks but that's about it. His striking isn't a threat to me. This will be a stand-up fight and I will knock him out in the first round.
"I have put in everything to win this tournament so winning it all is the minimum.
"This is a one night tournament so it would be nice to be able to finish him without taking any damage or fatigue, but I'm not looking past this Semi-Final and I will be focused on facing a tough opponent.
"The Finals of the tournament will be the main event so I plan to open up this event with my win and end it with my win."
Takizawa has other plans, of course, and the 27-year-old Tokyo native said he has left no stone unturned ahead of the event.
"I've prepared myself in the best way I can. All I have to do now is to go in there and fight so I have no regrets," he said.
"My opponent is a very tough opponent but I have a game plan to win it in a one-sided fight. Which is something I have been working on all year.
"I lost my fight last year on NYE and I have worked very hard to win on this day.
"I have a karate base and have come up with my own style that adopts best with MMA meaning different angles and effectiveness things like that."
Immediately following the Asakura vs. Takizawa bout, Hiromasa Ougikubo and Naoki Inoue will face off for the second spot in the tournament final.
Ougikubo is a former bantamweight title challenger and finalist of The Ultimate Fighter: Tournament of Champions, and has all the experience needed to be successful in a tournament format.
And, after bouncing back from his title fight loss to Asakura in August 2020, the 34-year-old is riding a three-fight win streak heading into Rizin 33, and says he's flying the flag for thirtysomething fighters as he prepares to battle his way to the final.
"It's been a long year with many fights and I feel that I'm finally here," he said.
"My opponent has a great ability to keep distance in his striking range and is a solid grappler so I plan to use all three rounds to frustrate him and win at all cost.
"I've been wanting to fight Inoue ever since the tournament has begun. I can't wait to fight him and throw everything I have at him.
"For the past two to three years I have always been stepping in the ring thinking this might be my last fight. Every fight is the grand sum of my career and that hasn't changed.
"I'm the only one left in my thirties in this GP so I want to show how tenacious a middle-aged man can become."
Ougikubo takes on Rizin's newest bantamweight star Inoue, who, at the age of 24, has already amassed an impressive record of 15-2.
He heads into his semi-final bout with Ougikubo with an unbeaten record under the Rizin FF banner, having won all five of his bouts inside the Rizin ring through 2020 and 2021.
Now Inoue is ready to make an impact in the bantamweight grand prix, and he is in confident mood heading into the New Year's Eve event.
"My opponent has a strong heart," he stated.
"He's probably going to want to grapple and I'm okay with that. If he chooses to strike, I'm also okay with that.
"Everybody who's left are tough guys, but I don't see a future in myself if I don't win this tournament in a convincing way.
"My goal in this fight is to let him do absolutely nothing. I hope to react and respond to whatever he brings.
"I think being calm and executing what I trained is the key to winning this one-day tournament."
Rizin 33: Fight Card
Main Event: Rizin Bantamweight Grand Prix Final
Roberto Satoshi Souza vs. Yusuke Yachi – for Rizin lightweight title
Yutaka Saito vs. Mikuru Asakura
Tenshin Nasukawa vs. Takanori Gomi – stand-up rules
Rena vs. Si Woo Park
Ayaka Hamasaki vs. Seika Izawa
Koji Takeda vs. "Blackpanther" Beynoah
Shoma Shibisai vs. Hideki Sekine
Kyohei Hagiwara vs. Hiroaki Suzuki
Kouzi vs. Ya-Man – kickboxing rules
Shibatar vs. Yuta Kubo
Kazuma Sone vs. Shinomu Ota
Yuki Motoya vs. Kintaro – bantamweight grand prix alternate bout
Hiromasa Ougikubo vs. Naoki Inoue – bantamweight grand prix semi-final
Kai Asakura vs. Kenta Takizawa – bantamweight grand prix semi-final
Kota Miura vs. Yushi
Rizin 33 streams internationally via Live NOW with English commentary by Joe Ferraro, Damien Brown and Johnny Case.
By Simon Head|2021-12-30T15:12:59+00:00December 30th, 2021|Latest News|Comments Off on Rizin 33: Bantamweight contenders sound off ahead of tournament finale
About the Author: Simon Head
Simon Head is a veteran sports editor and MMA reporter who has covered MMA for more than a decade for a host of major outlets, including BBC Sport, MMA Junkie/USA Today, BT Sport, and the Daily Mirror.
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Q: Visual Studio Code Postgres SQL Connection I would like to use Visual Studio Code to preform my PostgreSQL queries, and general DB maintenance as an alternative to pgAdmin4. I have read the documentation included with the appropriate extention (PostgreSQL by MS). When I try to Create A New Profile I get the following prompt:

I am working from an Apple Mac so I attempted localhost at first. That did not work. I tried the ip address of the local computer with the same result. I attempted just giving the name of the DB, but that did not work either. Any suggestions as to what I can try next. I am terrible at spelling and rembering names so I would like some form of IDE support when I am working.
This is the error I get:
PostgreSQL: Failed to connect: could not translate host name "localhost\Local" to address: nodename nor servname provided, or not known

A: As per documentation here Npgsql has a Visual Studio extension (VSIX) which integrates PostgreSQL access into Visual Studio. It allows connecting to PostgreSQL from within Visual Studio's Server Explorer, create an Entity Framework 6 model from an existing database, etc. The extension can be installed directly from the Visual Studio Marketplace page.
The VSIX doesn't automatically add Npgsql to your GAC, App.config, machines.config or any other project or system-wide resource. It only allows accessing PostgreSQL from Visual Studio itself.
As here you van find out, How to Connect Visual Studio LightSwitch to PostgreSQL with dotConnect for PostgreSQL Data Provider.
As per postgresql documentation here  Could not translate host name localhost, service 5432 to address: nodename nor servname provided, or not known.
Usually this error is caused by broken /etc/hosts file. The problem could be a missing localhost entry, syntax errors or incorrect whitespace.

For reference, here is what this file should look like by default on macOS:

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1   localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost

For further you ref here, here, here and here

A: The notation hostname\instance is a typical Microsoft SQL Server notation. PostgreSQL doesn't have the concept of instances like MSSQL does. However, PostgreSQL is run in an instance, it just doesn't have a name.
Maybe a simple localhost:5432 might work.
Then you might have to add or uncomment a line similar to the following in the pg_hba.conf file of the PostgreSQL instance:
# TYPE  DATABASE        USER            ADDRESS                 METHOD
local   all             all                                     trust

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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The CSB, established in 1990, was formed to investigate root causes to chemical accidents. While the independent agency typically collaborates with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA), Congress has asked CSB to become involved in the offshore incident investigation. Even though it has no true regulatory authority or responsibility, the CSB still garners a reputation for offering a thorough analysis of incidents.
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text:
ORB EXCLUSIVE: The Glamorous Life and Lonely Death of Andrea Reynolds, the Woman Who Saved Claus von Bulow
By the time Andrea got around to writing this book, few people remembered–or cared about–Claus von Bulow. Timing is everything.
Andrea Reynolds Plunket, the Mitteleuropa manipulator whose talent for self-invention propelled her to the upper echelons of international society and whose propensity for self-destructiveness eventually alienated all who loved her, died last week in penury and obscurity. She was 81.
The whip-smart enchantress, whose lover Claus von Bulow once described as "a Hungarian Hussar", came into the Danish aristocrat's life just after he was convicted in 1982 of attempting to murder his wealthy wife. Andrea organized the judicial appeal that got his conviction reversed, then helped strategize the second trial that got him acquitted. (During all these maneuvers, Claus and Andrea kept on living in the sumptuous Fifth Avenue apartment of his comatose wife, Sunny Crawford von Bulow, where they entertained such swells as Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, Kenneth Jay Lane, John Richardson, Taki and Alexandra Theodoracopulos, Mercedes Kellogg Bass, and Alice Mason.)
In 1990, a movie based on the von Bulow case was a resounding success, winning the Academy Award for Best Actor for the performance of Jeremy Irons as an insufferable snob. Glenn Close played a sympathetic Sunny, and Christine Baranski was prickly as Andrea. There is a scene where Claus and Andrea are discussing whether or not to hire Alan Dershowitz to shepherd the appeal. After seeing the movie, Mrs. Reynolds complained to the press that the screenwriter had invented out of whole cloth a line attributed to her character: "Get the Jew!"
Jeremy Irons and Christine Baranski as Claus and Andrea in "Reversal of Fortune"
After a time Andrea and Claus drifted apart and he moved to London. She took as her fourth husband Shaun Plunket, the unpropertied second son of a noble English family related to The Queen. They opened a Bed & Breakfast in a rustic compound in the Catskills she had obtained in a divorce, and they ran it until Plunket's death in 2012.
From that point on, things went downhill. "Andrea couldn't help herself, she was confrontational and crusty with everyone. She would say anything to shock people and get a reaction," said Guy Clark, a decorator and neighbor upstate. "She smoked like a chimney and drank wine from morning till night. She once told me she stayed 'permanently pickled' to get through her life of drudgery. But Andrea was glamorous and curvaceous until the end."
Andrea with Shaun at an over-the-top party hosted by interior designer Geoffrey Bradfield. If Shaun had outlived his older brother, Andrea would have become Lady Plunket. But she did get to go to Buckingham Palace for a private teatime with Her Majesty The Queen, a distant cousin of Shaun.
Clark said Andrea never became an American citizen and refused to apply for government benefits for fear she would be deported. Her daughter in London, who had married well (according to a riveting Vanity Fair article written in 1985 by Dominick Dunne), had constantly implored her to relocate to England, to no avail. As her funds vanished and the patronage of her society friends gradually dissipated, she had no money for heating oil, so she slept on the kitchen floor in front of a gas oven with her dogs. She ate little, husbanding her meager finances for wine, cigarettes and dog food. "Fortunately, it was a mild winter, or she wouldn't have made it through," says Clark.
According to Clark, her home and inn had recently been auctioned in a foreclosure sale, and in early April, when the new owners came by to politely inquire how soon she might be vacating the premises, she told them, "You don't have to worry about getting me out, I'll be dead by the end of the month." And indeed she was.
Mrs. Plunket died last Friday night in a local hospital. "All her organs were failing—heart, lungs, kidneys, liver", Erin Scarnato, a nursing home attendant in New Jersey who had befriended Andrea in recent years, told Orbmagazine. "She died of a broken heart," said Clark.
This issue caused a brouhaha when Helmut Newton photographed the two lovebirds in Sunny's apartment—attired in black leather.
Andrea stirred up a lot of dust in recent years by claiming she owned the rights to the Sherlock Holmes characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Most of the copyrights had passed into the public domain years ago, but she trademarked some of the names and managed for a time to convince film producers to pay her a fee in order to avoid litigation. According to the New York Times, her allegations of ownership of rights were repeatedly rebuked by the courts, but she persisted in her challenges to the Conan Doyle estate. Andrea's third husband, the American television producer Sheldon Reynolds, had in fact owned some tangential rights to a Sherlock Holmes TV series he had produced in the 1950s, but those rights and subsequent attempts to purchase more copyrights fell through. She maintained the fiction that she owned the trademarks to the Sherlock Holmes characters, but when Clark asked her for details, he says "she was cagey about it."
So much about Andrea's life was cinematic, it is a shame she never managed to cash in on it. A few years ago, she put together an autobiography that was circulated to publishers by the agent David Kuhn, but it wasn't sold. Andrea speculated that was because she didn't suggest that von Bulow might have been complicit in inducing his wife's coma (which endured for 28 years, in a luxurious and secure room at Columbia Presbyterian hospital, until she succumbed in 2008).
Carolina Herrera, Taki and Alexandra Theodoracopulos, and Reinaldo Herrera were, and are, great friends of Claus—and remained loyal supporters of Andrea, because of her spunk.
According to Clark, her society acquaintances cited above and possibly also including Daisy Soros and Monique Van Vooren, had been "generous to her to a fault. They stayed loyal to her because she was a stubborn fabulous lady who had her own mind and never backed down. But she expected her friends to keep her going forever and people got tired of it." Andrea told Clark that two years ago, she saw von Bulow in London, but even he and his extremely rich daughter Cosima had turned off the spigot.
Clark laughed, "When people lose their money, you don't expect them to be difficult anymore, but to become gracious, but Andrea never changed. She used up all her good will."
A few years ago, when the main building in the upstate compound, a wooden Victorian house, had suddenly burned to the ground, the old pals had raised $100,000 to buy a new steel bridge so that the Plunkets could have access to a stone cottage across the Willowemoc River which divided their property. Another source tells Orb that as recently as two years ago, Alexandra Theodoracopulos, who was born a Schoenberg princess in Austria, was sending letters in her rarefied circle soliciting donations to help Andrea hold onto the bed & breakfast inn. Such efforts staved the wolf from the door, but only temporarily.
An early image of Sunny Crawford
von Auersperg von Bulow
Clark said that Andrea kept up her "glamorous spirit" to the end, although she never stopped provoking and needling people, just to get a reaction. When he inquired if she intended to again ask her friends for money, she was fatalistic, saying, "You can go to the well only so many times before the water runs out."
And Andrea had in her lifetime seen wealth come and seen it go. As Dunne wrote in Vanity Fair, "Her first husband was a French-Italian named Ellis Giorgini. They had, according to Mrs. Reynolds, 'a beautiful wedding in Paris.' But the marriage was short-lived: 'He drank a bit too much.' Her second husband, Pierre Frottier-Duche, a Frenchman, is the father of her only child, Caroline. They lived in a house in Paris that had once belonged to Anatole France, and had a villa in Saint-Tropez. At one time very rich, Frottier suffered severe financial reverses. When he later went bankrupt, Mrs. Reynolds gave him back all the jewels he had given her. 'I'm a gentleman,' she said. Asked to comment on the story that Frottier had been forced to become a taxi driver after he went broke, she replied, 'No, no, no, a limousine driver, and he would pick up people like Henry Ford, whom he knew from before, and Henry would sit up in the front seat with him when he realized it was Pierre.'
What a life, what an adventure. Rest in peace, Andrea. You did it your way.