Sign up to receive Authers’ Note daily by email here Despite appearances to the contrary, the Trump trade may be moving into reverse as the president’s maiden State of the Union address approaches. The overall level of the stock market is, of course, at fresh records. But the pattern within it is shifting again. The end of the week saw sharp falls for almost all equity markets […]
SEOUL Plans for the first contact between North Korea and the United States after President Donald Trump took office were cancelled after the U.S. State Department denied a visa for the top envoy from Pyongyang, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. The talks, between senior North Korean foreign ministry envoy Choe Son Hui and former U.S. officials, were scheduled to take place on March 1 and […]
Submitted by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFPlan.com, As of this writing a tremendous number of things are happening in North Korea and Russia. Although these are not events that seem momentous, they are quite profound when taken into consideration with the grand scheme: the worldwide plot to form a state of global governance. These […]
BEIJING A youth named by China as the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, but reviled as a fake by many Tibetans, has pledged to uphold the “glorious tradition” of patriotism that holders of his position have followed, state news agency Xinhua said. Although officially atheist, China selected Gyaltsen Norbu as the 11th Panchen Lama in 1995 in a drive to win the hearts and minds of Tibetans. […]
GUATEMALA CITY The United States will request the extradition of former Guatemalan Vice President Roxana Baldetti and a former cabinet minister on drug trafficking charges, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala said on Friday. Baldetti has been imprisoned in Guatemala since 2015 on charges of leading a network that defrauded the government of the Central American country along with former president Otto Pérez Molina, who has also been […]
By Lewis Krauskopf | NEW YORK NEW YORK U.S. President Donald Trump’s planned economic agenda has fanned the flames for Wall Street’s record-setting run, but some investors worry that his first major address to Congress next week risks dousing it if his plans look slow to execute or are overly vague. The benchmark S&P 500 .SPX has surged 10 percent since Trump’s Nov. 8 election, with optimism […]
When the National Security Agency (NSA) introduced Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) in 2002 as an approved cryptographic security algorithm it was practically unbreakable. That was a long, long time ago. True, SHA-1 security has been broken, but then we’ve been planning on it being busted for years now. Getty Images/iStockphoto Since then, SHA-1 has been used in numerous secure applications. These include web Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) […]
Credit: shatterered.io Today, researchers at the Dutch research institute CWI and Google jointly announce that they have broken the SHA-1 internet security standard in practice. This industry standard is used for digital signatures and file integrity verification, which secure credit card transactions, electronic documents, GIT open-source software repositories and software distribution. CWI cryptanalyst Marc Stevens says: “Many applications still use SHA-1, although it was officially deprecated by […]
24 February 2017 MARC has assigned long-term ratings of AAA, AA and A to Kinabalu Capital Sdn Bhd’s (Kinabalu Capital) medium-term notes (MTN) RM130 million Class A, RM25 million Class B and RM15 million Class C respectively. Concurrently, MARC has assigned a MARC-1 rating to Kinabalu Capital’s issue of up to RM170 million commercial papers (CP). The issuance of the rated MTN and/or CP with a combined […]
By Frank Jack Daniel | MEXICO CITY MEXICO CITY An emboldened Mexico hardened its opposition to President Donald Trump on Friday by saying it would retaliate if the United States imposed a border tax and that it can afford to lose financial aid that might be pulled to pay for a border wall. Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said Mexico could respond to any tax the United States […]
By Arshad Mohammed | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON The longest-serving U.S. diplomat warned against isolationism, protectionism and Russian aggression on Friday in a retirement speech implicitly criticizing some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies even as he urged officials to serve the White House loyally. Ambassador Dan Fried argued that since becoming a world power over a century ago, the United States had largely pursued an open, rules-based world, […]
By Caroline Humer | NEW YORK NEW YORK The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which represents insurers in every state, Cigna Corp and Humana Inc said on Friday they would attend a meeting between the health insurance industry and President Donald Trump on Monday. Cigna’s chief executive officer, David Cordani, and Humana CEO Bruce Broussard will attend, spokesmen for both companies said. Bloomberg reported earlier on Friday […]
About a month ago, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz decided to ‘take a stand’ in defiance of Trump’s immigration executive order and penned a message to the world vowing, among other things, to hire 10,000 refugees over the next 5 years and “build bridges, not walls, with Mexico”. Here are some excerpts from the politically charged message drafted by Schultz with “deep concern and a heavy heart”: I […]
Two years after Donald Trump was booed at an influential conservative event, the US president returned to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday for a victory lap. But his rambling address, at an event that was more campaign rally than detailed presentation of policy, struck a jarring note at the end of a week that saw a semblance of orthodoxy from the new administration. While his […]
European equity funds attracted their largest weekly inflows in more than a year as institutional investors bet on a recovery taking hold across the continent. Investors added $1.1bn to funds investing in European stocks in the seven days to February 22, a haul that nearly matched the inflows of the preceding four weeks combined, according to data from EPFR. This was despite outflows from dedicated French stock […]
PARIS French prosecutors on Friday appointed a magistrate to investigate allegations concerning presidential candidate Francois Fillon and his wife, over charges that his wife got large sums of money for work she may not have done. The prosecutor’s decision to open up a new stage in the case marks a blow for Fillon, whose status as favourite to win the presidency has faded since a newspaper broke […]
By Mica Rosenberg | NEW YORK NEW YORK A U.S. Department of Homeland Security plan to add more than 5,000 border enforcement agents will present logistical challenges and might be unnecessary, according to former government officials familiar with earlier pushes to accelerate border hiring. Three former top officials at U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) told Reuters in interviews that ramping up hiring at the agency, as […]
The Dow was on track to break its 10-day record-setting streak on Friday, as investors turned cautious after recent comments from Trump administration suggested that pro-growth policies may take longer to be implemented. Wall Street is trading at record levels since the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, spurred by his promises of tax reforms, reduced regulations and increased infrastructure spending. However, with Trump giving scant […]
Primary dealers have warned of obstacles to the US Treasury introducing very long-dated bonds, despite some early support for the plans. This week Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary, said his staff had begun to look into issuing US government debt with maturities of as long as 50 or 100 years. Such a move would be a historic shift in policy for the $14tn Treasury market, which has resisted […]
By Emily Stephenson and Steve Holland | NATIONAL HARBOR, Md./WASHINGTON NATIONAL HARBOR, Md./WASHINGTON President Donald Trump said he would make a massive budget request for one of the “greatest military buildups in American history” on Friday in a feisty, campaign-style speech extolling robust nationalism to eager conservative activists. Trump used remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an organization that gave him one of his first […]
If you’ve read the latest headlines about Britain’s tech industry, you’d think the country hadn’t be rocked by the greatest political and economic uncertainty since the Second World War. Not only are UK startups raising record amounts of funding year on year, but tech giants like Amazon are investing and doubling down on the UK economy, as if the mood music was taken straight from a dance scene […]
By Michelle Martin and Thorsten Severin | BERLIN BERLIN German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives held a narrow opinion poll lead on Friday over the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), whose support has surged in recent weeks. The Ipsos poll put the conservative bloc at 32 percent while the SPD, enjoying a revival in fortunes since nominating former European Parliament President Martin Schulz as its candidate to replace Merkel, […]
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman starts a month-long Asian tour on Sunday to build ties with the world’s fastest growing importers of Saudi oil and promote investment opportunities, including the sale of a stake in its giant state firm Saudi Aramco. The octogenarian monarch, who has overseen the launch of an ambitious economic reform plan since his accession two years ago, is expected to visit Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan […]
By SOPHENG CHEANG, Associated Press PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Cambodia needs more than $400 million in aid to remove by 2025 all of the land mines that are a legacy of years of civil war, the country’s prime minister said Friday. Prime Minister Hun Sen said in a statement marking his nation’s Mine Awareness Day that the mines remain a threat and kill or maim nearly 100 […]
