According to conspiracy theorists, in 1991, record label CEOs and very wealthy “decision makers” met behind closed doors to invent and actively push Gangster Rap onto the American public. The goal, allegedly, was to promote selling drugs and street violence through music to fill privately-owned corporate prisons. An anonymous letter sent to HipHopIsRead.comdetailed a music industry insider’s part in this conspiracy theory.
The conspiracy theory goes like this: Beyoncé didn’t want to gain weight while she was pregnant, so she hired a surrogate to carry her daughter Blue Ivy Carter to term. The pop star announced her pregnancy by rubbing her baby bump at the tail end of her performance during the MTV Video Music Awards in 2011. However, a week before her performance on MTV, Beyoncé performed a concert and many believe that she showed no visible signs of a pregnancy. The conspiracy theory also stemmed from an interview with Beyoncé soon after after the MTV VMAs when her belly seemed to fold as she began to sit down, and rumors suggested that she was wearing a prosthetic pregnancy belly. The singer denied that she used a surrogate, and footage that aired during the On the Run tour that shows her naked baby bump seems to have proven conspiracy theorists wrong.
June offers the most hours of daylight of any month of the year! For gardeners, this is a great boon, allowing them to concentrate on their fields and flowers. Click here to see your own sunrise and sunset times. June is named for the Roman goddess Juno, patroness of marriage and women. Since ancient times, cultures have adopted June as the perfect time for revelry, weddings, and feasts.Know all of the months’ origins!
One old proverb says, “Calm weather in June sets corn in tune.” Like Goldilocks, gardeners hope for weather that is just right: not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry. Even the tenderest plants softies like basil and tomatoes are put in the ground in June. Folk wisdom tells us that plants will catch up by the end of the month regardless of how early we got them in the ground thanks to the long hours of sunshine.
September strews the woodlot o’er
With many a brilliant color;
The world is brighter than before,
Why should our hearts be duller?
Summer declines and roses have grown rare,
But cottage crofts are gay with hollyhocks,
And in old garden walks you breathe an air
Fragrant of pinks and August-smelling stocks.
When high the Sun in noonday glory rides,
Where willows keep the lake’s green margin cool,
The speckled trout amid their shadow hides,
And dragonflies haunt every shaded pool.
’Tis the last rose of summer,
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
Buttercups nodded and said, “Goodbye!” Clover and daisy went off together,
But the fragrant water lilies lie
Yet moored in the golden August weather.
(exceprt.almanac.com)
There was an explosion in Tianjin china at a chemical factory which is equivalent to 21 ton of TNT so far 145 people are dead and more than 797 injured the extents of the damage could be seen more than a mile away from the blast but not only that there was an explosion in china that day but there was also an explosion in Russia that same day. As the days go by the more i think that these explosion especially in Tianjin had nothing to do with a chemical accident but and act of war. I think the rod of god was used on Tianjin by the us. Coincidence that this happened while China has devalue their currency thus hurting the us economy making us goods more expensive
The question is now has China china respond in the same manner there has been problem in Texas and Indiana concerning chemical plant but lately there has been problems with chemical plant all over the world and what ever it is it not good.
Just to recap from my last post there what been going on so far in terms of explosion around the world
2 chemical plant explosion in China
An explosion in Russia
An explosion in Texas and a chemical plant leek in Illinois
Also there has been 2 explosion in Japan
All this has happened in a space of a week or so could all this be about a secret war between the USA China Russia and Japan
NB: there has been another explosion in china yesterday killing one person
The latest developments as tens of thousands of people make their way to Europe and across the continent, seeking safety and a better life. All times local.
A Polish official says that the country will continue to upgrade surveillance methods to prevent an influx of migrants.
Border guards spokeswoman Agnieszka Golias said Monday that a system of watchtowers is being developed, and that hundreds of personnel could be quickly added to around 8,000 guards patrolling Poland’s borders.
Golias also said that state-of-the art surveillance planes, drones, night vision equipment and SUVs were bought in recent years to help patrol the borders.
Polish border authorities believe that a new migrant wave may begin in the spring.
Golias told The Associated Press that “the situation in Europe is showing us how to streamline our efforts to be more effective.”
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3:35 p.m.
Austria has started building a fence that will stretch along a small part of the border with Slovenia.
Officials say the less than 4-kilometer (2.4-mile) barrier on both sides of the Spielfeld crossing point south of the city of Graz is not meant to prevent migrants from entering Austria, but instead to regulate their crossing.
Work on the chain-link fence began Monday, with completion planned by Christmas.
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1:50 p.m.
Germany’s interior minister says the number of migrants arriving in the country has declined significantly over the past week or two.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said Monday refugees and other migrants have been arriving at a pace of 2,000 to 3,000 a day in recent days, down from the 8,000 to 10,000 who often arrived daily over recent months.
He said the cause isn’t entirely clear but pointed to bad weather in the Mediterranean that has deterred people from crossing from Turkey to Greece, and efforts by Turkey to stop people leaving by sea.
He said that “this isn’t yet a turnaround, but it is a good development.” De Maiziere’s comments came after he announced that 965,000 people were registered in Germany as asylum-seekers from January to November.
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1:15 p.m.
Germany’s interior minister says that 965,000 people were registered as asylum-seekers in the country from January through the end of November.
The figure given by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere on Monday puts the total number of new arrivals this year above the total of 800,000 he forecast for 2015 in August. He said he won’t give a new full-year forecast.
De Maiziere said the actual number of new arrivals through the end of November is below 965,000 because of people who registered more than once or continued to other countries, but he can’t say how much lower.
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde and some two dozen officials on the fund’s executive board will gather Monday at headquarters in Washington for one of the most-anticipated decisions outside of actually approving loans for nations in crisis.
The question inside the 12th-floor, oval boardroom: whether to grant China’s yuan status as a reserve currency by adding it to the fund’s Special Drawing Rights basket. The SDR, created in 1969, gives IMF member countries who hold it the right to obtain any of the currencies in the basket — currently the dollar, euro, yen and pound — to meet balance-of-payments needs.
QUICKTAKE
The People’s Currency
While there’s little suspense in the main thrust of the expected approval — Lagarde already announced that fund staff had recommended the yuan be included and that she supported the finding — the IMF is likely to give more details on how it arrived at the decision.
The IMF’s highest decision-making body is its board of governors, a group of mostly finance ministers and central bankers from its 188 member countries. The board of governors has delegated most of its powers to the executive board, made up of 24 executive directors who represent the membership. The meeting Monday has been classified as “restricted,” meaning no support staff will be allowed to attend.
China’s yuan has weakened against the dollar over past two years
China’s yuan has weakened against the dollar over past two years
The executive board, which meets more than 200 times a year, usually makes decisions based on consensus, rather than formal votes. Mark Sobel, the U.S. executive director who answers to the Obama administration, wields the most power, with a 17 percent voting stake. Together, the Group of Seven countries control 43 percent of the vote, making them a formidable bloc. China, which holds a 3.8 percent voting share, is represented by former People’s Bank of China official Jin Zhongxia.
Here’s what to look for in Monday’s decision and its immediate aftermath:
Whether Yuan Deserved It
In her Nov. 13 statement, Lagarde said staff determined the yuan is “freely usable,” the test for inclusion. But five months ago, the currency appeared to fall short of the mark. Following Monday’s decision, the IMF will probably release a detailed staff report on the review, shedding more light on how the fund’s economists arrived at the new conclusion.
According to the fund, freely usable currencies must be widely used to make payments in global transactions, and widely traded in major exchange markets. Key indicators include the share a currency makes up of official reserves, international banking liabilities and global debt securities, as well as the volume of use in foreign-exchange markets.
In a July report, IMF officials found the yuan ranked seventh among currencies as a share of official reserves, behind the four SDR members as well as the Australian and Canadian dollars. The yuan constituted 1.1 percent of official reserves, compared with 63.7 percent for the U.S. dollar. The yuan also ranked outside the top five in terms of debt securities and currency trading, according to the report.
It’s unlikely the currency’s use has surged enough to put it in the top five of the IMF’s key statistics, according to Ted Truman, a former Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury official. China’s actions to address deficiencies mentioned in the earlier report represent “progress, but these new procedures have no established track record,” Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said in a Nov. 17 blog post.
A working group that includes former Treasury secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner hopes to build a framework for the trading and clearing of the Chinese currency in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, citing a statement from Michael Bloomberg, who will chair the group. Michael Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.
“SDR status could be a catalyst for central bank foreign-exchange reserve managers, sovereign wealth funds and other major money managers to shift funds into yuan,” Tom Orlik, Bloomberg Intelligence’s chief Asia economist, said in a note.
Weighting in Basket
The board’s decision should include the weighting the yuan will be assigned within the basket, and the staff paper may explain the basis for the proportion. The dollar currently accounts for 41.9 percent of the basket. The euro accounts for 37.4 percent, the pound 11.3 percent and the yen 9.4 percent.
In the preliminary report in July, IMF staff estimated the yuan would have a weight of about 14 percent to 16 percent.
The weighting will affect the interest countries pay when they borrow from the IMF.
Political Reaction
The reaction to the decision by governments and politicians will show how much of a flash point China’s economic and political rise remains in the world.
The U.S., in particular, will have to walk a fine line. The Obama administration initially insisted China implement more financial reforms to win America’s support for the yuan’s inclusion in the SDR basket.
But after presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping met at the White House in September, the administration softened its position, saying the U.S. would support inclusion as long as the yuan meets the IMF’s criteria.
An overly enthusiastic U.S. response could inflame politicians on both sides of the aisle. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he would declare China a currency manipulator on “day one” if elected. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York has pushed for Congress to pass measures to discourage currency manipulation by the Chinese.
More Reform Conditions
To give SDR users the time to adjust, the IMF has decided any changes to the basket will wait until the end of September.
In their July report, fund staffers highlighted a range of operational challenges of adding the yuan to the basket. Countries that hold SDRs, for example, need to have access to yuan-dominated securities to manage their reserves and hedge risks. Also, the IMF will need to identify a reliable interest-rate benchmark to calculate the rate paid by SDR borrowers.
China has addressed some of these issues, committing to issue three-month treasury bills every week and opening its onshore bond and currency markets to foreign central banks.
But the IMF will probably require more conditions to smooth the transition, said Domenico Lombardi, director of the global economy program at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. The IMF will likely seek further assurance that benchmark exchange and interest rates for the yuan will be available, he said.
Lombardi said the fund may also seek a commitment from the People’s Bank of China to refrain from currency interventions — a pledge that will make support for the yuan’s inclusion in the SDR more politically acceptable for other countries.
“The IMF membership have come to grips with the fact the renminbi has capital controls, but the PBOC’s commitment will be key,” Lombardi said, referring to the currency’s official name.
The single most important benchmark underpinning this week’s talks in Paris on climate change—two degrees Celsius—has guided climate-treaty discussions for decades, but scientists are at odds on the relevance of that target.
China plans to launch satellites to monitor its greenhouse gas emissions as the country, estimated to be the world’s top carbon emitter, steps up its efforts to cut such emissions, official news agency Xinhua said on Monday.
News of the plan comes as more than 150 world leaders arrived in Paris for climate change talks and Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama said they would work together towards striking a deal that moves towards a low-carbon global economy.
According to the Xinhau report, the country’s first two carbon-monitoring satellites will be ready by next May after four years of development led by Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and Physics, part of China’s Academy of Sciences.
No launch date was given and no other details of the plan were announced. The government and research institute were not available to comment.
If successful, it would be the world’s third country to send satellites into orbit to monitor greenhouse gases, coming after Japan which was the first country to do so in 2009, followed by the United States last year.
The satellites will be key for expanding research into emissions – currently, China is only able to collect data from the ground, whereas the probes will also monitor oceans, which make up 71 percent of the world’s surface.
While these probes will have worldwide scope it would improve China’s emissions data collection, which many experts say is inaccurate.
The country’s emissions are estimates based on how much raw energy is consumed, and calculations are derived from proxy data consisting mostly of energy consumption as well as industry, agriculture, land use changes and waste.
(Reporting by Kathy Chen; Editing by Josephine Mason, Greg Mahlich)
President Barack Obama told world leaders that the climate talks that opened Monday in Paris mark a turning point for collective action on global warming and stand as a rejection of the terrorists who struck the French capital a little more than two weeks ago.
The threat posed by climate change is the defining challenge of the century, Obama told the United Nations-sponsored summit organized to reach the first truly global agreement to curb greenhouse gases. Linking the meeting to the battle against extremism, Obama said that bringing world leaders to Paris for the conference “is an act of defiance that proves nothing will deter us from building the future we want for our children.”
“Here in Paris we can show the world what is possible when we come together, united by a common effort and a common purpose,” Obama said.
The president told the assembled dignitaries that no nation was immune from the effects of climate change. He said the U.S., the world’s biggest economy and its second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, accepted its role for contributing to the problem and shares the responsibility to fix it.
Climate Assistance
One of Obama’s main tasks is getting full cooperation from developing nations that don’t want to limit economic growth to fix a condition largely created by the world’s biggest economies.
Obama argued that many of the nations that have contributed little to climate change will be the first to feel its most destructive effects. Developed nations must “reaffirm our commitment that resources will be there for countries willing to do their part to skip the dirty phase of development,” he said.
To that end, the U.S. and 18 other nations — including the world’s biggest carbon emitters in the U.S., China, and India — are committing to double government investment in clean energy research and development, from $10 billion to $20 billion, over the next five years.
Gates Assist
The effort is getting an assist from Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, who is leading a group of philanthropists in vowing to plow $2 billion into clean energy through personal investments and a new fund to be set up next year.
Twenty-eight of the world’s wealthiest investors will participate in the program, which is dedicated to providing seed funding to new technologies that can help expand the use of clean energy, particularly in the developing world.
“Given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring many different paths, and that means we also need to invent new approaches,” Gates said in a statement released Sunday.
The move “should send a strong signal to the markets” that leaders from the world’s largest carbon emitters are “going all-in on clean energy,” White House senior adviser Brian Deese said in a conference call with reporters.
Renewable Energy
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, which is the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the U.S., said the research funding from government and private sources will help make renewable energy cheaper, more reliable and easier to connect. India is among the countries pledging to double research investments.
“This partnership will combine the responsibility of governments with the innovation capacity of the private sector,” Modi said at an event focused on the project, which is called Mission Innovation.
Obama said the collaboration is “one of the most significant public-private partnerships ever forged.” It will mean that underdeveloped areas of the world, including parts of India, won’t be consigned to living without reliable power sources for development.
The UN climate talks aim to produce an agreement that, for the first time, would bind all nations, rich and poor, to cutting pollution from burning fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas that’s blamed for a rise in global temperatures. While leaders in Paris are eager to demonstrate that unity, that consensus has not quieted critics of Obama’s agenda back at home.
Dissent in U.S.
Even as the U.S. hopes to cement its standing as a global leader on climate change, a group of influential congressional Republicans are hoping to use the summit to undercut the president’s ambitions and scale back American funding for international efforts to combat global warming.
The White House has downplayed concerns that Republicans could submarine the talks by restricting the State Department’s ability to donate to the Green Climate Fund, the central mechanism which leaders are expected to use to assist developing countries. The administration has pledged $3 billion to the international effort, with the White House requesting $500 million of that funding this year.
The White House has aggressively courted corporate interests ahead of the talks, soliciting significant pledges and contributions that Obama intends to use as examples of how the U.S. is acting even without congressional assistance.
Alex Infohub 