Physics reveals the best design for a badminton arena  The Economist

1. Wages growth slows, CBA logs flat first-quarter profit, ASX falls — as it happened  ABC News
2. 5 things to watch on the ASX 200 on Thursday 14 November 2024  The Motley Fool Australia
3. ASX falls as banks drop; MinRes sinks, James Hardie rallies  The Australian Financial Review
4. Markets today: ASX slides as ‘Trump trade’ peters out on Wall Street; miners, banks fall  Sydney Morning Herald

1. Albanese flies to South America on trade rescue mission after Trump victory  Sydney Morning Herald
2. Albanese channels Turnbull in Trump tariff fight  The Australian Financial Review
3. Live: Albanese lands in Peru ahead of APEC forum  ABC News
4. Australia news LIVE: Trade tussle awaits PM at APEC meeting in Peru; Trump’s appointment spree continues  The Age

1. Former US ambassador accuses Sky News of creating a ‘self-licking ice cream’ to attack Kevin Rudd  The Conversation
2. Ditching Rudd over Trump insults would be ‘worst possible signal’: Turnbull  Sydney Morning Herald
3. Senior Liberal calls for Rudd to be sacked after Trump advisor suggests US ambassador is on thin ice  9News

1. Airlines cancel Bali flights after volcano spews ash miles into the sky  Al Jazeera English
2. More Bali flight cancellations with experts warning travel disruptions from volcanic ash cloud may continue  9News
3. Volcanic eruption grounds Bali flights, leaving travellers stranded  Sydney Morning Herald
4. Update on Indonesia operations due to volcanic ash  Virgin Australia Newsroom
5. Travellers stranded after flights cancelled due to volcanic eruption  The Age

1. India tops global diabetes list with 212 million cases in 2022: Lancet Study  The Economic Times
2. Don’t follow self-healing methods to control diabetes, says diabetologists  The Hindu
3. Combat diabetes with urgent lifestyle changes: Experts  The Times of India
4. Indians account for quarter of world’s adult diabetes patients: Lancet study  Hindustan Times
5. Rice University’s ROGUE device implants a ‘living pharmacy’ to combat diabetes and obesity  Express Pharma

Vanavond in ‘De tafel van Gert’: wat als je de diagnose van Alzheimer hebt en de juiste medicatie bestaat maar niet verkrijgbaar is?  Het Nieuwsblad

The president and president-elect shook hands as part of a long-standing tradition signifying the transfer of power.

Don't ever try to be nice to your ex.

BARBIE AR-15 cause girls just wanna have guns.

SEE BABY! I told you so...

BABIES look like this 90% of the time

Well, that finally answers the age old question that these folks have been asking for ages: Can you actually tattoo a banana?

Hannah Deau’s rental apartment has envy-inducing architectural features like a brick wall, high ceilings, French doors, Spanish tiles, and around 20 plants. READ MORE...

According to experts. READ MORE...

The airline reported a revenue decrease of $61m compared to the same time last year

Homebase enters administration, but The Range buys up to 70 stores and the brand.

1. Year-long action plan to combat diabetes to be launched on World Diabetes Day  The Hindu
2. World Diabetes Day 2024  PIB
3. World Diabetes Day: Why diabetes is more than abnormal blood sugar level  The Times of India
4. World Diabetes Day 2024: 10 Foods That Are Secretly Increasing Your Risk Of Diabetes  NDTV
5. World Diabetes Day 2024: 5 ways to detect diabetes quickly  Health shots

1. Global carbon market gets green signal at COP29 under Paris Agreement's Article 6  The Hindu
2. Why India and China have pushed against climate change-related trade measures at COP29  The Indian Express
3. COP29: G77, China agree to use new NCQG draft text as basis for finance negotiations  The New Indian Express
4. Video | UN Scientists Warn Of 'Rising Emissions' Worldwide  NDTV
5. COP29 gets momentum with consensus on creation of carbon credits standards, India wants to conclude work  The Times of India

Filed under: North America, United States

Continue reading Sorry Indianapolis, You're No Longer the Sole Location Offering TSA PreCheck Enrollment Background Checks

Sorry Indianapolis, You're No Longer the Sole Location Offering TSA PreCheck Enrollment Background Checks originally appeared on Gadling on Mon, 16 Dec 2013 15:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Asia, Japan, Airlines, News

Continue reading Another Boeing 787 Dreamliner Has a Battery Problem

Another Boeing 787 Dreamliner Has a Battery Problem originally appeared on Gadling on Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Donald Trump’s policies risk making the US dollar a source of global instability Expert comment LToremark 13 November 2024

Although Trump favours a weaker exchange rate, his policies are likely to have the opposite effect. The risk is that the US dollar could become too strong, which is bad news for the global economy.

President-elect Donald Trump has a dollar problem. In recent months he has shown a clear preference for a weaker exchange rate to support the competitiveness of US exports and help reduce the US trade deficit. And yet, as the market has sensed since the US election, the much more likely outcome is that his policies end up strengthening the greenback. The risk is that the US dollar – which is expensive already – becomes more obviously overvalued, and this could increase the risk of global financial instability. 

The dollar has been on a rollercoaster ride in the past few decades. From 2002 until 2011, for example, the dollar weakened by around 30 per cent in inflation-adjusted, trade-weighted terms, according to BIS data. Yet in the years since 2011, the dollar has strengthened and is now at a more appreciated level than at any time since 1985.

What shapes this rollercoaster, broadly speaking, is the global balance of economic vitality: when the US economy gains momentum relative to the rest of the world, the dollar tends to strengthen; and vice versa. 

After China joined the WTO in 2001, the balance of economic vitality shifted decisively away from the US, in favour of China and other emerging economies. This was the decade of the commodity boom: the longest, biggest peacetime increase in commodity prices in nearly 200 years during which a sustained surge in China’s economy supported GDP growth across the developing world. The dollar weakened as a result.

But after 2011, a combination of factors – including the eurozone crisis and its aftermath, together with the sagging of the Chinese economy – tipped the balance of economic vitality back in favour of the US. The dollar strengthened once again.

And since both the European and Chinese economies remain very fragile, the balance of economic vitality seems likely to keep favouring the US dollar.

Two more considerations also point to a stronger US dollar under a second Trump administration.

The first is the exchange rate implications of Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on imports. When the US imposes tariffs on a trading partner, the foreign exchange market tends to sell that trading partner’s currency, forcing it to weaken to offset the dollar-price increase induced by the tariff. This helps explain why the Chinese renminbi depreciated by some 10 per cent in 2018 after Trump began imposing trade restrictions on China in January of that year. 

More widespread tariffs on a whole range of US trading partners should therefore strengthen the dollar more broadly.

A stronger dollar should also result from the macroeconomic framework Trump seems likely to deliver. He will certainly want to extend his 2017 tax cuts beyond 2025 when they are currently due to expire, so a more sustained loosening of US fiscal policy seems likely. Since boosting the US economy will create inflationary pressure, the market will expect interest rates to end up higher than they might otherwise be. The resulting combination of looser fiscal and tighter monetary policy tends to be a stronger currency.

The dollar probably has a fair amount of room to keep going up, since it is not obviously overvalued just yet. The US current account deficit – the broadest measure of a country’s trade deficit, and a rough but useful measure of financial vulnerability – was a little over 3 per cent of GDP last year. 

This is around half the level it reached in 2006, just before the 2008 global financial crisis, meaning the risks arising from an overvalued dollar may be for the latter part of Trump’s second presidency.

A strengthening dollar is also not great news for the rest of the world economy. A strong dollar tends to depress global trade growth, restrict developing countries’ access to international capital markets, and make it more difficult for countries whose currencies will be weakening to keep inflation under control.

If and when the dollar becomes unsustainably expensive, a further problem will present itself: how to deal with an overvalued currency without risking a lot of financial dislocation.

This problem last occurred in early 1985, when the dollar was universally reckoned to be dangerously dear. At that time the US was able to call on trading partners who depended on the US security umbrella – the UK, Germany, France and Japan – to negotiate the ‘Plaza Accord’, which coordinated a series of interventions in the foreign exchange market that allowed the dollar to decline in a measured way.  

It is virtually unimaginable that something similar could be negotiated today, not least because Chinese policymakers believe that the post-Plaza strengthening of the yen in the late 1980s led to an economic disaster for Japan. Beijing will not play ball.

Without much scope for a negotiated decline in the dollar, more chaotic alternatives seem likely. 

One is that the market decides suddenly that it no longer has an appetite for expensive dollar-denominated assets, and this might lead to a messy adjustment in the foreign exchange market. 

All 30 Major League teams will wear special "MLB 150" patches on their uniforms for the entire 2019 season in honor of the 150th anniversary of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first openly all-salaried professional baseball team.

The next five weeks will see lots of shuffling on Major League rosters. Here are the most intriguing positional battles on each of the 30 MLB clubs.

The baseball field is Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado's refuge from contract talks. But Tuesday's breaking news -- Manny Machado's 10-year, $300 million contract with the Padres -- made its way onto the field.

The Blue Jays will start determining who their catcher of the future will be when Danny Jansen and Reese McGuire battle it out behind the plate this spring.

Considering the players that get the big bucks often get most of the attention when they are signed and drafted, let's take some time to look at the other end of the spectrum. Here are the biggest steals on the Top 100 Prospects list.

All 30 Major League teams will wear special "MLB 150" patches on their uniforms for the entire 2019 season in honor of the 150th anniversary of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first openly all-salaried professional baseball team.

The next five weeks will see lots of shuffling on Major League rosters. Here are the most intriguing positional battles on each of the 30 MLB clubs.

A unique population of ventral tegmental area (VTA) neurons co-transmits glutamate and GABA. However, the circuit inputs to VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons are unknown, limiting our understanding of their functional capabilities. By coupling monosynaptic rabies tracing with intersectional genetic targeting in male and female mice, we found that VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons received diverse brainwide inputs. The largest numbers of monosynaptic inputs to VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons were from superior colliculus (SC), lateral hypothalamus (LH), midbrain reticular nucleus, and periaqueductal gray, whereas the densest inputs relative to brain region volume were from the dorsal raphe nucleus, lateral habenula, and VTA. Based on these and prior data, we hypothesized that LH and SC inputs were from glutamatergic neurons. Optical activation of glutamatergic LH neurons activated VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons regardless of stimulation frequency and resulted in flee-like ambulatory behavior. In contrast, optical activation of glutamatergic SC neurons activated VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons for a brief period of time at high frequency and resulted in head rotation and arrested ambulatory behavior (freezing). Stimulation of glutamatergic LH neurons, but not glutamatergic SC neurons, was associated with VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ footshock-induced activity and inhibition of LH glutamatergic neurons disrupted VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ tailshock-induced activity. We interpret these results such that inputs to VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons may integrate diverse signals related to the detection and processing of motivationally salient outcomes.

Basolateral amygdala (BLA) neurons are engaged by emotionally salient stimuli. An area of increasing interest is how BLA dynamics relate to evolving reward-seeking behavior, especially under situations of uncertainty or ambiguity. Here, we recorded the activity of individual BLA neurons in male rats across the acquisition and extinction of conditioned reward seeking. We assessed ongoing neural dynamics in a task where long reward cue presentations preceded an unpredictable, variably time reward delivery. We found that, with training, BLA neurons discriminated the CS+ and CS– cues with sustained cue-evoked activity that correlated with behavior and terminated only after reward receipt. BLA neurons were bidirectionally modulated, with a majority showing prolonged inhibition during cued reward seeking. Strikingly, population-level analyses revealed that neurons showing cue-evoked inhibitions and those showing excitations similarly represented the CS+ and behavioral state. This sustained population code rapidly extinguished in parallel with conditioned behavior. We next assessed the contribution of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a major reciprocal partner to the BLA. Inactivation of the OFC while simultaneously recording in the BLA revealed a blunting of sustained cue-evoked activity in the BLA that accompanied reduced reward seeking. Optogenetic disruption of BLA activity and OFC terminals in the BLA also reduced reward seeking. Our data indicate that the BLA represents reward-seeking states via sustained, bidirectional cue-driven neural encoding. This code is regulated by cortical input and is important for the maintenance of vigilant reward-seeking behavior.

Basketball is not played much in South Africa, but OM SportsLink successfully introduces the game to students in Mamelodi, a township outside of Pretoria.

Norwegian Bible school students on mission trip to South Africa, shares the Gospel at the garbage dump outside Pretoria

Typically, at least two discarded babies are found in the Mamelodi City Dump every week. AIDS Hope seeks to eliminate this horrible reality.

Opening a ‘baby safe’ in a township near Pretoria, South Africa, helps desperate mothers find a solution and give their babies a future.

After leading AIDS Hope for the past 11 years, Nico and Alma hand over the leadership of Meetse a Bophelo centre in Mamelodi.

After watching others be baptised, an Uzbek lady who had recently repented in the church expressed her desire to follow the others’ example.

A woman from a least-reached group of people accepted Christ during Discipleship Centre student outreach.