Beyond the Hype of Lab-Grown Diamonds
▻https://earther.gizmodo.com/beyond-the-hype-of-lab-grown-diamonds-1834890351
Billions of years ago when the world was still young, treasure began forming deep underground. As the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates plunged down into the upper mantle, bits of carbon, some likely hailing from long-dead life forms were melted and compressed into rigid lattices. Over millions of years, those lattices grew into the most durable, dazzling gems the planet had ever cooked up. And every so often, for reasons scientists still don’t fully understand, an eruption would send a stash of these stones rocketing to the surface inside a bubbly magma known as kimberlite.
There, the diamonds would remain, nestled in the kimberlite volcanoes that delivered them from their fiery home, until humans evolved, learned of their existence, and began to dig them up.
The epic origin of Earth’s diamonds has helped fuel a powerful marketing mythology around them: that they are objects of otherworldly strength and beauty; fitting symbols of eternal love. But while “diamonds are forever” may be the catchiest advertising slogan ever to bear some geologic truth, the supply of these stones in the Earth’s crust, in places we can readily reach them, is far from everlasting. And the scars we’ve inflicted on the land and ourselves in order to mine diamonds has cast a shadow that still lingers over the industry.
Some diamond seekers, however, say we don’t need to scour the Earth any longer, because science now offers an alternative: diamonds grown in labs. These gems aren’t simulants or synthetic substitutes; they are optically, chemically, and physically identical to their Earth-mined counterparts. They’re also cheaper, and in theory, limitless. The arrival of lab-grown diamonds has rocked the jewelry world to its core and prompted fierce pushback from diamond miners. Claims abound on both sides.
Growers often say that their diamonds are sustainable and ethical; miners and their industry allies counter that only gems plucked from the Earth can be considered “real” or “precious.” Some of these assertions are subjective, others are supported only by sparse, self-reported, or industry-backed data. But that’s not stopping everyone from making them.
This is a fight over image, and when it comes to diamonds, image is everything.
A variety of cut, polished Ada Diamonds created in a lab, including smaller melee stones and large center stones. 22.94 carats total. (2.60 ct. pear, 2.01 ct. asscher, 2.23 ct. cushion, 3.01 ct. radiant, 1.74 ct. princess, 2.11 ct. emerald, 3.11 ct. heart, 3.00 ct. oval, 3.13 ct. round.)
Image: Sam Cannon (Earther)
Same, but different
The dream of lab-grown diamond dates back over a century. In 1911, science fiction author H.G. Wells described what would essentially become one of the key methods for making diamond—recreating the conditions inside Earth’s mantle on its surface—in his short story The Diamond Maker. As the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) notes, there were a handful of dubious attempts to create diamonds in labs in the late 19th and early 20th century, but the first commercial diamond production wouldn’t emerge until the mid-1950s, when scientists with General Electric worked out a method for creating small, brown stones. Others, including De Beers, soon developed their own methods for synthesizing the gems, and use of the lab-created diamond in industrial applications, from cutting tools to high power electronics, took off.
According to the GIA’s James Shigley, the first experimental production of gem-quality diamond occurred in 1970. Yet by the early 2000s, gem-quality stones were still small, and often tinted yellow with impurities. It was only in the last five or so years that methods for growing diamonds advanced to the point that producers began churning out large, colorless stones consistently. That’s when the jewelry sector began to take a real interest.
Today, that sector is taking off. The International Grown Diamond Association (IGDA), a trade group formed in 2016 by a dozen lab diamond growers and sellers, now has about 50 members, according to IGDA secretary general Dick Garard. When the IGDA first formed, lab-grown diamonds were estimated to represent about 1 percent of a $14 billion rough diamond market. This year, industry analyst Paul Zimnisky estimates they account for 2-3 percent of the market.
He expects that share will only continue to grow as factories in China that already produce millions of carats a year for industrial purposes start to see an opportunity in jewelry.
“I have a real problem with people claiming one is ethical and another is not.”
“This year some [factories] will come up from 100,000 gem-quality diamonds to one to two million,” Zimnisky said. “They already have the infrastructure and equipment in place” and are in the process of upgrading it. (About 150 million carats of diamonds were mined last year, according to a global analysis of the industry conducted by Bain & Company.)
Production ramp-up aside, 2018 saw some other major developments across the industry. In the summer, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reversed decades of guidance when it expanded the definition of a diamond to include those created in labs and dropped ‘synthetic’ as a recommended descriptor for lab-grown stones. The decision came on the heels of the world’s top diamond producer, De Beers, announcing the launch of its own lab-grown diamond line, Lightbox, after having once vowed never to sell man-made stones as jewelry.
“I would say shock,” Lightbox Chief Marketing Officer Sally Morrison told Earther when asked how the jewelry world responded to the company’s launch.
While the majority of lab-grown diamonds on the market today are what’s known as melee (less than 0.18 carats), the tech for producing the biggest, most dazzling diamonds continues to improve. In 2016, lab-grown diamond company MiaDonna announced its partners had grown a 6.28 carat gem-quality diamond, claimed to be the largest created in the U.S. to that point. In 2017, a lab in Augsburg University, Germany that grows diamonds for industrial and scientific research applications produced what is thought to be the largest lab-grown diamond ever—a 155 carat behemoth that stretches nearly 4 inches across. Not gem quality, perhaps, but still impressive.
“If you compare it with the Queen’s diamond, hers is four times heavier, it’s clearer” physicist Matthias Schreck, who leads the group that grew that beast of a jewel, told me. “But in area, our diamond is bigger. We were very proud of this.”
Diamonds can be created in one of two ways: Similar to how they form inside the Earth, or similar to how scientists speculate they might form in outer space.
The older, Earth-inspired method is known as “high temperature high pressure” (HPHT), and that’s exactly what it sounds like. A carbon source, like graphite, is placed in a giant, mechanical press where, in the presence of a catalyst, it’s subjected to temperatures of around 1,600 degrees Celsius and pressures of 5-6 Gigapascals in order to form diamond. (If you’re curious what that sort of pressure feels like, the GIA describes it as similar to the force exerted if you tried to balance a commercial jet on your fingertip.)
The newer method, called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), is more akin to how diamonds might form in interstellar gas clouds (for which we have indirect, spectroscopic evidence, according to Shigley). A hydrocarbon gas, like methane, is pumped into a low-pressure reactor vessel alongside hydrogen. While maintaining near-vacuum conditions, the gases are heated very hot—typically 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius, according to Lightbox CEO Steve Coe—causing carbon atoms to break free of their molecular bonds. Under the right conditions, those liberated bits of carbon will settle out onto a substrate—typically a flat, square plate of a synthetic diamond produced with the HPHT method—forming layer upon layer of diamond.
“It’s like snow falling on a table on your back porch,” Jason Payne, the founder and CEO of lab-grown diamond jewelry company Ada Diamonds, told me.
Scientists have been forging gem-quality diamonds with HPHT for longer, but today, CVD has become the method of choice for those selling larger bridal stones. That’s in part because it’s easier to control impurities and make diamonds with very high clarity, according to Coe. Still, each method has its advantages—Payne said that HPHT is faster and the diamonds typically have better color (which is to say, less of it)—and some companies, like Ada, purchase stones grown in both ways.
However they’re made, lab-grown diamonds have the same exceptional hardness, stiffness, and thermal conductivity as their Earth-mined counterparts. Cut, they can dazzle with the same brilliance and fire—a technical term to describe how well the diamond scatters light like a prism. The GIA even grades them according to the same 4Cs—cut, clarity, color, and carat—that gemologists use to assess diamonds formed in the Earth, although it uses a slightly different terminology to report the color and clarity grades for lab-grown stones.
They’re so similar, in fact, that lab-grown diamond entering the larger diamond supply without any disclosures has become a major concern across the jewelry industry, particularly when it comes to melee stones from Asia. It’s something major retailers are now investing thousands of dollars in sophisticated detection equipment to suss out by searching for minute differences in, say, their crystal shape or for impurities like nitrogen (much less common in lab-grown diamond, according to Shigley).
Those differences may be a lifeline for retailers hoping to weed out lab-grown diamonds, but for companies focused on them, they can become another selling point. The lack of nitrogen in diamonds produced with the CVD method, for instance, gives them an exceptional chemical purity that allows them to be classified as type IIa; a rare and coveted breed that accounts for just 2 percent of those found in nature. Meanwhile, the ability to control everything about the growth process allows companies like Lightbox to adjust the formula and produce incredibly rare blue and pink diamonds as part of their standard product line. (In fact, these colored gemstones have made up over half of the company’s sales since launch, according to Coe.)
And while lab-grown diamonds boast the same sparkle as their Earthly counterparts, they do so at a significant discount. Zimnisky said that today, your typical one carat, medium quality diamond grown in a lab will sell for about $3,600, compared with $6,100 for its Earth-mined counterpart—a discount of about 40 percent. Two years ago, that discount was only 18 percent. And while the price drop has “slightly tapered off” as Zimnisky put it, he expects it will fall further thanks in part to the aforementioned ramp up in Chinese production, as well as technological improvements. (The market is also shifting in response to Lightbox, which De Beers is using to position lab-grown diamonds as mass produced items for fashion jewelry, and which is selling its stones, ungraded, at the controversial low price of $800 per carat—a discount of nearly 90 percent.)
Zimnisky said that if the price falls too fast, it could devalue lab-grown diamonds in the eyes of consumers. But for now, at least, paying less seems to be a selling point. A 2018 consumer research survey by MVI Marketing found that most of those polled would choose a larger lab-grown diamond over a smaller mined diamond of the same price.
“The thing [consumers] seem most compelled by is the ability to trade up in size and quality at the same price,” Garard of IGDA said.
Still, for buyers and sellers alike, price is only part of the story. Many in the lab-grown diamond world market their product as an ethical or eco-friendly alternative to mined diamonds.
But those sales pitches aren’t without controversy.
A variety of lab-grown diamond products arrayed on a desk at Ada Diamonds showroom in Manhattan. The stone in the upper left gets its blue color from boron. Diamonds tinted yellow (top center) usually get their color from small amounts of nitrogen.
Photo: Sam Cannon (Earther)
Dazzling promises
As Anna-Mieke Anderson tells it, she didn’t enter the diamond world to become a corporate tycoon. She did it to try and fix a mistake.
In 1999, Anderson purchased herself a diamond. Some years later, in 2005, her father asked her where it came from. Nonplussed, she told him it came from the jewelry store. But that wasn’t what he was asking: He wanted to know where it really came from.
“I actually had no idea,” Anderson told Earther. “That led me to do a mountain of research.”
That research eventually led Anderson to conclude that she had likely bought a diamond mined under horrific conditions. She couldn’t be sure, because the certificate of purchase included no place of origin. But around the time of her purchase, civil wars funded by diamond mining were raging across Angola, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia, fueling “widespread devastation” as Global Witness put it in 2006. At the height of the diamond wars in the late ‘90s, the watchdog group estimates that as many as 15 percent of diamonds entering the market were conflict diamonds. Even those that weren’t actively fueling a war were often being mined in dirty, hazardous conditions; sometimes by children.
“I couldn’t believe I’d bought into this,” Anderson said.
To try and set things right, Anderson began sponsoring a boy living in a Liberian community impacted by the blood diamond trade. The experience was so eye-opening, she says, that she eventually felt compelled to sponsor more children. Selling conflict-free jewelry seemed like a fitting way to raise money to do so, but after a great deal more research, Anderson decided she couldn’t in good faith consider any diamond pulled from the Earth to be truly conflict-free in either the humanitarian or environmental sense. While diamond miners were, by the early 2000s, getting their gems certified “conflict free” according to the UN-backed Kimberley Process, the certification scheme’s definition of a conflict diamond—one sold by rebel groups to finance armed conflicts against governments—felt far too narrow.
“That [conflict definition] eliminates anything to do with the environment, or eliminates a child mining it, or someone who was a slave, or beaten, or raped,” Anderson said.
And so she started looking into science, and in 2007, launching MiaDonna as one of the world’s first lab-grown diamond jewelry companies. The business has been activism-oriented from the get-go, with at least five percent of its annual earnings—and more than 20 percent for the last three years—going into The Greener Diamond, Anderson’s charity foundation which has funded a wide range of projects, from training former child soldiers in Sierra Leone to grow food to sponsoring kids orphaned by the West African Ebola outbreak.
MiaDonna isn’t the only company that positions itself as an ethical alternative to the traditional diamond industry. Brilliant Earth, which sells what it says are carefully-sourced mined and lab-created diamonds, also donates a small portion of its profits to supporting mining communities. Other lab-grown diamond companies market themselves as “ethical,” “conflict-free,” or “world positive.” Payne of Ada Diamonds sees, in lab-grown diamonds, not just shiny baubles, but a potential to improve medicine, clean up pollution, and advance society in countless other ways—and he thinks the growing interest in lab-grown diamond jewelry will help propel us toward that future.
Others, however, say black-and-white characterizations when it comes to social impact of mined diamonds versus lab-grown stones are unfair. “I have a real problem with people claiming one is ethical and another is not,” Estelle Levin-Nally, founder and CEO of Levin Sources, which advocates for better governance in the mining sector, told Earther. “I think it’s always about your politics. And ethics are subjective.”
Saleem Ali, an environmental researcher at the University of Delaware who serves on the board of the Diamonds and Development Initiative, agrees. He says the mining industry has, on the whole, worked hard to turn itself around since the height of the diamond wars and that governance is “much better today” than it used to be. Human rights watchdog Global Witness also says that “significant progress” has been made to curb the conflict diamond trade, although as Alice Harle, Senior Campaigner with Global Witness told Earther via email, diamonds do still fuel conflict, particularly in the Central African Republic and Zimbabwe.
Most industry observers seems to agree that the Kimberley Process is outdated and inadequate, and that more work is needed to stamp out other abuses, including child labor and forced labor, in the artisanal and small-scale diamond mining sector. Today, large-scale mining operations don’t tend to see these kinds of problems, according to Julianne Kippenberg, associate director for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch, but she notes that there may be other community impacts surrounding land rights and forced resettlement.
The flip side, Ali and Levin-Nally say, is that well-regulated mining operations can be an important source of economic development and livelihood. Ali cites Botswana and Russia as prime examples of places where large-scale mining operations have become “major contributors to the economy.” Dmitry Amelkin, head of strategic projects and analytics for Russian diamond mining giant Alrosa, echoed that sentiment in an email to Earther, noting that diamonds transformed Botswana “from one of the poorest [countries] in the world to a middle-income country” with revenues from mining representing almost a third of its GDP.
In May, a report commissioned by the Diamond Producers Association (DPA), a trade organization representing the world’s largest diamond mining companies, estimated that worldwide, its members generate nearly $4 billion in direct revenue for employees and contractors, along with another $6.8 billion in benefits via “local procurement of goods and services.” DPA CEO Jean-Marc Lieberherr said this was a story diamond miners need to do a better job telling.
“The industry has undergone such changes since the Blood Diamond movie,” he said, referring to the blockbuster 2006 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio that drew global attention to the problem of conflict diamonds. “And yet people’s’ perceptions haven’t evolved. I think the main reason is we have not had a voice, we haven’t communicated.”
But conflict and human rights abuses aren’t the only issues that have plagued the diamond industry. There’s also the lasting environmental impact of the mining itself. In the case of large-scale commercial mines, this typically entails using heavy machinery and explosives to bore deep into those kimberlite tubes in search of precious stones.
Some, like Maya Koplyova, a geologist at the University of British Columbia who studies diamonds and the rocks they’re found in, see this as far better than many other forms of mining. “The environmental footprint is the fThere’s also the question of just how representative the report’s energy consumption estimates for lab-grown diamonds are. While he wouldn’t offer a specific number, Coe said that De Beers’ Group diamond manufacturer Element Six—arguably the most advanced laboratory-grown diamond company in the world—has “substantially lower” per carat energy requirements than the headline figures found inside the new report. When asked why this was not included, Rick Lord, ESG analyst at Trucost, the S&P global group that conducted the analysis, said it chose to focus on energy estimates in the public record, but that after private consultation with Element Six it did not believe their data would “materially alter” the emissions estimates in the study.
Finally, it’s important to consider the source of the carbon emissions. While the new report states that about 40 percent of the emissions associated with mining a diamond come from fossil fuel-powered vehicles and equipment, emissions associated with growing a diamond come mainly from electric power. Today, about 68 percent of lab-grown diamonds hail from China, Singapore, and India combined according to Zimnisky, where the power is drawn from largely fossil fuel-powered grids. But there is, at least, an opportunity to switch to renewables and drive that carbon footprint way down.
“The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption.”
And some companies do seem to be trying to do that. Anderson of MiaDonna says the company only sources its diamonds from facilities in the U.S., and that it’s increasingly trying to work with producers that use renewable energy. Lab-grown diamond company Diamond Foundry grows its stones inside plasma reactors running “as hot as the outer layer of the sun,” per its website, and while it wouldn’t offer any specific numbers, that presumably uses more energy than your typical operation running at lower temperatures. However, company spokesperson Ye-Hui Goldenson said its Washington State ‘megacarat factory’ was cited near a well-maintained hydropower source so that the diamonds could be produced with renewable energy. The company offsets other fossil fuel-driven parts of its operation by purchasing carbon credits.
Lightbox’s diamonds currently come from Element Six’s UK-based facilities. The company is, however, building a $94-million facility near Portland, Oregon, that’s expected to come online by 2020. Coe said he estimates about 45 percent of its power will come from renewable sources.
“The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption,” Coe said. “That’s something we’re focused on in Lightbox.”
In spite of that, Lightbox is somewhat notable among lab-grown diamond jewelry brands in that, in the words of Morrison, it is “not claiming this to be an eco-friendly product.”
“While it is true that we don’t dig holes in the ground, the energy consumption is not insignificant,” Morrison told Earther. “And I think we felt very uncomfortable promoting on that.”
Various diamonds created in a lab, as seen at the Ada Diamonds showroom in Manhattan.
Photo: Sam Cannon (Earther)
The real real
The fight over how lab-grown diamonds can and should market themselves is still heating up.
On March 26, the FTC sent letters to eight lab-grown and diamond simulant companies warning them against making unsubstantiated assertions about the environmental benefits of their products—its first real enforcement action after updating its jewelry guides last year. The letters, first obtained by JCK news director Rob Bates under a Freedom of Information Act request, also warned companies that their advertising could falsely imply the products are mined diamonds, illustrating that, even though the agency now says a lab-grown diamond is a diamond, the specific origin remains critically important. A letter to Diamond Foundry, for instance, notes that the company has at times advertised its stones as “above-ground real” without the qualification of “laboratory-made.” It’s easy to see how a consumer might miss the implication.
But in a sense, that’s what all of this is: A fight over what’s real.
“It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in. They are a type of diamond.”
Another letter, sent to FTC attorney Reenah Kim by the nonprofit trade organization Jewelers Vigilance Committee on April 2, makes it clear that many in the industry still believe that’s a term that should be reserved exclusively for gems formed inside the Earth. The letter, obtained by Earther under FOIA, urges the agency to continue restricting the use of the terms “real,” “genuine,” “natural,” “precious,” and “semi-precious” to Earth-mined diamonds and gemstones. Even the use of such terms in conjunction with “laboratory grown,” the letter argues, “will create even more confusion in an already confused and evolving marketplace.”
JVC President Tiffany Stevens told Earther that the letter was a response to a footnote in an explanatory document about the FTC’s recent jewelry guide changes, which suggested the agency was considering removing a clause about real, precious, natural and genuine only being acceptable modifiers for gems mined from the Earth.
“We felt that given the current commercial environment, that we didn’t think it was a good time to take that next step,” Stevens told Earther. As Stevens put it, the changes the FTC recently made, including expanding the definition of diamond and tweaking the descriptors companies can use to label laboratory-grown diamonds as such, have already been “wildly misinterpreted” by some lab-grown diamond sellers that are no longer making the “necessary disclosures.”
Asked whether the JVC thinks lab-grown diamonds are, in fact, real diamonds, Stevens demurred.
“It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in,” she said. “They are a type of diamond.”
Change is afoot in the diamond world. Mined diamond production may have already peaked, according to the 2018 Bain & Company report. Lab diamonds are here to stay, although where they’re going isn’t entirely clear. Zimnisky expects that in a few years—as Lightbox’s new facility comes online and mass production of lab diamonds continues to ramp up overseas—the price industry-wide will fall to about 80 percent less than a mined diamond. At that point, he wonders whether lab-grown diamonds will start to lose their sparkle.
Payne isn’t too worried about a price slide, which he says is happening across the diamond industry and which he expects will be “linear, not exponential” on the lab-grown side. He points out that lab-grown diamond market is still limited by supply, and that the largest lab-grown gems remain quite rare. Payne and Zimnisky both see the lab-grown diamond market bifurcating into cheaper, mass-produced gems and premium-quality stones sold by those that can maintain a strong brand. A sense that they’re selling something authentic and, well, real.
“So much has to do with consumer psychology,” Zimnisky said.
Some will only ever see diamonds as authentic if they formed inside the Earth. They’re drawn, as Kathryn Money, vice president of strategy and merchandising at Brilliant Earth put it, to “the history and romanticism” of diamonds; to a feeling that’s sparked by holding a piece of our ancient world. To an essence more than a function.
Others, like Anderson, see lab-grown diamonds as the natural (to use a loaded word) evolution of diamond. “We’re actually running out of [mined] diamonds,” she said. “There is an end in sight.” Payne agreed, describing what he sees as a “looming death spiral” for diamond mining.
Mined diamonds will never go away. We’ve been digging them up since antiquity, and they never seem to lose their sparkle. But most major mines are being exhausted. And with technology making it easier to grow diamonds just as they are getting more difficult to extract from the Earth, the lab-grown diamond industry’s grandstanding about its future doesn’t feel entirely unreasonable.
There’s a reason why, as Payne said, “the mining industry as a whole is still quite scared of this product.” ootprint of digging the hole in the ground and crushing [the rock],” Koplyova said, noting that there’s no need to add strong acids or heavy metals like arsenic (used in gold mining) to liberate the gems.
Still, those holes can be enormous. The Mir Mine, a now-abandoned open pit mine in Eastern Siberia, is so large—reportedly stretching 3,900 feet across and 1,700 feet deep—that the Russian government has declared it a no-fly zone owing to the pit’s ability to create dangerous air currents. It’s visible from space.
While companies will often rehabilitate other land to offset the impact of mines, kimberlite mining itself typically leaves “a permanent dent in the earth’s surface,” as a 2014 report by market research company Frost & Sullivan put it.
“It’s a huge impact as far as I’m concerned,” said Kevin Krajick, senior editor for science news at Columbia University’s Earth Institute who wrote a book on the discovery of diamonds in far northern Canada. Krajick noted that in remote mines, like those of the far north, it’s not just the physical hole to consider, but all the development required to reach a previously-untouched area, including roads and airstrips, roaring jets and diesel-powered trucks.
Diamonds grown in factories clearly have a smaller physical footprint. According to the Frost & Sullivan report, they also use less water and create less waste. It’s for these reasons that Ali thinks diamond mining “will never be able to compete” with lab-grown diamonds from an environmental perspective.
“The mining industry should not even by trying to do that,” he said.
Of course, this is capitalism, so try to compete is exactly what the DPA is now doing. That same recent report that touted the mining industry’s economic benefits also asserts that mined diamonds have a carbon footprint three times lower than that of lab-grown diamonds, on average. The numbers behind that conclusion, however, don’t tell the full story.
Growing diamonds does take considerable energy. The exact amount can vary greatly, however, depending on the specific nature of the growth process. These are details manufacturers are typically loathe to disclose, but Payne of Ada Diamonds says he estimates the most efficient players in the game today use about 250 kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity per cut, polished carat of diamond; roughly what a U.S. household consumes in 9 days. Other estimates run higher. Citing unnamed sources, industry publication JCK Online reported that a modern HPHT run can use up to 700 kWh per carat, while CVD production can clock in north of 1,000 kWh per carat.
Pulling these and several other public-record estimates, along with information on where in the world today’s lab diamonds are being grown and the energy mix powering the producer nations’ electric grids, the DPA-commissioned study estimated that your typical lab-grown diamond results in some 511 kg of carbon emissions per cut, polished carat. Using information provided by mining companies on fuel and electricity consumption, along with other greenhouse gas sources on the mine site, it found that the average mined carat was responsible for just 160 kg of carbon emissions.
One limitation here is that the carbon footprint estimate for mining focused only on diamond production, not the years of work entailed in developing a mine. As Ali noted, developing a mine can take a lot of energy, particularly for those sited in remote locales where equipment needs to be hauled long distances by trucks or aircraft.
There’s also the question of just how representative the report’s energy consumption estimates for lab-grown diamonds are. While he wouldn’t offer a specific number, Coe said that De Beers’ Group diamond manufacturer Element Six—arguably the most advanced laboratory-grown diamond company in the world—has “substantially lower” per carat energy requirements than the headline figures found inside the new report. When asked why this was not included, Rick Lord, ESG analyst at Trucost, the S&P global group that conducted the analysis, said it chose to focus on energy estimates in the public record, but that after private consultation with Element Six it did not believe their data would “materially alter” the emissions estimates in the study.
Finally, it’s important to consider the source of the carbon emissions. While the new report states that about 40 percent of the emissions associated with mining a diamond come from fossil fuel-powered vehicles and equipment, emissions associated with growing a diamond come mainly from electric power. Today, about 68 percent of lab-grown diamonds hail from China, Singapore, and India combined according to Zimnisky, where the power is drawn from largely fossil fuel-powered grids. But there is, at least, an opportunity to switch to renewables and drive that carbon footprint way down.
“The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption.”
And some companies do seem to be trying to do that. Anderson of MiaDonna says the company only sources its diamonds from facilities in the U.S., and that it’s increasingly trying to work with producers that use renewable energy. Lab-grown diamond company Diamond Foundry grows its stones inside plasma reactors running “as hot as the outer layer of the sun,” per its website, and while it wouldn’t offer any specific numbers, that presumably uses more energy than your typical operation running at lower temperatures. However, company spokesperson Ye-Hui Goldenson said its Washington State ‘megacarat factory’ was cited near a well-maintained hydropower source so that the diamonds could be produced with renewable energy. The company offsets other fossil fuel-driven parts of its operation by purchasing carbon credits.
Lightbox’s diamonds currently come from Element Six’s UK-based facilities. The company is, however, building a $94-million facility near Portland, Oregon, that’s expected to come online by 2020. Coe said he estimates about 45 percent of its power will come from renewable sources.
“The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption,” Coe said. “That’s something we’re focused on in Lightbox.”
In spite of that, Lightbox is somewhat notable among lab-grown diamond jewelry brands in that, in the words of Morrison, it is “not claiming this to be an eco-friendly product.”
“While it is true that we don’t dig holes in the ground, the energy consumption is not insignificant,” Morrison told Earther. “And I think we felt very uncomfortable promoting on that.”
Various diamonds created in a lab, as seen at the Ada Diamonds showroom in Manhattan.
Photo: Sam Cannon (Earther)
The real real
The fight over how lab-grown diamonds can and should market themselves is still heating up.
On March 26, the FTC sent letters to eight lab-grown and diamond simulant companies warning them against making unsubstantiated assertions about the environmental benefits of their products—its first real enforcement action after updating its jewelry guides last year. The letters, first obtained by JCK news director Rob Bates under a Freedom of Information Act request, also warned companies that their advertising could falsely imply the products are mined diamonds, illustrating that, even though the agency now says a lab-grown diamond is a diamond, the specific origin remains critically important. A letter to Diamond Foundry, for instance, notes that the company has at times advertised its stones as “above-ground real” without the qualification of “laboratory-made.” It’s easy to see how a consumer might miss the implication.
But in a sense, that’s what all of this is: A fight over what’s real.
“It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in. They are a type of diamond.”
Another letter, sent to FTC attorney Reenah Kim by the nonprofit trade organization Jewelers Vigilance Committee on April 2, makes it clear that many in the industry still believe that’s a term that should be reserved exclusively for gems formed inside the Earth. The letter, obtained by Earther under FOIA, urges the agency to continue restricting the use of the terms “real,” “genuine,” “natural,” “precious,” and “semi-precious” to Earth-mined diamonds and gemstones. Even the use of such terms in conjunction with “laboratory grown,” the letter argues, “will create even more confusion in an already confused and evolving marketplace.”
JVC President Tiffany Stevens told Earther that the letter was a response to a footnote in an explanatory document about the FTC’s recent jewelry guide changes, which suggested the agency was considering removing a clause about real, precious, natural and genuine only being acceptable modifiers for gems mined from the Earth.
“We felt that given the current commercial environment, that we didn’t think it was a good time to take that next step,” Stevens told Earther. As Stevens put it, the changes the FTC recently made, including expanding the definition of diamond and tweaking the descriptors companies can use to label laboratory-grown diamonds as such, have already been “wildly misinterpreted” by some lab-grown diamond sellers that are no longer making the “necessary disclosures.”
Asked whether the JVC thinks lab-grown diamonds are, in fact, real diamonds, Stevens demurred.
“It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in,” she said. “They are a type of diamond.”
Change is afoot in the diamond world. Mined diamond production may have already peaked, according to the 2018 Bain & Company report. Lab diamonds are here to stay, although where they’re going isn’t entirely clear. Zimnisky expects that in a few years—as Lightbox’s new facility comes online and mass production of lab diamonds continues to ramp up overseas—the price industry-wide will fall to about 80 percent less than a mined diamond. At that point, he wonders whether lab-grown diamonds will start to lose their sparkle.
Payne isn’t too worried about a price slide, which he says is happening across the diamond industry and which he expects will be “linear, not exponential” on the lab-grown side. He points out that lab-grown diamond market is still limited by supply, and that the largest lab-grown gems remain quite rare. Payne and Zimnisky both see the lab-grown diamond market bifurcating into cheaper, mass-produced gems and premium-quality stones sold by those that can maintain a strong brand. A sense that they’re selling something authentic and, well, real.
“So much has to do with consumer psychology,” Zimnisky said.
Some will only ever see diamonds as authentic if they formed inside the Earth. They’re drawn, as Kathryn Money, vice president of strategy and merchandising at Brilliant Earth put it, to “the history and romanticism” of diamonds; to a feeling that’s sparked by holding a piece of our ancient world. To an essence more than a function.
Others, like Anderson, see lab-grown diamonds as the natural (to use a loaded word) evolution of diamond. “We’re actually running out of [mined] diamonds,” she said. “There is an end in sight.” Payne agreed, describing what he sees as a “looming death spiral” for diamond mining.
Mined diamonds will never go away. We’ve been digging them up since antiquity, and they never seem to lose their sparkle. But most major mines are being exhausted. And with technology making it easier to grow diamonds just as they are getting more difficult to extract from the Earth, the lab-grown diamond industry’s grandstanding about its future doesn’t feel entirely unreasonable.
There’s a reason why, as Payne said, “the mining industry as a whole is still quite scared of this product.”
]]>The most expensive hyphen in history
▻https://www.fastcompany.com/90365077/the-most-expensive-hyphen-in-history
Bugs, bugs bugs
By Charles Fishman4 minute Read
This is the 18th in an exclusive series of 50 articles, one published each day until July 20, exploring the 50th anniversary of the first-ever Moon landing. You can check out 50 Days to the Moon here every day.
In the dark on Sunday morning, July 22, 1962, NASA launched the first-ever U.S. interplanetary space probe: Mariner 1, headed for Venus, Earth’s neighbor closer to the Sun.
Mariner 1 was launched atop a 103-foot-tall Atlas-Agena rocket at 5:21 a.m. EDT. For 3 minutes and 32 seconds, it rose perfectly, accelerating to the edge of space, nearly 100 miles up.
But at that moment, Mariner 1 started to veer in odd, unplanned ways, first aiming northwest, then pointing nose down. The rocket was out of control and headed for the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic. Four minutes and 50 seconds into flight, a range safety officer at Cape Canaveral—in an effort to prevent the rocket from hitting people or land—flipped two switches, and explosives in the Atlas blew the rocket apart in a spectacular cascade of fireworks visible back in Florida.
The Mariner 1 probe itself was blown free of the debris, and its radio transponder continued to ping flight control for another 67 seconds, until it hit the Atlantic Ocean.
This was the third failed probe in 1962 alone; NASA had also launched two failed probes to the Moon. But the disappointment was softened by the fact that a second, identical Mariner spacecraft (along with an identical Atlas-Agena rocket) were already in hangers at the Cape, standing by. Mariner 2 was launched successfully a month later and reached Venus on December 14, 1962, where it discovered that the temperature was 797º F and that the planet rotated in the opposite direction of Earth and Mars. The Sun on Venus rises in the West.
It was possible to launch Mariner 1’s twin just 36 days after the disaster because it took scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory only five days to figure out what had gone wrong. In handwritten computer coding instructions, in dozens and dozens of lines of flight guidance equations, a single letter had been written incorrectly, probably forgetfully.
In a critical spot, the equations contained an “R” symbol (for “radius”). The “R” was supposed to have a bar over it, indicating a “smoothing” function; the line told the guidance computer to average the data it was receiving and to ignore what was likely to be spurious data. But as written and then coded onto punch cards and into the guidance computer, the “R” didn’t have a bar over it. The “R-bar” became simply “R.”
As it happened, on launch, Mariner 1 briefly lost guidance-lock with the ground, which was not uncommon. The rocket was supposed to follow its course until guidance-lock was re-achieved, unless it received instructions from the ground computer. But without the R-bar, the ground computer got confused about Mariner 1’s performance, thought it was off course, and started sending signals to the rocket to “correct” its course, instructions that weren’t necessary—and weren’t correct.
Therefore “phantom erratic behavior” became “actual erratic behavior,” as one analyst wrote. In the minute or so that controllers waited, the rocket and the guidance computer on the ground were never able to get themselves sorted out, because the “averaging” function that would have kept the rocket on course wasn’t programmed into the computer. And so the range safety officer did his job.
A single handwritten line, the length of a hyphen, doomed the most elaborate spaceship the U.S. had until then designed, along with its launch rocket. Or rather, the absence of that bar doomed it. The error cost $18.5 million ($156 million today).
In the popular press, for simplicity, the missing bar became a hyphen. The New York Times front-page headline was “For Want of a Hyphen Venus Rocket Is Lost.” The Los Angeles Times headline: “‘Hyphen’ Blows Up Rocket.” The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1968 book The Promise of Space, called it “the most expensive hyphen in history.”
For NASA’s computer programmers, it was a lesson in care, caution, and testing that ended up steeped into their bones. During 11 Apollo missions, more than 100 days total of spaceflight, the Apollo flight computers performed without a single fault.
But what happened to Mariner 1 was, in fact, an arresting vulnerability of the new Space Age. A single missing bolt in a B-52 nuclear bomber wasn’t going to bring down the plane, but a single inattentive moment in computer programming—of the sort anyone can imagine having—could have a cascade of consequences.
George Mueller was NASA’s associate administrator for manned spaceflight from 1963 to 1969, the most critical period for Apollo’s development. Just before that, Mueller had been an executive at Space Technology Laboratories, which had responsibility for writing the guidance equations for Mariner 1, including the equation with the missing bar.
During his years at NASA, Mueller kept a reminder of the importance of even the smallest elements of spaceflight on the wall behind his desk: a framed image of a hyphen.
]]>American Oil Keeps Flowing to China Despite Mounting Trade War - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-06/american-oil-keeps-flowing-to-china-despite-mounting-trade-war
• U.S. shipments to Asian nation seen increasing in May and June
• Tankers headed to China haven’t rerouted even as tension rises
Washington’s escalating trade war with Beijing hasn’t choked off the flow of American oil to China.
At least six million barrels of U.S. crude set off for Chinese refineries in May, according to ship tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. In June, American shipments to the Asian nation are expected to reach at least 4 million barrels, according to shipping reports and data from Kpler. The volumes are a marked increase from April, when China took just one supertanker of U.S crude, about two million barrels.
U.S. oil may just be too cheap to pass up. West Texas Intermediate crude is selling for almost $9 per barrel less than the global benchmark Brent, down from around $6 in April. While global supply risks have boosted the price of Brent, growing American production has kept WTI weak, making it more appealing to international buyers.
“Clearly the trade war is a consideration,” but the WTI discount to Brent is attractive, said Sandy Fielden, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. Purchases made now could be sold later for a higher price — something Chinese companies started doing soon after the trade war began last year.
The three tankers that initially set sail for China in May have not signaled a destination change, even as trade tension ramps up. Meanwhile, a fourth ship headed for Singapore rerouted to Rizhao, China. One of the China-bound tankers, a very large crude carrier (VLCC), received its supply at the Louisiana Offshore Oil port in May, ship tracking data show. More could be headed to China from LOOP, America’s only facility that can fully load a VLCC.
]]>Taxi Industry Leaders Got Rich. Drivers Paid the Price. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/nyregion/newyorktoday/nyc-news-taxi-medallions.html
In the past year and a half, eight professional drivers, including three taxi medallion owners, have died by suicide. Since 2016, 950 taxi drivers have filed for bankruptcy. And as of Monday, a city task force created last year to study the taxi industry had no members.
The Times published an investigation this week into what caused financial ruin for so many drivers.
Industry disrupters like Uber and Lyft have drawn lots of attention, but the real problem was that lenders made reckless loans as regulators looked on, my colleague Brian M. Rosenthal reported. The loans generated huge profits for lenders, as well as for city coffers.
The practices were similar to those that led to the housing market crash and global financial crisis of 2008. They also created what one analyst called “modern-day indentured servitude.”
Here are five takeaways from Mr. Rosenthal’s investigation.
[Read Part 1 of the investigation: How reckless loans devastated a generation of taxi drivers.]
Uber and Lyft did not cause the crisis in New York City’s yellow taxi industry
The taxi medallion bubble burst in 2014. Uber entered the city in 2011, and Lyft in 2014.
The internet-based ride-hailing companies may have hastened the crisis, but virtually all of the hundreds of industry veterans interviewed for the investigation said the industry would have collapsed regardless because of inflated medallion prices and risky lending practices.
City data shows that 97 percent of yellow cab rides start in central Manhattan, or at the airports, where Uber and Lyft are less popular.
On a per-cab basis, each taxi’s revenue has decreased by about 10 percent since Uber entered New York, according to the city’s data.
Taxi industry leaders artificially inflated the price of taxi medallions
To drive a yellow taxi in the city, you need a medallion.
After years of stability, medallion prices soared from $200,000 in 2002 to more than $1 million in 2014. Some industry leaders have admitted to intentionally causing prices to spike. During that time, revenue generated by taxis barely changed.
Taxi industry leaders steered drivers into reckless loans
From 2002 through 2014, about 4,000 people signed loans to buy taxi medallions.
Drivers borrowed up to $1 million, often without a down payment, according to financial documents. Many were required to repay their loans within three years, which was practically impossible, forcing them to extend the terms of their loans at inflated interest rates.
Hundreds of drivers signed interest-only loans requiring them to forfeit legal rights and indefinitely give up almost every dollar they earned.
You can imagine the toll: Some borrowed even more money, and a few, facing financial and other pressures, died by suicide.
[Read Part 2: How top officials counted money while drivers were trapped in loans.]
Lenders protected themselves by selling those loans
People who made risky taxi loans protected themselves by selling the loans to other institutions.
At the market’s height, the six nonprofit credit unions most involved in the industry sold about $3 billion in medallion loans to 122 other credit unions, according to financial disclosure forms.
Officials ignored years of warning signs
In 2010, a city employee wrote a report showing that cabbies weren’t making enough to support their loans.
In 2014, state inspectors gave a presentation to officials in Albany.
Earlier this year, Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, shut the committee overseeing the industry, saying it had completed most of its work.
The state attorney general’s office said yesterday that it had opened an inquiry into the lending practices, while Mayor de Blasio ordered a city investigation into the brokers who helped arrange loans.
#USA #New_York #Taxi #Betrug #Ausbeutung
]]>Russia’s Payback Will Be Syria’s Reconstruction Money – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/05/russias-payback-will-be-syrias-reconstruction-money
But international donors—and Bashar al-Assad—aren’t playing along yet.
[…]
Almost four years later, with rebels having mostly abandoned calls for regime change and losing large swaths of their enclaves, Russia has achieved most of its short- and medium-term goals in Syria. A growing number of signs suggest Moscow is now shifting focus to another objective: The Kremlin would like Syria to provide it a financial windfall.
[…]
Russian analysts say Moscow had originally envisaged a sect-based power-sharing arrangement, modeled on Lebanon, between the Syrian government and several opposition groups as the political panacea for the conflict. But Russia could neither convince the regime nor the rebels to compromise and abandoned the plan. Now it has reduced its ambitions and is focused on using its leverage with Assad to agree on a constitutional committee whose members have been appointed by the regime, the opposition, and representatives of Syrian civil society.
Max Suckov, a Russia analyst, said Moscow would achieve little more in terms of a political settlement. “Russia is not very hopeful about a political settlement which satisfies all Syrian actors,” he said. “I think Russia has accepted that Syria will continue to be a centralized state, but that certainly makes it difficult to convince the EU to pay for reconstruction.”
]]>Founder Interviews: Jim Rose of CircleCI
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-jim-rose-of-circleci-edd76bea3c65?source=rss----3a814
Six-time founder and CircleCI CEO Jim Rose is on a mission to give everyone the ability to build and deliver software at the speed of imagination.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Jim Rose: I’m originally from Wisconsin and went to Duke for undergrad. After I graduated, I spent some time in China as an analyst working on the copy machine supply chain. There are lots of stories there, but we’ll save those for another time. After a while I came back to the States and spent some time working in Seattle, and then for WPP. It was just at the start of the first tech boom, and I started a company called MobShop. We wanted to give consumers the ability to get discounts when they bought goods at volume — this was way before Groupon, who had a similar idea and ended up (...)
#davis-baer #founder-interview #founder-stories #founder-advice #founders
]]>UN experts warn #Assange arrest exposes him to risk of serious human rights violations | UN News
▻https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/04/1036491
Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial executions, Agnes Callamard, tweeted that in “expelling Assange from the Embassy” and allowing his arrest, it had taken Mr. Assange “one step closer to extradition”. She added that the UK had now arbitrarily-detained the controversial anti-secrecy journalist and campaigner, “possibly endangering his life”.
Mr. Assange took refuge inside the embassy in 2012, to avoid extradition to Sweden by the UK authorities where he faced charges, since dropped, of sexual assault. But he also faces US federal conspiracy charges, relating to the leak of a vast number of Government documents to his Wikileaks website, by the former US intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning. The US argues that publication by the investigative site, endangered the lives of its citizens working overseas.
]]>5 #chatbots Ideas: Business Can’t Afford to Miss in 2019
▻https://hackernoon.com/5-chatbots-ideas-business-cant-afford-to-miss-in-2019-e59cd41e01f8?sourc
5 Chatbot Ideas: Business Can’t Afford to Miss in 2019If you are looking to add chatbot to your website, you would have probably noticed that there are many things required to get a user-friendly chatbot.As an IT sourcing analyst with ValueCoders (IT Sourcing Company), I used to face several challenges in developing “chatbots” during the stages of programming. Although, I find now quite easier to manage the development work, especially after knowing the ideas to develop a powerful chatbot solution for the business community. Sharing here my experience:Although chatbots have been around in the business industry for decades, e-businesses have only learned now how to effectively use them for business purposes.So, have you ever considered implementing chatbot to your business site?If yes, (...)
]]>Women in Tech: Software Engineer Career Advice
▻https://hackernoon.com/women-in-tech-software-engineer-career-advice-8cb70cc5c13c?source=rss---
Is it really a man’s world when it comes to software engineering? Glancing around a Java uni lecture or checking out the engineering department at an old school software house might feel like you’ve just stepped into a secret men’s club.But don’t be fooled. This isn’t a disadvantage; in fact, it’s just the opposite.By making strategic moves in your career, you can use your scarcity to climb the ladder and help orchestrate more diversity in your own teams.We spoke to three leading women in tech — Nicola Eade, Frontend Developer at Open Agent, Liz Crawford, Chief Product and #technology Officer at Flare HR, and Aisha Khan Information Analyst at EY — for their take on excelling as a woman in software engineering.Combatting STEM stereotypesWomen in technology and soft skillsIn your career, simply by (...)
#software-development #diversity-in-tech #women-in-tech #career-advice
]]>9 Digital Identity Trends That Will Make or Break Businesses in 2019
▻https://hackernoon.com/9-digital-identity-trends-that-will-make-or-break-businesses-in-2019-f5c
1. Payment Fraud MultipliedIn 2019, retail sales via smartphones in the United States will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18% and will affect more than $1 trillion trillion in revenue at some point in the customer’s journey, according to Forrester research.Credit card numbers and related identity information are priced at couple of dollars on the black web, due to ongoing data breaches.2. Enterprises leaning towards SaaSAccording to research conducted by an analyst from Gartner, 2019 will be the year of the SaaS market, growing by 17.8%, with a total value of $85.1 billion.With SaaS as the largest share of the cloud market, Craig Roth, Gartner’s VP of research department, said this was partly because companies wanted to move their content platforms to SaaS. All signs are (...)
#enterprise #digital-identity #business #cybersecurity #identity-management
]]>Shares slump for big four publishers after latest financials
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-02-07-shares-slump-for-big-four-publishers-after-latest-financia
Take-Two and Electronic Arts suffer the most but analyst maintains games industry still “in rude health”
]]>4 Case Study Questions for Interviewing #data Analyst at a #startup
▻https://hackernoon.com/4-case-study-questions-for-interviewing-data-analyst-at-a-startup-c8659e
At Holistics, we understand the value of data in making business decisions as a Business Intelligence (BI) platform, and hiring the right data team is one of the key elements to get you there.To get hired for a tech product startup, we all know just doing reporting alone won’t distinguish a potential data analyst, a good data analyst is one who has an absolute passion for data. He/she has a strong understanding of the business/product you are running, and will be always seeking meaningful insights to help the team make better decisions.That’s the reason why we usually look for these characteristics below when interviewing data analyst candidates:Ability to adapt to a new domain quicklyAbility to work independently to investigate and mine for interesting insightsProduct and business growth (...)
]]>Analyst predicts first video games revenue decline since 1995
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-01-24-analyst-predicts-first-video-games-revenue-decline-since-1
Pelham Smithers blames China freeze and decreasing interest in Fortnite
]]>How A World Driven By The #blockchain Might Look Like
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-a-world-driven-by-the-blockchain-might-look-like-6ebff6ee3e50?source
According to Joel Monegro, a former analyst at USV (a venture capital firm) the blockchain implies value creation in its protocols. Where the web has allowed the value to be captured at the applications layer (take Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many others).In a Blockchain Economy, this value might be captured by the protocols at the base of the blockchain (for instance Bitcoin and Ethereum).However, according to blockchain investor Paivinen due to ease of forking, incentives to compete and improved interoperability and interchangeability also in a blockchain-based economy, protocols might get thinner.Although the marginal value of scale might be lower compared to a web-based economy, where massive scale created an economic advantage. The success of the Blockchain will depend on its (...)
#blockchain-driven #blockchain-world #hackernoon-top-story #blockchain-driven-world
]]>Winners and Losers in Big Oil’s Offshore Spending Revival - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-11/the-winners-and-losers-of-big-oil-s-offshore-spending-revival
After four years of cutbacks, oil companies are poised to open their purses again and develop new offshore fields, although the benefits won’t be spread equally across the companies who provide them everything from seismic surveys to pumps and turbines.
The long-awaited spending rebound will re-energize oil-services providers that have survived the deepest crisis in a generation thanks to cost cuts, mergers and sometimes painful debt restructuring. But for some debt-laden suppliers, the investment pickup may come too late.
Peut-être une éclaircie, pour le groupe #Bourbon,
Bourbon Corporation, a French operator of support vessels for offshore industry, is also looking for signs of recovery as persisting low rates has forced it to suspend the payments of its debt. Bourbon’s situation is “worrying” as it operates in an oversupplied market, said Kevin Vo, an analyst at AlphaValue in Paris. Bourbon declined to comment.
ça cause également de #TechnipFMC (fusion de #Technip et du texan FMC Technologies)
]]>Opinion : To Understand France’s Crisis, You Must First Understand Its Cheese
Karl Sharro, BuzzFeed, le 20 décembre 2018
▻https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/karlsharro/an-ancient-land-beset-by-ancient-rivalries
Karl Sharro is a Lebanese expert analyst on WENA (Western Europe and North American) affairs.
When you think of France, you think of fine cheeses and wines. Ironically — tragically, perhaps — it’s those cheeses and wines that explain the roots of France’s divisions. As the old French saying goes: “The people who make the cheese are not the ones who eat it.” The origins of the saying have been lost in time, but it’s thought to refer to the tension between the peasantry who produce but can’t afford their products and the bourgeoisie who produce nothing but consume the variety of French delicacies made in the countryside.
A French cheeseboard with several types of cheese is the perfect representation of the nation. Different parts that have never truly come together, as you know if you tried to mix a Camembert and a Roquefort. And at the center is Paris, the dominant baguette as it is referred to derogatorily. There are many fault lines in this nation, but none are stronger than those between the countryside and the city. At heart, this is a philosophical dispute, as all French disagreements are. It is a clash between the rustic and the Cartesian worldviews — the former has existed for centuries, the latter imposed after the 1789 revolution in the name of the Enlightenment.
As seasoned observers of the West like myself have become accustomed to in recent years, there is a tendency in Western culture to blame events on external actors and complex conspiracy theories. This strange trait can come as a shock to more rational Middle Eastern observers, but it is quite common across the WENA region, on the streets and in the media. Soon after the protests took off, some attributed them to a changing Facebook algorithm, and others argued they were caused by Russian agitation and propaganda.
#Karl_Sharro #KarlreMarks :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/730563
►https://seenthis.net/messages/738075
Marvel’s Spider-Man is the fastest-selling superhero game in US history
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-12-21-marvels-spider-man-is-the-fastest-selling-superhero-game-i
NPD analyst Mat Piscatella reveals Insomniac title has smashed records in its first three months
]]>An X reveals a Diamond : locating Israeli Patriot batteries using radar interference – Federation Of American Scientists
▻https://fas.org/blogs/security/2018/11/an-x-reveals-a-diamond-locating-israeli-patriot-batteries-using-radar-interfere
Amid a busy few weeks of nuclear-related news, an Israeli researcher made a very surprising OSINT discovery that flew somewhat under the radar. As explained in a Medium article, Israeli GIS analyst Harel Dan noticed that when he accidentally adjusted the noise levels of the imagery produced from the SENTINEL-1 satellite constellation, a bunch of colored Xs suddenly appeared all over the globe.
SENTINEL-1’s C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operates at a centre frequency of 5.405 GHz, which conveniently sits within the range of the military frequency used for land, airborne, and naval radar systems (5.250-5.850 GHz)—including the AN/MPQ-53/65 phased array radars that form the backbone of a Patriot battery’s command and control system. Therefore, Harel correctly hypothesized that some of the Xs that appeared in the SENTINEL-1 images could be triggered by interference from Patriot radar systems.
Using this logic, he was able to use the Xs to pinpoint the locations of Patriot batteries in several Middle Eastern countries, including Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
This blog post partially fills that gap, while acknowledging that there are some known Patriot sites—both in Israel and elsewhere around the globe—that interestingly don’t produce an X via the SAR imagery.
All of these sites were already known to Israel-watchers and many have appeared in news articles, making Harel’s redaction somewhat unnecessary—especially since the images reveal nothing about operational status or system capabilities.
Avec analyse détaillée des 4 sites israéliens de batteries de missiles Patriot identifiés, dont l’un (Palmachim, cf. ►https://seenthis.net/messages/740257 ) figure d’ailleurs sur la liste des cibles du Hezbollah…
The proximity of the Negev air defense battery to an Israeli nuclear facility is not unique. In fact, the 2002 SIPRI Yearbook suggests that several of the Yahalom batteries identified through SENTINEL-1 SAR imagery are either co-located with or located close to facilities related to Israel’s nuclear weapons program. The Palmachim site is near the Soreq Centre, which is responsible for nuclear weapons research and design, and the Mount Carmel site is near the Yodefat Rafael facility in Haifa—which is associated with the production of Jericho missiles and the assembly of nuclear weapons—and near the base for Israel’s Dolphin-class submarines, which are rumored to be nuclear-capable.
Google Earth’s images of Israel have been intentionally blurred since 1997, due to a US law known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment which prohibits US satellite imagery companies from selling pictures that are “no more detailed or precise than satellite imagery of Israel that is available from commercial sources.” As a result, it is not easy to locate the exact position of the Yahalom batteries; for example, given the number of facilities and the quality of the imagery, the site at Palmachim is particularly challenging to spot.
However, this law is actually being revisited this year and could soon be overturned, which would be a massive boon for Israel-watchers. Until that happens though, Israel will remain blurry and difficult to analyze, making creative OSINT techniques like Harel’s all the more useful.
]]>China’s new Ethics Committee has been reviewing existing titles
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-12-11-chinas-new-ethics-committee-has-been-reviewing-existing-ti
Waiting list for bringing games to China “likely to be longer than expected”, analyst IHS Markit warns
]]>CNN firing Marc Lamont Hill proves Israel is untouchable in U.S. media
You can attack the Palestinians in America uninterrupted, call to expel them and deny their existence. Just don’t dare say a bad word about Israel, the holy of holies.
Gideon Levy
Dec 02, 2018
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-cnn-firing-marc-lamont-hill-proves-israel-is-untouchable-in-u-s-me
Marc Lamont Hill is an American writer and lecturer in communications at Temple University in Philadelphia, and also an analyst with CNN. In a speech last week at a United Nations conference he called for “international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
In a matter of hours, the skies collapsed into well-orchestrated hysteria. Seth Mandel, editor of the Washington Examiner, accused Hill of having called for Jewish genocide; Ben Shapiro, an analyst on Fox News, called it an anti-Semitic speech; Consul Dani Dayan tweeted that Hill’s remarks were like a “swastika painted in red,” the Anti-Defamation League said they were tantamount to calling for Israel to be wiped off the map. The inevitable outcome was not long in coming and CNN fired the rebel analyst on the very same day.
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How dare he? What was he thinking? Where did he think he’s living, in a democracy with free speech or a country where dialogue about Israel is under the serious censorship of the Jewish establishment and Israeli propaganda? Hill tried to claim that he’s opposed to racism and anti-Semitism and his remarks were intended to support the establishment of a binational, secular and democratic state. But he didn’t stand a chance.
In the heavy-handed reality that has seized control over dialogue in the United States, there’s no room for expressions that may offend the Israeli occupation. On a liberal day it’s permissible to say “two states” as long as you do it in a whisper.
What would have happened if Hill had called for the establishment of a Jewish state between the Jordan and the sea? He would have safely continued holding down his job. Rick Santorum, the former senator, said in 2012 that “no Palestinian” lives in the West Bank. Nobody thought of firing him. Even Hill’s critic, Shapiro, has called in the past for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the territories (he backtracked on it a few years later) and nothing happened to him.
]]>Strategy Analytics: Nintendo to take back console market leadership in 2019
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-11-29-strategy-analytics-nintendo-to-take-back-console-market-le
Analyst predicts Nintendo will sell 17.3 million consoles in 2019, overtaking both Microsoft and Sony
]]>“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Goldman Sachs analysts ask | Ars Technica
▻https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/curing-disease-not-a-sustainable-business-model-goldman-sachs-analysts-
One-shot cures for diseases are not great for business—more specifically, they’re bad for longterm profits—Goldman Sachs analysts noted in an April 10 report for biotech clients, first reported by CNBC.
The investment banks’ report, titled “The Genome Revolution,” asks clients the touchy question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” The answer may be “no,” according to follow-up information provided.
Analyst Salveen Richter and colleagues laid it out:
The potential to deliver “one shot cures” is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically engineered cell therapy, and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies... While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.
For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90 percent. In 2015, the company’s hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less than $4 billion this year.
“[Gilead]’s rapid rise and fall of its hepatitis C franchise highlights one of the dynamics of an effective drug that permanently cures a disease, resulting in a gradual exhaustion of the prevalent pool of patients,” the analysts wrote. The report noted that diseases such as common cancers—where the “incident pool remains stable”—are less risky for business.
]]>Push #notifications Are Not That Bad, You Just Need To Take Control Again
▻https://hackernoon.com/push-notifications-are-not-that-bad-you-just-need-to-take-control-again-
Just a year ago, the first thing I did when I woke up was picking up my phone and instantly reviewing my notifications. Despite what Tristan Harris said about tech hijacking my morning routine, I was still doing it.I didn’t want to check my social media in front of my employees. I wanted to show to an investor or client that emailed me overnight that I was working early in the morning. I needed to know if an important email would impact my morning meetings.As a startup founder, I always had a good reason to do it.And it seems that I’m not the only one. According to a recent survey from the tech analyst company ReportLinker, 46 % of Americans admitted to checking their #smartphones before they even get out of bed in the morning.How did that happen?Push Notifications Become Part Of Our Daily (...)
]]>In Sri Lanka, old land issues and a new prime minister highlight post-war traumas
Sri Lanka’s civil war ended nearly a decade ago, but Maithili Thamil Chilwen’s barren plot of land still resembles a battlefield.
There is only a mound of dirt where her home once stood in Keppapilavu village in the country’s northeast; the rest is just dirt, gravel, and broken shards of doors and windows from her demolished home.
Sri Lanka’s military occupied thousands of hectares of land during and after the country’s bitter 26-year civil war, which came to a brutal end in 2009 when the military crushed remaining Tamil fighters here in the north. Almost a decade later, rights groups say reconciliation between the country’s majority Sinhalese community and its Tamil minority is at a standstill, and occupied land is one glaring example.
Thamil Chilwen, an ethnic Tamil, said the military seized her property at the end of the war. It took almost nine years, until earlier this year, for the military to give it back. But by then, her home and fields were destroyed.
“We were happy when the military told us we could go back to our land. But when I saw the state of the land, I had to cry,” she said.
The military has been slow to return land to civilians, or to even acknowledge just how much territory it still occupies. It’s symptomatic of wider post-conflict fissures across the country: rights groups say Sri Lanka’s government hasn’t taken significant steps to address rampant war-era abuses – including enforced disappearances and thousands of civilian deaths in the conflict’s final months.
Hopes for national reconciliation took another blow last week when the country’s president, Maithripala Sirisena, abruptly appointed the controversial former leader who oversaw the 2009 military offensive, Mahinda Rajapaksa, as prime minister. The surprise move has locked Sri Lanka in a political crisis: the ousted prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, has vowed to stay in office; government ministers who support him have denounced his dismissal as “an anti-democratic coup”.
Human Rights Watch said any return to office for Rajapaksa raises “chilling concerns” for rights in the country. Rajapaksa is accused of widespread rights abuses, particularly in his role overseeing the military offensive that crushed the Tamil insurgency.
“The current government’s failure to bring justice to victims of war crimes under the Rajapaksa government reopens the door for past abusers to return to their terrible practices,” said the group’s Asia director, Brad Adams.
For most Tamils, a return to their ancestral land is one key part of finding justice, says Ruki Fernando, a Colombo-based rights activist who has documented war-time disappearances.
More than 40,000 people remain displaced since the end of the war, mostly concentrated in the Tamil heartlands of northern and northeastern Sri Lanka.
“It’s about culture and religious life. It’s where they buried their ancestors,” Fernando said. “It’s their identity.”
Alan Keenan, a Sri Lanka analyst with the International Crisis Group, says land is among a range of issues that have largely gone unresolved over the last decade.
“Most Tamils don’t feel that they have gotten as much they were promised in terms of dealing with the legacy of war, having their land returned, discovering the fate of their tens of thousands of missing relatives, having crimes committed by the military addressed judicially,” Keenan said. “For a whole range of things, they think they didn’t get what they were promised.”
Reparations
Estimates for the amount of land occupied by the military vary wildly. The military last year said it had returned roughly 20,000 hectares of private and state land in the north. In a report released this month, Human Rights Watch said the government claimed the military was occupying about 48,000 hectares of private and state land in the north and east.
Rights groups say the military has converted some of the occupied land into for-profit businesses. They have set up plantation farms, restaurants, and even resorts catering to tourists, in addition to large military bases.
An army spokesman did not respond to IRIN’s requests for comment. But in an interview with the Indian newspaper The Hindu this year, Mahesh Senanayake, the Sri Lankan army chief, said 80 percent of occupied land has been returned. He claimed the military had been the only organisation capable of running key services in the north after decades of war.
“The government machinery was not functioning for decades,” he said. “There was a big gap and our services are needed to address it.”
Early this month, President Sirisena ordered the release of all civilian land by the end of the year. However, rights groups say such promises have gone unfulfilled for years.
Sirisena was elected in 2015 on the back of a reformist agenda to boost reconciliation between the divided Sinhalese and Tamil communities. When he came to office, Sirisena broke from his predecessor and promised to set up a national truth commission, an office to investigate missing persons, and provide reparations for war-era abuses.
The government has held public consultations to solicit feedback on reconciliation, and legislated the creation of an office for reparations. But rights groups say progress has been achingly slow, even before last week’s political crisis. The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism last year said government actions on transitional justice have “ground to a virtual halt”.
Analysts say Sirisena has been reluctant to push a reform agenda too forcefully in the face of resurgent Sinhalese nationalism. Rajapaksa, the former president, is popular among Sinhalese nationalists; the political party he leads nearly swept local elections held in February, seen as a bellwether for the current political mood in the country.
“The government is afraid the Sinhala constituency will be unhappy that they are giving back the land, that they are shrinking the footprint of the military,” Keenan said.
In a country that has held an uneasy peace since the civil war’s remarkably violent end in 2009, there are signs of discontent. A Tamil nationalist party, the Tamil National People’s Front, also made significant gains during the February elections here in Sri Lanka’s north, where it took control of the two largest councils in populous Jaffna district.
In Keppapilavu village, an army tank sits outside an imposing military base surrounded by tall cement walls. A few metres away, a group of men and women have held a protest for the last year, under tents made of tin and tarpaulin.
Arumuham Weluthapillayi, a Hindu priest, started the protest last year with other displaced families. He says half of his land is still occupied by the army – in addition to homes, places of worship, schools, a cemetery, and numerous shops around the village.
This area was once a stronghold of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, commonly known as the Tamil Tigers. But nine years after the insurgency was routed, Weluthapillayi says he can’t understand why the army hasn’t left.
“The war is over,” he said. “There are no security issues. Why are they still here?”
▻https://www.irinnews.org/news/2018/10/30/sri-lanka-old-land-issues-and-new-appointment-threaten-reconciliation
#Sri_Lanka #COI #terres #tamouls #déplacés_internes #IDPs #dédommagement #indemnisations #Keppapilavu
Analyst expects Houser brothers to receive huge Red Dead royalties
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-10-26-houser-brothers-expected-to-receive-bulk-of-usd538m-red-de
UPDATE: Take-Two clarifies that last year’s royalties of $383m shared across all studios
]]>Imran Khan leaves for Saudi conference saying #Pakistan ’desperate’ for loans | Reuters
▻https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-saudi-khashoggi-pakistan/imran-khan-leaves-for-saudi-conference-saying-pakistan-desperate-for-loa
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan left for Saudi Arabia to attend an investment conference boycotted by other leaders over the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
]]>Israeli lawmaker’s attack on celebrity Jewish-Arab marriage echoes Nazi ideology
MK Oren Hazan accused TV anchor Lucy Aharish of seducing Fauda actor Tzahi Halevi in order to hurt Israel – and Netanyahu said nothing
Yossi Verter SendSend me email alerts
Oct 11, 2018
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-mk-s-attack-on-celebrity-jewish-arab-marriage-echoes-nazi-ideology
Knesset Member Oren Hazan (Likud), he of the infamous selfie celebrating the passing of the nation-state law, has identified a terrorist cell. This cell has a single member – TV anchorwoman Lucy Aharish.
This week the Arab journalist carried out a terrorist act intended to lower the Jewish birthrate when she married actor Tzahi Halevi. “She seduced a Jewish soul with the aim of harming our country and preventing more Jewish offspring from perpetuating the Jewish line,” the racist, ignorant and repulsive MK tweeted.
Substitute the word “German” for “Jewish” here and you’ve got the Nazi racial doctrine. Talk of racial purity, prevention of “assimilation,” seduction of the male and hostile exploitation of his fine, pure seed for nationalist purposes. In the name of such an ideology, six million Jews were murdered in Europe.
Next week, the Knesset opens its winter session. The Likud MK will address the parliament from the podium. He will vote in committees. No boycott will be imposed on his party faction. He will not be penalized. He will exchange high-fives and pats on the back with the gang who appeared in the selfie. They deserve each other.
Tzachi Halevy and Lucy Aharish.Vered Adir, David Bachar
But something can still be done. A few months from now, when an early election is announced, Likud will hold a primary for its slate for the 21st Knesset. Like the rest of the bunch who were elected on the basis of their districts in the last primary, this time Hazan will have to run on the national list. There the hurdle is much higher. The last time around, when he ran in the Samaria district, he needed just 2,000 or 3,000 votes. This time he’ll need 20,000 to gain a top-20 slot (the district winners will be ranked after them). Whoever marks Hazan’s name on the ballot despite this repugnant tweet and everything else we now know about the guy will directly harm Likud.
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In any event, given the party’s primary system, at least a third of the current MKs will likely be gone in the next Knesset. The math is simple: Twenty-nine will run for re-election (all but Benny Begin). Plus, four candidates not currently in the Knesset are likely to be elected to the list: Gideon Sa’ar, Danny Danon, Yoav Galant and Nir Barkat. That makes 33. The national list that comprises the top 20 will include no more than 18-19 of these people. In other words, we’ll have to bid farewell, happily or otherwise, to some 15 MKs.
On Thursday we waited in vain for the Likud chairman (and Hazan’s selfie buddy) to denounce the disgusting tweet. Netanyahu chooses his condemnations carefully. What starts with “droves of Arabs are streaming to the polls” culminates in the seduction by Arab women of Jewish men so as to suppress the Jewish birthrate.
We also waited in vain for any fatherly scolding from the prime minister of his elder son Yair for his hateful, invective-filled Facebook post aimed at Television News Company analyst Amnon Abramovich. No point expecting any such thing from Netanyahu. They are all his sons.
]]>‘We Would Be Opening the Heavens to War’ | FAIR
▻https://fair.org/home/we-would-be-opening-the-heavens-to-war
And I wanted to ask you about that question of priorities, finally. The Washington Post had an article headlined “Potential Winners if a Space Force Flies,” which delivered the no doubt shocking news that “a group of government contractors sees a chance to profit.” Hold onto your hat! An analyst tells the Post, “Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Harris Corporation may be particularly well positioned to benefit from Trump’s Space Force.” I found it odd to present military contractors as sort of savvily responding to policy, as opposed to driving it, but then, to your point, there was vanishingly little reference in media coverage to who would not benefit from this allocation of funds, to what would be lost, to what would be harmed, and so I wanted to underscore that point that you made, just to say, media didn’t talk about it either.
]]>Shadowy Black Axe group leaves trail of tattered lives - The Globe and Mail
▻https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/shadowy-black-axe-group-leaves-trail-of-tattered-lives/article27244946
Canadian police say they are fighting a new kind of criminal organization.
The signs began to appear two years ago: photos on Facebook of men wearing odd, matching outfits.
Then there were stories, even old police files, attached to the people in the photos: a kidnapping, a man run over by a car, brutal beatings over what seemed to be a small slight.
Mapping a secret criminal hierarchy for the first time is a rare kind of detective work. So when two Toronto police officers and an RCMP analyst in British Columbia started documenting the existence of something called the “Black Axe, Canada Zone,” they could not have predicted it would take them to funerals, suburban barbecue joints and deep into African history before they understood what they were seeing.
The Black Axe is feared in Nigeria, where it originated. It is a “death cult,” one expert said. Once an idealistic university fraternity, the group has been linked to decades of murders and rapes, and its members are said to swear a blood oath.
Most often, the group is likened to the Mob or to biker gangs, especially as it spreads outside Nigeria.
An investigation by The Globe and Mail that included interviews with about 20 people found that “Axemen,” as they call themselves, are setting up chapters around the world, including in Canada.
Like any criminal organization, it focuses on profit, police say. But instead of drug or sex trafficking, it specializes in a crime many consider minor and non-violent: scamming.
What police have also learned is that, when done on an “industrial” level as part of a professional global network, scams ruin lives on a scale they have rarely seen.
Two weeks ago, at a news conference attended by FBI officers, Toronto police announced they had taken part in an international crackdown on a money-laundering network through which more than $5-billion flowed in just over a year. Two local men charged with defrauding a Toronto widow of her life’s savings will eventually face extradition to the United States on money-laundering charges, they said.
Online fraud is fluid, global and hard-to-track, but it often requires local operatives. Several Toronto-area residents have been defrauded of at least $1-million each in the past two years, and police allege the money was wired with the help of Canadian residents linked to the Black Axe, and sometimes it was handed to the group’s associates in person. The recipients then sent the money ricocheting through bank accounts around the globe, with trusted members in countries on every continent helping with the transfers before it disappeared.
The sophistication of the money-laundering scheme reflects the efficiency of the scams, in which several people assume false identities and mix reality – bank accounts, real names and real websites – with fake documents.
The police added an extra charge for one of the men they arrested, Akohomen Ighedoise, 41: “participating in a criminal organization.”
Officers said in an interview they seized documents that will prove in court that Mr. Ighedoise separately helped a network of fraudsters launder money, that the fraudsters are members of the Black Axe and that he is their bookkeeper. The charge is the first time a Canadian has been publicly linked to the group.
Interviews with police, gang experts and Nigerian academics paint a picture of an organization both public and enigmatic, with an ostensible charitable purpose as well as secret codes and a strict hierarchy. Police say it has grown to 200 people across Canada.
Officers in Canada first heard the name “Black Axe” less than two years ago, said Tim Trotter, a detective constable with the Toronto Police Service. They are working quickly, trying to stop the group from becoming entrenched.
“I mean, 100 years ago, law enforcement dealt with the same thing, the Sicilian black hand, right? It meant nothing to anybody except the Sicilian community,” Det. Constable Trotter said. “And that’s what we have here – that’s what we believe we have here.”
**
Many scam victims lose a few thousand dollars. Soraya Emami, one of Toronto’s most recent victims, lost everything, including many friends.
In 1988, Ms. Emami fled her native Iran with her four sons. Her husband was jailed by the regime and his passport was held for years. Ms. Emami flew to Canada and became a real estate agent in North York.
It took 30 years to save for a nice house in quiet Stouffville, Ont. The rest of her earnings went to her boys, who grew up to be a doctor, an engineer, a computer engineer and a bank manager. Last year, the youngest – a fifth son, born in Canada – began university. She and her husband had never reunited, and for the first time in decades, Ms. Emami thought about dating.
“My kids grow up, and I feel lonely,” said the 63-year-old, who has long, wavy black hair. “I didn’t know how, and because I’m not [used to] any relationship, I feel shy.”
Ms. Emami saw a TV commercial for Match.com and joined, hesitantly. A few days later, she told a friend she had heard from a tanned, white-haired, very nice geologist. Fredrick Franklin said he lived just 45 minutes away, in Toronto’s wealthy Bridle Path neighbourhood.
He had spent years in Australia, and when they talked on the phone, she could not always understand his thick accent at first. He called her several times a day from Vancouver, where he was on a business trip, then from Turkey, where he travelled on a short contract. He was to fly home via Delta airlines on May 5. She would pick him up from the airport, and they would finally meet.
“I am a simple man in nature, very easy going,” he wrote in an e-mail, telling her about his son and granddaughters. “I have done the Heart and Stroke ride in Toronto for the past 2 years, have also done the MS ride from London to Grand Bend.”
A few days before his return date, Mr. Franklin called Ms. Emami in a panic. His bank had told him someone had tried to gain access to his account, he said. He could not clear it up from rural Turkey, so would she mind calling the bank and reporting back with his balance? He e-mailed the phone number for SunTrust bank, a 10-digit account number and a nine-digit tax ID number.
She spoke to a bank teller. The balance, she was told, was $18-million.
A few days later, Mr. Franklin asked for a small favour – could she send him a new phone and laptop – saying he would repay her upon his return. She acquiesced, believing he could pay her back.
Within a few weeks, she lost half a million dollars, and the scam would cost her the home in Stouffville.
What perplexes police about some of the Toronto romance frauds is not how the victims could be so naive, but how the fraudsters could be so convincing.
The SunTrust account appears to be real, The Globe determined after retracing the steps Ms. Emami took to access it. The bank said it could not verify the account’s existence, as that was client-related information.
In the course of the scam, Ms. Emami spoke to at least five people other than the Aussie geologist, including two in person.
In June, in what they called Project Unromantic, York Regional Police charged nine local people in several cases, including that of Ms. Emami, that added up to $1.5-million. They considered the criminals to be internationally connected. “We don’t know who’s at the top, but there seems to be a hierarchy,” Detective Courtney Chang said.
The Toronto police believe the crimes that led to their charges against Mr. Ighedoise are linked to the ones in York Region.
*
Canadian police came across the Black Axe by happenstance. In 2013, an RCMP analyst in Vancouver was investigating a West Coast fraud suspect and found a photo of him on Facebook with another man, said Det. Constable Trotter (the analyst would not speak to The Globe). Both were wearing unusual clothes and seemed to be at a meeting in Toronto.
The analyst discovered the second man was under investigation by Toronto financial crimes detective Mike Kelly, an old partner of Det. Constable Trotter. The analyst e-mailed Det. Constable Kelly to ask if he knew the significance of what the two men in the photo were wearing.
The uniform of the Black Axe is a black beret, a yellow soccer scarf and high yellow socks. These items often have a patch or insignia showing two manacled hands with an axe separating the chain between them, which sometimes also says “Black Axe” or “NBM,” standing for “Neo-Black Movement,” another name for the group. They often incorporate the numbers seven or 147.
The group tries to maintain a public image of volunteerism. It has been registered as a corporation in Ontario since 2012 under the name “Neo-Black Movement of Africa North America,” with Mr. Ighedoise among several people listed as administrators. In the United Kingdom, said Det. Constable Trotter, it has been known to make small donations – to a local hospital, for example – and then claim to be in a “partnership” with the legitimate organization.
In the GTA, the group got itself listed publicly in 2013 as a member of Volunteer MBC, a volunteer centre serving Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon. But after expressing an interest in recruiting volunteers, the group involved never posted an ad, and staff at the centre said when they tried to follow up, they found the three yahoo.com addresses on file were no longer working.
Police found plenty of photos on social media of men in Axemen uniforms at what were said to be conferences or events.
Det. Constable Kelly and Det. Constable Trotter compiled a list of people in Canada photographed wearing Axemen outfits. From a car, they watched some of them attend a funeral. One mourner had yellow socks and a yellow cummerbund with NBM on it, Det. Constable Trotter said. The rest were dressed normally. Near the end of the ceremony, “all of a sudden the berets and everything came out, and then they put the coffin into the earth,” he said.
As they added names to their list, the investigators checked each one for connections to previous cases.
What they found were 10 to 20 episodes of serious violence over the past few years clearly linked to members of the group, many of them at a Nigerian restaurant in northwest Toronto, Det. Constable Trotter said. One man had been run over by a car; another was allegedly kidnapped and beaten with a liquor bottle for a day in an abandoned building; a man was knocked to the ground for refusing to fetch another man a beer. Witnesses generally refused to talk.
In one incident, a group of men had insulted another man’s girlfriend, and when he objected, they “beat the living hell” out of him, leaving him with cranial fractures, Det. Constable Trotter said.
“Without the understanding of the context, it’s just a bar fight,” he said. “But when we understand who those people were, and we realize, oh, they’re all affiliated to the group … that’s why no one called [911]. And that’s why, when the police came, suddenly, oh no, those cameras don’t work. And that’s why, out of a bar full of people, the only witness was his girlfriend.”
That case and the kidnapping case are before the courts, Det. Constable Trotter said. The Globe tried to search for all court records linked to the bar’s address over the past few years, but was told such a search is impossible.
Police have six criteria to identify members of the group, Det. Constable Trotter said. If a person meets three of the six, he is considered a likely member.
Police have documents that show when certain people were “blended” or initiated into the group, including some in Toronto, he said. Members live mostly in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.
“There’s evidence that they’ve been active since 2005, so that’s a decade’s worth of ability to lay under the radar and become ensconced in the criminal community,” he said.
To set up scams, they work from cafés or home and are “fastidious” about deleting their online history, Det. Constable Kelly said.
“They have names, titles, they show respect,” Det. Constable Trotter said. “They pay dues to each other. Individuals are detailed by higher-ranking individuals to do things.”
As they learned of the group’s fearsome reputation in Nigeria, the officers began to equate it more with established Canadian organized crime. At Afrofest in Woodbine Park one summer, a group of Axemen walked through in full uniform – not something anyone from the Nigerian community would do lightly, Det. Constable Trotter said. “I wouldn’t wear a Hells Angels vest if I wasn’t a Hells Angel.”
He began to worry the group’s brazenness would signify to the community that “Axemen are here. And they’re open about it, and the police are doing nothing.”
*
Fraternities such as the Black Axe were born during an optimistic time in Nigeria’s recent history, and at first they reflected it. In the postcolonial 1970s, they were modelled after U.S. fraternities. They attracted top students and were meant to foster pan-African unity and Nigeria’s future leaders.
When the country descended into widespread corruption after its oil boom, the fraternities split into factions and violently sought power on campuses, trying to control grades and student politics and gain the loyalty of the richest, best-connected students.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, the groups inspired terror: Students were hacked to death or shot in their sleep, and professors were murdered in their offices in what seemed to be random attacks. Researchers say such crimes were often assigned to new members in their late teens to prove their allegiance after a painful hazing in an isolated cemetery or forest.
“Sometimes, they are given some tough assignments like raping a very popular female student or a female member of the university staff,” Adewale Rotimi wrote in a 2005 scholarly article.
Raping the daughters of rich and powerful families, or the girlfriends of enemies, was another tactic of the groups to prove their dominance, Ifeanyi Ezeonu wrote in 2013.
In addition to innocent victims, one West African organization fighting cult violence says more than 1,700 fraternity members died in inter-group wars in a 10-year span. The groups were outlawed, and much of their ritualistic element – night-time ceremonies, code words – seemed to evolve to avoid detection, said Ogaga Ifowodo, who was a student in Nigeria during the 1980s and later taught at Cornell and Texas State universities.
“Early on … you could distinguish them by their costume,” he said. “The Black Axe, they tended to wear black berets, black shirt and jeans.”
The transformation was not a coincidence, Mr. Ifowodo said.
“At that time, we were under military dictatorships, and they had actually propped up the now-secret cults as a way of weakening the students’ movements,” he said. “It violates something that I think is sacred to an academic community, which is bringing into campus a kind of Mafia ethos.”
But this does not explain whether, or how, the fraternities could morph into a sophisticated global crime syndicate.
In Nigeria, the groups are not associated with fraud, said Etannibi Alemika, who teaches at Nigeria’s University of Jos. Mr. Ifowodo agreed. However, he also backed Toronto Police’s conclusion that Black Axe is one and the same as the Neo-Black Movement. In a briefing document posted online, Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board says the two are closely linked, but speculates that the Black Axe is a “splinter group” of the NBM.
The NBM is known to carry out fraud, said Jonathan Matusitz, a professor at the University of Central Florida who has studied Nigerian fraternities. He said the group’s members have also been linked, mostly in Nigeria, to drug trafficking, pimping, extortion, and the falsification or copying of passports and credit cards.
“I think that the NBM movement is more about scamming people, and it has some associations with the Black Axe, which kills people,” he said. “Have they joined forces to have like a super-group? I hope not.”
Despite police fears, several people interviewed by The Globe, mostly business owners, said they had never heard of the Black Axe before the police news conference last week.
Kingsley Jesuorobo, a Toronto lawyer who has many Nigerian-Canadian clients, said he has never heard of anyone being intimidated by the group.
Mr. Jesuorobo said he is familiar with the Black Axe in the Nigerian context, but cannot imagine it posing a real threat in Canada. It is more likely that former members gravitate to each other for social reasons, he said.
“It would be a case of comparing apples and oranges to look at how these guys operate – the impunity that characterizes their actions – in Nigeria, and then sort of come to the conclusion that they can do the same thing here,” he said.
For Nigerian-Canadians, a cultural minority working hard to establish themselves, the idea is very troubling, he said.
“If these things are true, it would be a bad omen for our community,” he said.
*
After confirming her love interest’s $18-million bank balance, Ms. Emami did not hear from him for a few days. When they spoke again, she told him she had worried. He responded that it was a sign of how close they had become; she had sensed something had happened.
The geologist said that during his contract in Turkey, he had been in a mining accident. He was injured and could not get to Istanbul to replace his phone and laptop, which had been destroyed, so would she buy new ones and send them by courier? Ms. Emami went to the Apple Store at Fairview Mall and called him, asking if he could pay with his credit card over the phone. He said the store would not allow it, and the employee agreed. So she bought the $4,000 laptop and phone and shipped them.
A few days later, he called again: He needed $80,000 to pay the salary of an employee, promising to repay with interest. She told him she would have to borrow from her son, but he reassured her, and she wired the money in several instalments.
The day of his flight, a man called and said he was Mr. Franklin’s lawyer and was with him at the Istanbul airport. Someone injured in the mining accident had died, he said, and Mr. Franklin owed $130,000 to his family or he would go to jail.
“He’s calling me, he’s crying to me,” she said. “I didn’t have any choice. I go to friends and everybody I know. Because you know, when you’re trying to be a good person, everybody trusts you. …Whatever I asked, they give me.”
Even a friend of a friend, a cab driver, lent her thousands. “He told me, you know, dollar by dollar I collected this money,” she recalled.
Mr. Franklin sent her details of his rebooked flight, and she promised to pick him up and cook a meal. He would love that, he said; he liked chicken.
“You don’t believe how much food I make for him,” she said.
She was waiting with the packed-up meal the morning of his flight when the phone rang again. It was another lawyer, this time at the Frankfurt airport, he said. Mr. Franklin owed $250,000 in tax before he could leave the country with a valuable stone.
“My heart is just – crash,” she said. “I was crying on the phone. I said, ’Please don’t do this to me. … Why are you doing this to me? I told you from the first day, I’m borrowing this money from people.’”
A man saying he was Mr. Franklin’s son, who also had an Australian accent, called and told her he had remortgaged his house to save his father and might lose custody of his children because of it. Ms. Emami pulled together $158,000. When her bank would not let her transfer the money, she was instructed to meet a man and a woman in person who deposited it into their accounts.
Ms. Emami’s son and her manager at work persuaded her to go to police. When officers told her Mr. Franklin was not real and the money was likely gone for good, they called a psychiatrist to help her grasp the news.
She cannot pay her bills or afford groceries, her credit rating is destroyed and she is hunting for work despite crippling headaches. On Oct. 27, she was served with notice that she will lose her house in Stouffville in 20 days.
“I can’t sleep,” she said recently, crying.
She had always considered it her “duty” to help people in need, she said. Now her friends, even her sons, are angry that the scam impoverished them as well.
“It’s my life, it’s my relationships,” she said. “And after 30 years living here with five kids, you know, I can’t live in the street. I can’t go to the shelter.”
*
Other local women describe the lengths fraudsters went to to blend truth and fiction. One received a forged Ontario provincial contract. Two victims in York said the scammers impersonated an Edmonton mining executive. The fraudsters build Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that seem to be populated by friends and family.
“When we Google them, they do seem real,” one woman said.
Daniel Williams of the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, a federal intelligence-gathering agency on fraud, said the scammers profit from economies of scale. “What they did to you, they were doing to 8,000 people that day,” he said.
The agency gets more calls from fraud victims a day than it can answer, sometimes exceeding 2,000. Staff look for waves of calls complaining of the same methods.
Authorities estimate they are only ever aware of about 1 per cent to 5 per cent of fraud committed globally, Mr. Williams said. Many victims do not believe they have been scammed or will not report it out of embarrassment.
Fraudsters, sometimes using credit checks, also home in on well-off victims for special treatment, Det. Constable Kelly said.
“It’s just like, oh, we’ve got somebody on $100,000 level, let’s steer this to this person,” he said.
The amount taken from Toronto victims alone is “absolutely astonishing,” he said.
“If you were going to distribute cocaine, for example, you have to buy that cocaine from another smuggler somewhere, and you have to put up money for that,” he said.
“In fraud, what is your put-up? What is your overhead? Your commodity that you’re trading in, that you’re selling, is BS. BS is cheap, it’s abundant, it’s infinite. You know, it can be replicated again and again and again and again. … And that’s why it’s a better business.”
Fraudsters based in Canada work with people in Kuala Lumpur, in Tokyo, in Lagos, Det. Constable Kelly said.
At the turn of the 20th century in New York, Italian-owned banks started suffering bombings, and homes were mysteriously burned down. Police heard the incidents happened after warnings from something called the “black hand.” But no officers spoke Italian, and investigations were stymied.
It was not until the 1950s that widespread police crackdowns began. By that time, the group now known as the Mafia had spread around the world and made new alliances. The FBI estimates the organization has about 25,000 members and a quarter-million affiliates worldwide, including about 3,000 in the United States.
Police hope the charge against Mr. Ighedoise will send an early message to Canada’s Axemen. York and Toronto officers are working to confirm connections between the fraud ring that impoverished Ms. Emami and the ring that Mr. Ighedoise is alleged to help lead.
At their recent press conference, they appealed to the Nigerian community to report instances where the Black Axe has “intimidated” others.
They want to know how ambitious the group really is, Det. Constable Trotter said, and how much it is feared.
If Axemen rely on selling stories, he said, the most important one is for their own community: “That [they] have all the power and authority and the propensity for violence that [they] have back home, here in Canada.”
]]>Russia Is Hunting For Its Crashed Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missile And The U.S. Might Be Too - The Drive
►http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23058/russia-is-hunting-for-its-crashed-nuclear-powered-cruise-missile-and-the-u
Russia is reportedly set to launch an operation to recover a prototype of its Burevestnik nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed cruise missile that came down in the Barents Sea in 2017. At the same time, the wreckage presents a prime opportunity for other countries, particularly the United States, to gain major insights into its design and true capabilities.
CNBC was first to report the Russian expedition, citing unnamed U.S. government sources with knowledge of an American intelligence report on the matter, on Aug. 21, 2018. These individuals said that the Kremlin would dispatch three unspecified ships, including one specially configured to recover the missile’s nuclear reactor, but said there was no set timeline for when the operation would begin or how long it might last.
Russia test-fired four Burevestniks in total between November 2017 and February 2018, according to the new information. The longest test flight reportedly lasted over two minutes and saw the weapon travel a total of 22 miles, while the shortest experiment saw the missile fail within seconds, but it still managed to cover a distance of five miles. The missile reportedly uses a nuclear reactor to power its propulsion system, giving it theoretically unlimited range.
The Russians have otherwise been very tight-lipped about the design, which read more about here. So, it’s not surprising that they would want to recover any wrecks both to prevent foreign intelligence services from getting their hands on it and to gather more information for their test program.
The official video below offers the best views of the Burevestnik cruise missile available to date.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuwMsJlM-pg
Though CNBC did not say which Russian ships might be heading out on the recovery mission, it is very possible that the Yantar might be among them. Officially an “oceanographic research vessel,” this spy ship has specialized equipment that can reportedly tap or cut submarine cables and investigate and retrieve objects from depths of up to 18,000 feet.
In 2017, the vessel reportedly sailed off the coast of Syria to recover the remnants of two fighter jets, a Su-33 and a Mig-29KR, that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea during operations from Russia’s aircraft carrier Kuznetsov. In that case, the goal was also, at least in part, to make sure other countries could not retrieve the wrecks for their own purposes.
In June 2018, the U.K.’s Royal Navy escorted Yantar through the English Channel as it headed into the North Sea. Pictures showed a Saab SeaEye Tiger deep-sea robot on the ship’s deck. Russia acquired this piece of equipment after the Kursk submarine disaster. The Tiger can reach depths of 3,280 feet and private companies have previously used them to do work at sites with heavy radioactive contamination.
The Russian spy ship Yantar.It’s not clear what state the missile wreckage, or the weapon’s reactor, might be in. We at The War Zone have previously explored in detail what might happen if these weapons came down on land or over water after reports that they were crashing first emerged earlier in 2018. It’s also worth noting that these apparent failures might have been successes depending on the actual test points and would have provided Russia important information for further development of the Burevestnik regardless.
Of course, if the weapon is at all salvageable, the race may be on for the Russians to get it off the bottom of the Barents Sea before anyone else does. The United States has already reportedly been keeping a close eye on the tests and could have a good idea of where the missiles have landed.
If they spread any substantial amount of radioactive material when they came down, it might make them even easier to locate. In February 2017, well before the reported test flights, a U.S. Air Force WC-135 atmospheric reconnaissance aircraft was flying around the Barents Sea on what the service has insisted was a routine mission. This coincided with reports of increased radioactivity in the region, but that might have been linked to leaking Russian nuclear waste facilities.
That U.S. Navy has its own deep sea intelligence gathering and salvage capabilities, notably the super-secret Seawolf-class submarine the USS Jimmy Carter. In September 2017, again before Russia reportedly began firing Burevestniks, that boat returned to its homeport at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in Washington State flying a Jolly Roger flag, a symbol representing the completion of a particularly successful mission.
USN
The secretive USS Jimmy Carter flying a Jolly Roger flag as it returns to port in September 2017.The U.S. government has a long history of trying to steal sensitive Russian equipment from the bottom of the ocean, as well. In the 1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency famously used the Hughes Glomar Explorer to pull a portion of the Soviet Golf II-class ballistic missile submarine K-129 up from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
Getting ahold of or even examining pieces of a #Burevestnik, one of six super weapons Russian President Vladimir Putin highlighted in a speech in March 2018, would be a major coup for American intelligence agencies and the U.S. government’s foreign partners. NATO as a whole is also becoming more concerned with Russia’s aggressive policies and various advanced weapons developments, amid threatening training exercises, electronic warfare attacks, and deceptive information operations.
All told, it might be worth keeping an eye on Yantar’s movements to see if she heads out into the waters above the Arctic Circle any time soon.
Update: 5:20pm EST
Canadian analyst Steffan Watkins has found that Russia’s Akademik Primakov, a seismic research vessel has been recently sailing a very deliberate pattern in the Kara Sea, which is to the east of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. To the west of Novaya Zemlya is the Barents Sea and the area was home to Soviet nuclear weapon testing.
@steffanwatkins
Russian seismic research vessel Akademik Primakov (MMSI:273392760) is certainly looking for something in the Kara Sea at 5kn. (Before you get too excited, it could be mapping the Arctic shelf, to aid in Russian claims to it.)It is possible that the initial report of where the missile went down was inaccurate and that it instead crashed into the Kara Sea. However, as Watkins notes, the Akademik Primakov is more likely mapping the region. The Russian company JSC Sevmorneftegeofizika acquired the ship in June 2017 specifically to conduct geological exploration activities in the Arctic Shelf.
]]>Cryptocurrency Trading Tools and Signals: AI Is The Next Frontier
▻https://hackernoon.com/cryptocurrency-trading-tools-and-signals-ai-is-the-next-frontier-4e66ee3
Everyone talks about the volatility of the cryptocurrency market, it’s both the pro and the con of crypto trading making it potentially highly profitable and incredibly difficult to manage.There’s a ton of new tools out there, tools designed to mirror stock trading signals, trading tools that rely on quant analyst insights, tools for calculating, managing trades and portfolios. With the acceleration of technology growth, there are even new Ai trading tools in development, such as RoninAi coming later this summer, not to be confused with algorithmic trading or bots.What makes Ai so great for crypto trading?Ai machine learning technology is unique in how it works. I can tell it what I want it to do, like analyze and predict the crypto market like the top analysts (output), give it all the (...)
#ai-next-frontier #crypto-trading-tools #ai-frontiers #crypto-trading #cryptotradingsignals
]]>Strategies to Implement in a #data Center Disaster for iCloud Recovery
▻https://hackernoon.com/strategies-to-implement-in-a-data-center-disaster-for-icloud-recovery-fc
Photo by antas singh from PexelsDo you know that in the current information economy, data is the fuel which keeps the engines running? This fuel comes expensive as according to Gartner, an average enterprise suffers a loss of $300,000 for every hour of system downtime. There are other estimates as well that range as high as $500,000.Because of the integral role played by the data, its protection and its ability to generate customer value have become the foremost concern of the executives. Many businesses either have business-continuity(BC) or disaster-recovery(DR) plans. The largest organizations have data centers not just around their country but in different parts of the world too.What Are You Planning?The business analyst firm 452 did research and found that 82 percent of the (...)
#cloud-computing #data-center #data-center-disaster #icloud-recovery
]]>Trump’s ‘America First’ Policy Could Leave U.S. Defense Industry Behind – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/18/trumps-america-first-policy-could-leave-u-s-defense-industry-behind
#America_Last (appel de une…)
Signs that President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy could harm U.S. businesses and curb the United States’ clout around the world surfaced this week in an unexpected place—a small town outside London, during the world’s largest civil and military air event.
The biennial gathering at the #Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom brings together military officials, diplomats, and arms dealers from around the world for plane-watching and deal-making. In other years, the United States has sent the Defense Department’s top weapons buyers, and top-end American products, such as the F-35 stealth fighter jet, have taken center stage.
But this year’s event is being held in the shadow of Trump’s most controversial policies: his erratic approach to foreign affairs and his economic protectionism, including steep tariffs he has imposed on steel and aluminum.
Those measures and the resulting uncertainty are prompting some European countries to go their own way on major industry projects, including the development of a next-generation fighter jet, potentially leaving U.S. firms behind.
“I think it is forcing Europe together in ways that have unanticipated consequences for the U.S. defense industry,” said Byron Callan, an analyst with Capital Alpha Partners.
[…]
So it came as no surprise when the Trump administration announced the decision to send a large delegation to help sell U.S. products at Farnborough, including top officials such as Navarro. The administration also used the opportunity to roll out the Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) Policy, also known as the “Buy America” plan, an initiative to improve U.S. arms transfer processes and increase the competitiveness of U.S.-made products.
But the U.S. government showing at Farnborough was disappointing from the start of the weeklong exhibition Monday. Navarro pulled out at the last minute, as did Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer; Heidi Grant, the U.S. Air Force’s head of international affairs; and other U.S. government officials. At the show itself, only five U.S. military aircraft appeared on static display in the Defense Department corral that normally showcases products built for the armed services by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and other U.S. defense giants.
[…]
“It’s the lowest number of aircraft in the U.S. corral I’ve ever seen,” said Joel Johnson, an analyst with the Teal Group. “There’s this huge push in theory to go sell American … but the U.S. government [showing] in all its majesty is the smallest I’ve seen in all my years at trade shows.”
]]>Monster Hunter World concerns trigger 13% drop for Capcom shares
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-07-11-monster-hunter-world-concerns-trigger-13-percent-drop-for-
US analyst predicts “significant risk of sales decline” as console version slows ahead of PC launch
]]>Morgan Stanley: Google should give out free smart speakers to beat Amazon
▻https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/28/morgan-stanley-google-should-give-out-free-smart-speakers-to-beat-ama.html
Quand c’est gratuit, c’est toi le produit... once again.
One top Wall Street firm believes Google’s parent company, Alphabet, needs take dramatic measures to compete with the success of the Amazon Echo.
Morgan Stanley told its clients that the internet giant should defend its retail ad sales turf by giving away its Home Mini devices, and it wouldn’t cost that much.
“We argue Alphabet needs more devices/smart speakers in people’s homes. The growth of voice shopping combined with Amazon’s expected install base advantage could threaten long term growth in Alphabet’s high-monetizing retail search category,” analyst Brian Nowak said in a note Thursday. “Like the mobile transition when Alphabet gave Android to OEMs and began paying Apple to power Safari search, we believe Alphabet should give away a Google Home Mini to every US (arguably global) household.”
Nowak estimates Amazon will have 62 percent share of the U.S. smart speaker market at year-end 2018 versus 33 percent for Alphabet. The analyst projects more than 70 percent of U.S. households will own a smart speaker with voice commerce capabilities by 2022. He says it will “only” cost Alphabet $3.3 billion, which is a “small price to pay” given the opportunity.
“We see voice shopping likely leading to faster eCommerce adoption…so in our view, the only question is whether/how much Alphabet will participate in voice commerce monetization,” he said. “More aggressive investment in a Google Home Mini giveaway could also drive the sum of parts [valuation] narrative.”
Nowak also predicts Alphabet will miss the second-quarter earnings per share Wall Street consensus estimate by 1 percent due to currency effects and investment spending.
He reiterated his overweight rating on the company’s shares and raised his price target to $1,250 from $1,200 because of Alphabet’s long-term opportunity to increase its profits.
]]>How US sanctions on Iran can help Russia win trade battle with European rivals — RT Business News
▻https://www.rt.com/business/428532-russia-iran-us-sanctions
Russian companies working in Iran have an advantage over European rivals – they are already under US sanctions, so they have nothing to lose, TeleTrade Chief Analyst Petr Pushkarev told RT.
“Russian companies will continue doing business in Iran as if nothing happened at all – in oil, gas and nuclear energy. They have this advantage over the Europeans, who, like Total or Airbus, have major businesses in the US and are listed on American exchanges,” Pushkarev said.
India & Iran drop dollar in oil trade to bypass US sanctions – report
Companies from Russia can simply ignore Washington’s threats of imposing fines for trade with Iran or for conducting projects in Iran, the analyst says. Russian trade with Iran accounts only for $2 billion, but it can grow significantly, Pushkarev notes.
“This is quite real because Russia and Iran are natural allies in Syria. #Rosneft has preliminary agreements with Iran worth up to $30 billion, and even if only a small part of these plans are implemented with Russia, and not with European partners, it can be a significant gain for Moscow,” he said.
Another possible sphere for boosting business ties between Moscow and Tehran are contracts for the delivery of civil aviation aircraft, Pushkarev says. Iran planned the purchase of 100 aircraft from Boeing, 80 from Airbus and another 20 from the Franco-Italian ATR. “Russia will have a chance to deliver its MC-21 jets, if Iran agrees to wait for a couple of years, since the aircraft is just on the way and ends the testing phase,” he said.
Une ouverture à l’exportation pour le tout nouveau Irkout #MS-21 ?
Irkout MS-21 — Wikipédia
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irkout_MS-21
En 2009, Irkut annonce une première sortie de chaîne en 2014 et une certification européenne en 2016. Sa version de base MS-21-200 de 150 places devrait être suivie du MS-21-300 de 180 places et du MS-21-400 de 210 places.
En septembre 2014, à la suite de retards, on déclare qu’il fera son premier vol en avril 2016 et entrera en service en 2017. Il est prévu d’en construire 50 exemplaires par an à partir de 2018.
Le MS-21-300 effectue son premier vol le 28 mai 2017 à Irkoutsk. Il est rejoint par un deuxième prototype le 12 mai 2018.
]]>Fortnite sold 5 million battle passes on the first day of Season 3
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-05-25-fortnite-sold-5-million-battle-passes-on-the-first-day-of-
Analyst Michael Pachter relates success, predicts more games moving to cosmetics as a result
]]>A Trump Darling, Gas Exports, Set to Gain as Iran Deal Dies - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-10/shale-gas-exporters-to-gain-as-iran-move-encourages-drilling
Another darling of the Trump administration is poised to gain from the Iran deal breakup as oil surges: Natural gas exports.
With the move to curb Iran’s oil output encouraging more shale drilling, prices for natural gas produced alongside crude in West Texas could crater, falling to zero some days, according to Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. Already, the gas sold at West Texas’ Waha hub is down 51 percent for the year.
That’s bad for producers selling the fuel in the U.S., but good for companies that export it in tankers. As the market for liquefied natural gas grows in Asia, being able to source gas at its cheapest should give U.S. exports a leg up.
[…]
“I doubt this was a driving factor by the administration” to impose sanctions because “we just don’t have that much capacity built up for LNG exports,” said Anastacia Dialynas, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. But indirectly, she said, “if it results in a structurally higher oil price, it definitely makes U.S. cargoes more attractive.”
]]>Goldman asks: ’Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’
►https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled “The Genome Revolution.”
“The potential to deliver ’one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies,” analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. “While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.”
(…) “GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients,” the analyst wrote. “In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”
#économie #recherche #pharma #biens_publics #merci @archiloque
Suspected Chinese #Cyber_Espionage Group Observed Targeting U.S. Maritime Industry – gCaptain
▻http://gcaptain.com/suspected-chinese-cyber-espionage-group-observed-targeting-u-s-maritime-in
#FireEye, a leading cybersecurity company, released new research on Friday shedding light on activity from suspected Chinese cyber espionage group, dubbed #TEMP.Periscope, targeting U.S. engineering and maritime industries.
Since at least early 2018, FireEye has observed an ongoing wave of intrusions suspected to be from TEMP.Periscope, the company said. These intrusions have primarily targeted engineering and maritime entities, especially those connected to #South_China_Sea issues.
TEMP.Periscope, which has been active since at least 2013, has primarily focused on maritime-related targets across multiple verticals including engineering firms, shipping and transportation, manufacturing, defense, government offices, and research universities.
Identified victims were mostly found in the United States, although organizations in Europe and at least one in Hong Kong have also been affected.
According to FireEye, TEMP.Periscope had gone quiet just like many other Chinese groups after the Obama-Xi agreement in late 2015. However, the group was observed resurfacing in the summer of 2017, and it has been particularly active since this past February.
“The organizations targeted by TEMP.Periscope have a connection to the ongoing disputes in the South China Sea,” said Fred Plan, Senior Analyst at FireEye. “They or their customers are involved in military and defense, or the shipping business, or they are developing technologies that would be advantageous to the defense industry or governments in the region. Because of the group’s tendency to target engineering organizations we believe the group is seeking technical data that can help inform strategic decision-making. Hypothetically, this could be used to answer questions like ‘what is the range and effectiveness of this marine radar system?’ or ‘how precisely can a system detect and identify activities at sea?’”
]]>