Global News Synopsis | Week 26 | 24th

Steemians - Check out my synopsis and curation below of significant global happenings during week 26. All sources have been provided in "Reference Links" section at the end of this synopsis. 2 new sections have been added to the weekly synopsis - Technocracy and Corporatocracy.

Let me know your feedback in the comments section below.

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Geo-Politics

1. Update on Yemen war situation – On June 30, the Yemeni Missiles Force [loyal to the Houthis] announced that it had launched a new short range “ballistic missile” at a gathering of Saudi-led coalition troops on the western coast of Yemen. A day earlier, coalition forcers were targeted with a missile of the very same type. On June 29, units of the Yemeni Navy [loyal to the Houthis] foiled an a landing of the Saudi-led coalition on the western coast of Yemen, according to the Yemeni Saba News Agency (NSA). A source in the Yemeni Navy told SNA that coalition naval forces suffered from “catastrophic loses” during the failed landing attempt. On June 29, the Saudi-led coalition and its Yemeni proxies launched a new attack on the district center of al-Tuhayat and the town of Zabid along the western coast of Yemen, according to the Sky News Arabia TV. Yemeni sources told the UAE-based TV channel that coalition forces advanced more than 30km towards the two positions. Sky News Arabia said that Saudi-led coalition captured 60 fighters of the Houthis and killed many others during its advance towards al-Tuhayat and Zabid.
On June 24, the Yemeni Missiles Force [loyal to the Houthis] announced that it had launched a salvo of Burkan-2H ballistic missiles at the information center of the Defense Ministry of Saudi Arabia and other military positions in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

2. Thousands of Palestinians once again descended on the Israeli-Gazan border on Friday for the latest showdown with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The Israeli forces responded with live fire as rioters hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails and also sent incendiary balloons across the fence which sparked at least 15 fires in Israel, the Times of Israel reports. Two people, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed during Friday's protests at five points along the border, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. Another 310 were injured in exchanges with the IDF, many of whom suffered tear gas poisoning.

The protesters also managed to take down an Israeli surveillance drone that was trying to map out their location and movements. An online video, yet to be verified, showed a small UAV being taken down by what appears to be a slingshot.

3. Iran has opened a uranium feedstock plant in the absence of the nuclear agreement. The nuclear plant that remained closed for nine years has now reopened Iran’s atomic energy agency (AEOI) said on Wednesday. Tehran prepares to increase uranium enrichment capacity if a nuclear deal with world powers falls apart, reported Reuters. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the AEOI to start the necessary preparations to upgrade the country’s enrichment capacity in case the European efforts at a world deal fail.

The UF6 factory is part of the Isfahan uranium conversion facility, according to AEOI’s statement on its website. The AEOI said on Wednesday that in response to Khamenei’s order and Trump’s renunciation of the deal, a plant for the production of UF6, the feedstock for centrifuge machines that enrich uranium, had been relaunched and a barrel of yellow cake has been delivered there.

4. Incumbent Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won the majority of votes, the head of the electoral board said. This would mark the second consecutive term for Erdogan, but the first one under “a new system.” With over 97.2 percent of votes counted, the head of Turkey's High Electoral Board (YSK) says Erdogan has secured more than 50 percent of the votes needed for the victory. Following the failed coup, Turkey has been under a state of emergency for nearly two years and has seen a widespread crackdown on alleged supporters of Gulen. Around 160,000 people have been detained, and thousands of public servants and soldiers have been fired.

5. Trump-Putin summit to be held at Helsinki on July 16th. President Trump has pushed for improved relations with the Kremlin, even inviting Putin to the White House during a March phone call. Efforts to arrange the summit started to intensify in mid-June. Bolton said during yesterday's press conference that both Trump and Putin shared a belief that their face-to-face meeting will improve relations between the two countries.

6. The US military has formally ended a 70-year presence in the South Korean capital of Seoul on Friday, with the opening of a new military headquarters further south in the city of Pyeongtaek. The US has had forces in Seoul since shortly after World War 2. The new base is farther south, and therefore out of the range of North Korean artillery. The relocation has been planned for some time, though the priority is clearly lessened with North Korea in talks to relocate its artillery, and peace talks underway.

7.Video footage of surgical strikes against Pakistan conducted by India, across the Line of Control (LoC) that took place on September 29, 2016 was aired on TV news channels on Wednesday. The strike were conducted in 2016 when the the Indian Army destroyed terrorist launch pads and killed many terrorists. The eight-minute-long video shows how the Special Forces of the Indian Army crossed over the LoC and destroyed the targets on the Pakistani side of the LoC. Given the almost 2 year delay by the government in releasing any official footage, critics are alluding these might be doctored/edited videos, released to boost BJPs declining approval ratings before 2019 elections.

Geo-Economics

1. Update on the Eagle -Dragon trade wrestle - China's central bank announced it would cut the Required Reserve Ratio (RRR) for some banks by 0.5% effective July 5, just over two months after the PBOC did a similar cut on April 17. The objective is to release more liquidity into the market, reduce companies’ debt burdens and help cleaning up banks’ balance sheets(as we had reported on Chinese Corporate defaults in Week 23, snip below).

Separately, the 200 billion yuan freed for smaller lenders such as the postal bank and city commercial lenders will be used to support funding for smaller businesses. It comes amid concerns that the growing trade war between the US and China could further impair the already sharply slowing down Chinese economy.

To up the ante against US in the ongoing trade war, China has made US imports to China 6% more expensive than they were in Q1 - via the "stealth tariff" of currency devaluation.

The Eagle camp was no less aggressive- the US administration has decided to restrict China’s ability to invest in or acquire US companies in the industries identified by Beijing in its so-called Made in China 2025 plan. This level of dramatic escalation implies the China hawks have taken the upper hand in The White House.

Where do we go from here?

2. Indian rupee crashes record low against USD- Brent crude’s sustained gains since the middle of 2017 has led to a widening of the nation’s current-account and fiscal deficits at a time when global funds have become selective about their emerging-market investments. As Bloomberg notes, overseas investors have reduced holdings of rupee-denominated government and corporate bonds by $6.1 billion, and pulled $785 million from equities since the beginning of 2018.The withdrawals have made the rupee the worst-performing currency in Asia, spurring analysts to put out bearish forecasts.

The Rupee is not alone - All emerging currencies seem to be losing ground against USD at the same time. Emerging markets are getting walloped by a surge in crude-oil prices, amplifying a downturn already under way amid a U.S. dollar that has mostly rallied in the first half of 2018.

3. Deutsche Bank is not off the hook yet - According to WSJ calculations, Deutsche Bank’s market capitalization has fallen to a level that would see it removed from the Euro Stoxx 50, taking the lender out of the orbit of exchange-traded-funds with €42.5 billion ($49.1 billion) in assets that follow this index. When companies are dropped by indexes, the funds that track them must begin to sell those stocks and buy shares in the recently-added companies.

Crypto

1. Bank of Finland Releases Scathing Crypto Report, Calls Digital Currency a “Fallacy”- The paper, written by Aleksi Grym, Adviser on Digitalization and Head of the Digital Central Bank process in the Financial Stability and Statistics Department. It aims to explain how cryptocurrencies’ fundamental nature “shows how poorly understood the concept of money itself still is today” and how the Internet and social media have “muddled our sense of fact and fiction.” In Grym’s words, cryptocurrencies are not real currencies but instead “accounting systems for non-existent assets.” He makes the argument that digital ledger technologies, like blockchain, are actually the same as other record keeping systems, but that their implementation for crypto is “unrelated to the fundamental characteristics of money:”

2. Japan’s most popular messaging platform, Line, that has previously shown a sharp interest in crypto, now plans to open its own digital currency exchange Bitbox in July.

3.A new strain of malware, that has been dubbed “CryptoCurrency Clipboard Hijackers”, scans the clipboard application for crypto wallet addresses and replaces it with ones that belong to the hackers. If a user does not double check the address before sending a transaction, it will be sent to the rogue one and the newly purchased coin will be lost to the attackers.

4. The Tron (TRX) crypto-currency, that has established itself in the top trading echelons of coins with an estimated market capitalization of US$2.56 billion, has now migrated to an independent public blockchain. On June 4, Tron founder Justin Sun tweeted “#TRON Independence Day… starts now, join us to be part of the free, decentralized internet”.

5. Recent floods in the Sichuan province of China have reportedly resulted in heavy damage to a major cryptocurrency mining operation in the area. The news was published on a local blockchain and crypto information platform Golden Finance.

Technocracy

1. Chipping frenzy in Sweden - Thousands of people in Sweden have inserted microchips, which can function as contactless credit cards, key cards and even rail cards, into their bodies. Swedish biohackers are generally part of the transhumanist movement. And it is the transhumanists – or more specifically the subgroup “grinders” – who have been inserting NFC chips somewhere between the thumb and the index finger of thousands of Swedes. These are the same microchips that have been used for decades to track animals and packages.

2. The National Security Agency (NSA) is scrubbing several years worth of call records swept up in foreign intelligence surveillance wiretaps that it was never authorized to collect - claiming that "technical irregularities" caused the oversight, according to the agency. A May transparency report revealed that the NSA collected over 500 million US call detail records in 2017 - over 3x the number gathered in 2016.

Any transparency report for Amazon Alexa??

Corporatocracy

1. Netflix is under investigation for allowing what could be considered child porn on its streaming site.
The Argentinian film “Desire” is the movie in question because it includes a graphic scene where two underage girls engage in “sexually suggestive behavior.”

2. Facebook continue unfolding its sinister motives- Facebook has filed a patent for a system that hides audio clips in TV commercials. These sounds would be so high-pitched that they are inaudible to human beings. They would then trigger your phone to record all the background noises in your home. The patent application is called “broadcast content view analysis based on ambient audio recording.” According to The Daily Mail, these secret messages would force your phone to record the audio of the private conversations you have without you even knowing.

Get Off Facebook ASAP

3. Monopolist Amazon expands into Pharma business - with the clever acquisition of PillPack, pulling the rug out from below the feet of the entire pharma industry.
Commenting on the move, Bloomberg writes that the relatively cheap acquisition - Amazon paid only $1 billion for this critical market entry - Loop Capital said that the purchase is a "Trojan horse" for Amazon to become a major pharma player. Meanwhile, Jefferies analyst Brian Tanquilut said the deal presents a large overhang for the retail pharmacy sector - particularly for players like Walgreens Boots Alliance.

4. Short sold Tesla goes desperate to ramp up production - New photographs and drone footage of Tesla's "state of the art" Fremont production tent, which the company is using to "temporarily" boost Model 3 production, show that Tesla is using what has been dubbed "stone age" processes that fly in the face of the "alien dreadnaught" concept that Elon Musk had touted for the company's production. Elon Musk tweeted that the tent produced cars had higher quality than the regular ones!!

Miscellanoeus / Of-Note

1. US Charges Over 600 "Despicable, Greedy People" In Multi-Billion Dollar Healthcare Fraud - the conclusion of a year-long crackdown on opioid overprescribers that led to the indictment of more than 600 people - including 76 doctors - on health-care fraud charges. All told, the DOJ found that the crimes resulted in more than $2 billion in losses for Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare, as well as private insurers.

In a speech announcing the takedown, Attorney General Sessions accused the fraudsters of siphoning off US tax dollars and wasting money that was earmarked for military health care. One doctor was charged with defrauding Medicare of more than $112 million by distributing 2.2 million unnecessary doses of opioids. And 16 of the doctors swept up in the takedown were responsible for circulating more than 20.3 million pills illegally.

More than 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016, and it's likely that total deaths climbed in 2017, possibly past the 70,000 mark.