U.S. President Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary called top U.S. bankers on Sunday amid an ongoing rout on Wall Street and made plans to convene a group of officials known as the “Plunge Protection Team.”

U.S. stocks have fallen sharply in recent weeks on concerns over slowing economic growth, with the S&P 500 index on pace for its biggest percentage decline in December since the Great Depression.

“Today I convened individual calls with the CEOs of the nation’s six largest banks,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Twitter shortly before financial markets were due to open in Asia.

U.S. equity index futures dropped late on Sunday as electronic trading resumed to kick off a holiday-shortened week.

In early trading, the benchmark S&P 500’s e-mini futures contract was off by about a quarter of a percent.

The Treasury said in a statement that Mnuchin talked with the chief executives of Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.

“The CEOs confirmed that they have ample liquidity available for lending,” the Treasury said.

Mnuchin “also confirmed that they have not experienced any clearance or margin issues and that the markets continue to function properly,” the Treasury said.

Mnuchin’s calls to the bankers came amid a partial government shutdown that began on Saturday following an impasse in Congress over Trump’s demand for more funds for a wall on the border with Mexico. Financing for about a quarter of federal government programs expired at midnight on Friday and the shutdown could continue to Jan. 3.

The Treasury said Mnuchin will convene a call on Monday with the president’s Working Group on Financial Markets, which includes Washington’s main stewards of the U.S. financial system and is sometimes referred to as the “Plunge Protection Team.”

The group, which was also convened in 2009 during the latter stage of the financial crisis, includes officials from the Federal Reserve as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Wall Street is also closely following reports that Trump has privately discussed the possibility of firing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Mnuchin said on Saturday Trump told him he had “never suggested firing” Powell.

Trump has criticized the U.S. central bank for raising interest rates this year, which could further dampen economic growth. The Fed’s independence is seen as a pillar of the U.S. financial system.

Mnuchin’s calls come as a range of asset classes have suffered steep losses.

In December alone, the S&P 500 is down nearly 12.5 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite has slumped 13.6 percent. The Nasdaq is now in a bear market, having declined nearly 22 percent from its record high in late August, and the S&P is not far off that level.

Corporate credit markets have been under duress as well, and measures of the investment grade corporate bond market are poised for their worst yearly performance since the 2008 financial crisis.

The high-yield bond market, where companies with the weakest credit profiles raise capital, has not seen a deal all month.

The last time that happened was in November 2008.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

A White House official says tension between a president and the interest-rate setting Federal Reserve is “traditional as part of our system.”

Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney says it should come as no surprise that President Donald Trump is unhappy the central bank, an independent agency, “is raising rates and we think driving down the value of the stock market.”

Speculation about the fate of Trump’s appointed Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, has swirled after Bloomberg News reported that Trump discussed firing Powell after this past week’s rate increase.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tweeted Saturday that Trump has denied ever suggesting that and doesn’t believe he has the right to dismiss Powell.

Mulvaney also tells ABC’s “This Week” that the economy’s “fundamentals are still strong.”

 
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From: MeNeedIt

China and the United States held a vice ministerial-level call on Friday, the second such contact in a week, achieving a “deep exchange of views” on trade imbalances and the protection of intellectual property, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said.

A statement posted on the ministry’s website on Sunday said the two countries “made new progress” on those issues, without specifying further.

It also said China and the United States discussed arrangements for the next call and mutual visits.

On Wednesday, the ministry said Beijing and Washington had held a vice ministerial-level telephone call about trade and economic issues, without providing other details.

The calls took place amid signs of a thaw in a trade dispute between the United States and China, the world’s two largest economies.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping this month agreed to a truce that delayed the planned Jan. 1 U.S. increase of tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods while they negotiate a trade deal.

Chinese Commerce Ministry officials indicated earlier the two countries were in close contact over trade, and any U.S. trade delegation would be welcome to visit.
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From: MeNeedIt

In 2018, sitting leaders relinquished power in South Africa and Ethiopia. Zimbabwe elected a new leader after 37 years of rule by former President Robert Mugabe. Peaceful power transitions were also seen in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Mali. But while many find those trends encouraging, the opposite is also true in countries where some of world’s longest serving leaders continue to hold power. VOA correspondent Mariama Diallo reports on the overall trends that are sparking both hope and worry.
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From: MeNeedIt

A Venetian cloth dyer’s son, Tintoretto spent his entire career in Venice, becoming widely considered the last great painter of the Renaissance.

The lagoon city’s churches and palazzi essentially serve as a permanent retrospective of this native son’s formidable talents in using dramatic color, bold brushstrokes and daringly innovative perspective on often-enormous canvasses.

Still, curators here have encountered challenges when mounting tributes this year to mark the 500th anniversary of his birth.

Some of Tintoretto’s paintings couldn’t be included in the main exhibition, hosted at the landmark Palazzo Ducale (Doges’ Palace), because they couldn’t fit through its 16th-century stone doorways.

And several Venetian churches, where the painter did much of his best work, balked at loaning their masterpieces. Not surprisingly, they are eager for visitors making the Tintoretto pilgrimage to visit their venues and not just the stellar show, which, since opening in September, has drawn more than 100,000 visitors.

​On to Washington

After it closes here Jan. 6, the exhibition travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington for a four-month run starting March 10. That will be the first Tintoretto retrospective outside of Europe.

When Venice last hosted a Tintoretto retrospective, in 1937, church paintings were cut out of their frames, rolled up and carted off to the exhibition. That method would be met with horror by today’s art world, especially since nearly a score of Tintoretto paintings were recently restored, thanks to the Save Venice organization.

“The churches generally felt, and we understood, it didn’t make sense to move his masterpieces across the city,” said Robert Echols, a Boston-based art historian who is one of the curators. Some of those church works will go to the U.S. exhibition, however.

Weeding out impostors

Some of Tintoretto’s greatest works can never travel, of course, and are being celebrated here.

In the Chapter House in the Scuola di San Rocco, admirers can lie on their backs to see Tintoretto’s work, which has been likened to the monumental achievement of Michelangelo in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. Thanks to new lighting and strategically placed mirrors, the Chapter House last month had its own renaissance of sorts. Now visitors can see details in what before had seemed like a gloomy, cavernous room.

Echols and co-curator Frederick Ilchman, chair of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, devoted much of their art historian careers to weeding out paintings that had been dubiously attributed to Tintoretto, whittling down what had been a list of 468 works to just more than 300 paintings of his authorship.

“Tintoretto, to some extent, is a painter who was a victim of his own success,” Echols said.

Tintoretto, a pseudonym of Jacopo Rubusti, obtained so many commissions, particularly in his later years, that he farmed out some work, notably to his son, Domenico. While his genius was acknowledged in his own day, some works done by imitators or his workshop had been incorrectly attributed to Tintoretto in successive centuries.

Tintoretto cleverly maneuvered to snag commissions from nobles and churches during the heady years of the sea-going Most Serene Republic of Venice.

“The Shakespeare play is not the ‘Merchant of Florence,’ it’s the ‘Merchant of Venice,’” Ilchman noted, recounting how Tintoretto sometimes offered discounts to ensure commissions didn’t go to his rivals, which included Tiepolo, Titian and Veronese.

Scandalous at times

Tintoretto’s imaginative use of perspective and his dynamic, inventive interpretations of mythological and religious themes are on convincing display, including one that sparked scandal in his day. In “St. Louis, St. George and The Princess,” a dragon’s head emerges from between the legs of a woman and from under her billowing, burnt-orange gown.

In the “The Abduction of Helen,” the kidnapped woman, with a nipple poking out above her blouse, seems to be tumbling out of the frame toward the viewer.

Tintoretto had an impressive production of portraits. The exhibition displays many of his finest in a long, narrow hall, as if in a noble family’s own palazzo.

Riveting self-portraits — one of Tintoretto in his 20s on loan by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and another of Tintoretto as an old man sent by the Louvre — open and close the retrospective.

The Venice show to honor Tintoretto’s birth anniversary began in 2018. The companion Washington show starts in 2019. The different years are fitting, for, while the year of his death, 1594, is undisputed, and his grave prominent in a Venice church decorated with some of his masterpieces, historians aren’t sure just when he was born. The artist’s birth year is often written as 1518/1519.
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From: MeNeedIt

It was another miserable day on Wall Street as a series of big December plunges continued, putting stocks on track for their worst month in a decade.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 464 points Thursday, bringing its losses to more than 1,700 points since Friday.

The benchmark S&P 500 index has slumped 10.6 percent this month and is almost 16 percent below the peak it reached in late September.

The steady gains of this spring and summer now fell like a distant memory. As we’ve entered the fall, investors started to worry that global economic growth is cooling off and that the U.S. could slip into a recession in the next few years. The S&P 500 is on track for its first annual loss in a decade.

The technology stocks that have led the market in recent years are now dragging it down. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite is now down 19.5 percent from the record high it reached in August.

The market swoon is coming even as the U.S. economy is on track to expand this year at the fastest pace in 13 years. Markets tend to move, however, on what investors anticipate will happen well into the future, so it’s not uncommon for stocks to sink even when the economy is humming along.

Slowing economy a concern

Right now, markets are concerned about the potential for a slowing economy and two threats that could make the situation worse: the ongoing trade dispute between the U.S. and China, which has lasted most of this year, and rising interest rates, which act as a brake on economic growth by making it more expensive for businesses and individuals to borrow money.

The selling in the last two days came after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the fourth time this year and signaled it was likely to continue raising rates next year, although at a slower rate than it previously forecast.

Scott Wren, senior global equity strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, said investors felt Fed Chairman Jerome Powell came off as unconcerned about the state of the U.S. economy, despite deepening worries on Wall Street that growth could slow even more in 2019 and 2020. Wren said investors want to know that the Fed is keeping a close eye on the situation.

“He may be a little overconfident,” said Wren. “The Fed needs to be paying attention to what’s going on.”

Powell also acknowledged that the Fed’s decisions are getting trickier because they need to be based on the most up-to-date figures on jobs, inflation, and economic growth. For the last three years the Fed told investors weeks in advance that it was almost certain to increase rates. But things are less certain now, and the market hates uncertainty

‘Completely overblown’

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the market’s reaction to the Fed was “completely overblown.”

Investors have responded to a weakening outlook for the U.S. economy by selling stocks and buying ultra-safe U.S. government bonds. The bond-buying has the effect of sending long-term bond yields lower, which reduces interest rates on mortgages and other kinds of long-term loans. That’s generally good for the economy.

At the same time, the reduced bond yields can send a negative signal on the economy. Sharp drops in long-term bond yields are often seen as precursors to recessions.

The S&P 500 index skidded 39.54 points, or 1.6 percent, to 2,467.42. The Dow fell 464.06 points, or 2 percent, to 22,859.60 after sinking as much as 679.

The Nasdaq fell 108.42 points, or 1.6 percent, to 6,528.41. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies dropped another 23.23 points, or 1.7 percent, to 1,326.

Stocks for smaller companies suffer

Smaller company stocks have been crushed during the recent market slump because slower growth in the U.S. will have an outsize effect on their profits. Relative to their size, they also tend to carry more debt than larger companies, which could be a problem in a slower economy with higher interest rates.

The Russell 2000 is down almost 24 percent from the peak it reached in late August and it’s down 13.6 percent for the year to date. The S&P 500, which tracks larger companies, is down 7.7 percent.

The possibility of a partial shutdown of the federal government also loomed over the market on Thursday, as funding for the government runs out at midnight Friday. In general, shutdowns don’t affect the U.S. economy or the market much unless they stretch out for several weeks, which would delay paychecks for federal employees.

Oil prices still dropping 

Oil prices continued to retreat. Benchmark U.S. crude fell 4.8 percent to $45.88 a barrel in New York, and it’s dropped 40 percent since early October. Brent crude, used to price international oils, slipped 5 percent to $54.35 a barrel in London.

After early gains, bond prices headed lower. The yield on the two-year Treasury rose to 2.87 percent from 2.65 percent, while the 10-year note rose to 2.80 percent from 2.77 percent.

The gap between those two yields has shrunk this year. When the 10-year yield falls below the two-year yield, investors call it an “inverted yield curve.” That hasn’t happened yet, but investors fear it will. Inversions are often taken as a sign a recession is coming, although it’s not a perfect signal and when recessions do follow inversions in the yield curve, it can take a year or more.

“The bond market has been telling us something for about a year, and that is there’s not going to be much inflation and there’s not going to be a sustained surge in economic growth,” said Wren, of Wells Fargo.

Around the world

In France, the CAC 40 lost 1.8 percent and Germany’s DAX fell 1.4 percent. The British FTSE 100 slipped 0.8 percent. Indexes in Italy, Portugal and Spain took bigger losses.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 lost 2.8 percent and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gave up 1 percent. Seoul’s Kospi shed 0.9 percent.

As investors adjusted to the prospect of a weaker economy and lower long-term interest rates, the dollar fell to 111.11 yen from 112.36 yen. The euro rose to $1.1469 from $1.1368.

The British pound rose to $1.2671 from $1.2621. That sent the price of gold higher, and it gained 0.9 percent to $1,267.9 an ounce. Silver rose 0.3 percent to $14.87 an ounce and copper, which is considered an indicator of economic growth, fell 0.7 percent to $2.70 a pound.

Other fuel prices also fell. Wholesale gasoline lost 4.6 percent to $1.32 a gallon and heating oil slid 3.1 percent to $1.75 a gallon. Natural gas gave up 3.8 percent to $3.58 per 1,000 cubic feet. 
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From: MeNeedIt

The U.S.-China trade war is spooking potential investors in soybean crushing plants planned for Wisconsin and New York state, developers said, casting doubt on the future of a sector that had been a rare bright spot in the U.S. farm economy.

Crushers in the United States have been posting near-record profits by snapping up cheap and plentiful soybeans no longer purchased by China and making soymeal and soy oil for export to Europe and Southeast Asia.

But margins are not predictable as the United States and China attempt to resolve their trade differences before a March 2 deadline, adding another puzzle as investors parse out the costs and impacts of a trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies.

WSBCP LLC, or the Wisconsin Soybean Crushing Plant, is struggling to find backers for the state’s first soy processing facility because of uncertainty in agricultural and financial markets over the trade conflict, said Phil Martini, chief executive of industrial contractor C.R. Meyer & Sons Co, who is overseeing the project.

“I’m not a mental giant, but it doesn’t take one to think people are uncertain about what’s going on,” Martini said. “The crush margin is very good, but it can go the other way.”

China bought about 60 percent of U.S. raw soybean exports last year in deals worth $12 billion, but has mostly been buying beans from Brazil since imposing a 25 percent tariff on American soybeans in July in retaliation for U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping agreed on Dec. 1 not to impose additional tariffs for 90 days, a truce that spurred Chinese purchases of a few million tons of U.S. soybeans this month.

It is unclear when or if Beijing will remove its soy tariff, a move that would spur more deals and lift U.S. soybean prices in a boon to U.S. farmers and a blow to crushing margins.

Construction on the $150 million plant in Waupun, Wisconsin, is set to begin in 2019, with a projected opening in 2020, according to a June statement from the city, which owns the land where the facility would be located.

Martini said it remains to be seen whether the timetable needs to be postponed. He is also looking for livestock producers to commit to buying the plant’s products.

Kathy Schlieve, Waupun’s economic director, said the project would likely be delayed because the investor pool is not finalized.

“It’s different dynamic and we’re really trying to understand that,” Schlieve said about the trade war.

Shift from 2017

The uncertainty is a turnaround from last year when farmer-owned agricultural cooperatives were building new soybean crushing plants at the fastest rate in two decades after several years of large crops.

U.S. grain merchant Archer Daniels Midland Co set a new record for crush volumes in the third quarter and benefited from strong margins.

But after months of soybean futures prices hovering around 10-year lows due to the lack of Chinese buying, farmers have little room for new ventures.

“There isn’t a lot of extra money out there to invest in something like that,” said John Heisdorffer, an Iowa farmer and chairman of the American Soybean Association.

New York plant

The trade war also prolonged the search for investors for a $54 million soybean crushing plant that St. Lawrence Soyway Company is planning for Massena, New York, near the border with Canada, CEO Doug Fisher said.

Fisher tried to win over investors worried by the trade war with charts and graphs showing how the conflict improved margins for U.S. crushing plants.

“These tariffs with China rattle them, when in fact they have increased crush plant profits,” Fisher said.

As of Wednesday, the company had raised about 85 percent of the total, Fisher said.

St. Lawrence Soyway’s plant is projected to process soybeans into feed for dairy cows. The livestock industry has also been hit by Chinese tariffs on dairy products and pork, though.

“As those farmers are not doing as well, their ability to buy meal at higher prices is not there,” Fisher said.
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From: MeNeedIt

When drones buzzing over the runway forced London’s busy Gatwick Airport to shut down, many travelers wondered why it’s so hard for authorities to stop such intruders.

Shoot them down, some said. Jam their signals, others suggested.

Experts say it’s not that easy.

Britain and the U.S. prohibit drones from being flown too high or too close to airports and other aircraft. In Britain, it is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

Still, there is little to stop a drone operator bent on disrupting air traffic, which British officials say was the case with the Gatwick incident that began Wednesday evening.

The number of close calls between drones and aircraft has increased dramatically in recent years as the popularity of drones has soared. Basic models for amateurs sell for under $100; larger, more sophisticated ones can cost hundreds more.

Britain had 120 reports of close encounters in 2018, up from 93 last year. In 2014, there were six, according to the U.K. Airprox Board, which catalogs air safety incidents.

In the United States, there were nearly 2,300 drone sightings at airports in the year ending June 30, according to Federal Aviation Administration records. Runways have been temporarily closed, but an FAA spokesman said he could not recall drones ever leading to the shutdown of a U.S. airport.

Drone dangers

A drone hit a small charter plane in Canada in 2017; it landed safely. In another incident that same year, a drone struck a U.S. Army helicopter in New York but caused only minor damage.

“This has gone from being what a few years ago what we would have called an emerging threat to a more active threat,” said Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and author of askthepilot.com. “The hardware is getting bigger and heavier and potentially more lethal, and so we need a way to control how these devices are used and under what rules.”

Even small drones could cause severe consequences by damaging a helicopter’s rotor or getting sucked into a jet engine. A drone could also crash through a windshield, incapacitating the pilot, though that’s mainly seen as a risk to small aircraft.

“On an airliner, because of the thickness of the glass, I think it’s pretty unlikely, unless it’s a very large drone,” said John Cox, a former airline pilot and now a safety consultant.

Drones that collide with planes could cause more damage than birds of the same size because of their solid motors, batteries and other parts, according to a study released by the FAA.

Stopping drones

Authorities could capture drones with anti-drone “net guns” that fire lightweight netting, but such equipment can be pricey and have limited range, and it is not widely used.

As for taking one down with a rifle, hitting a small, fast-moving object like a drone would be difficult even for a marksman, and the bullet could hit someone, experts say. There’s also the risk of damage or injury from a falling drone.

Jamming systems could disrupt the signals between drone and operator, but that could interfere with the many vital communication systems in use at an airport, said Marc Wagner, CEO of Switzerland-based Drone Detection Sys.

Local laws might also prevent the use of such electronic countermeasures. Wagner said it is OK in Switzerland to use jamming systems, while Britain and the U.S. prohibit them.

Dutch police experimented with using eagles to swoop down on drones and pluck them out of the sky over airports or large events, but ended the program last year, reportedly because the birds didn’t always follow orders.

“The only method is to find the pilot and to send someone to the pilot to stop him,” Wagner said.

That can be done with frequency spectrum analyzers that can triangulate the drone operator’s position, but “the technology is new and it’s not commonly used,” said Wagner, whose company sells such gear and other counter-drone technology, including radar, jammers and powerful cameras.

China’s DJI Ltd., the world’s biggest manufacturer of commercial drones, and some other makers use GPS-based “geofencing” to automatically prevent drones from flying over airports and other sensitive locations, though the feature is easy to get around.

DJI also introduced a feature last year that allows authorities to identify and monitor its drones. It wasn’t clear what brand was used in the Gatwick incident.

British authorities are planning to tighten regulations by requiring drone users to register, which could make it easier to identify the pilot. U.S. law already requires users to register their drones and get certified as pilots.

But Wagner warned: “If somebody wants to do something really bad, he will never register.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Rudolph and friends no longer need to rely on the famous reindeer’s red nose to avoid getting lost. Now they have wireless technology.

To keep track of their animals in Lapland, Northern Finland’s vast and remote snow-covered forests, reindeer herders are turning to technology by fitting them with internet-connected collars.

Herders who previously spent weeks searching for their reindeer in sub-zero wilderness can now instantly see where they are on a mobile app that receives up-to-date location data.

“In all sectors of society, this (tech) efficiency is playing a big role. It’s the same in reindeer husbandry,” said Seppo Koivisto, whose hundreds of reindeer roam Lapland’s 4,000 square-kilometer (1,545 square-mile) Palojarvi District.

Lapland’s reindeer are the main source of livelihood for about 1,500 herders, so there’s high interest in technology that can help manage them. Koivisto is using the latest generation of wireless collars made possible by a group that includes Helsinki-based communications firm Digita and Finland’s Reindeer Herding Association. The association is based in Rovaniemi, which bills itself as the “official hometown of Santa Claus.”

“We have fewer workers, so their actions should be more and more efficient all the time,” and this technology lets them do that, said Koivisto. Since he started using the technology, he has only had to hire half the usual number of workers.

The technology can also help herders account for attacks from predators such as wolverines and lynx that roam across the Russian border.

At least 5,000 reindeer are killed every year, according to the herding association. Most that die in Lapland’s forests are never found. Koivisto says he loses about 8 percent of his herd annually.

The collars, which use GPS satellite positioning and special long-distance wireless networks, help herders find reindeer corpses so they can claim valuable compensation from the Finnish government.

If a collar-fitted reindeer doesn’t move after about four hours, its icon changes from green to red on the app, signaling a potential attack.

To best locate groups of reindeer, which are bred for their meat, milk and fur, the trackers are fitted on the herd’s female leader.

“In the old days, we roughly knew reindeer locations, in which part of the district they were,” said herder Jarno Konttaniemi. “But today, with this technology, we know exactly where they are.”

Digita built the long-range network, which it says is the world’s most northerly “Internet of Things” network. The “Internet of Things” refers to the next generation of devices and everyday objects that are connected to the internet.

While reindeer herding has roots going back hundreds of years, “at least some of the reindeer owners are really up-to-date when it comes to using technology,” said Ari Kuukka, Digita’s head of “Internet of Things” services.

The herding association has been working for years on a reliable GPS reindeer tracking system. The main challenge was coming up with a device that was cheap but had a long-lasting battery.

The third and latest prototype is the size of a deck of cards, stays charged for about a year, and costs about 90 euros ($102).

The herding association hopes to eventually shrink the transmitter down to a coin-sized microchip that can be attached to a reindeer’s ear, said Matti Sarkela, the herding association’s head of office who has previously helped develop a mobile app that alerts drivers to reindeer near Finland’s often icy roads.

He hopes embracing new technologies can inspire the younger generation to carry on the herding tradition.

“It has brought a lot of young people into our industry all the time,” said Sarkela. “It’s a really positive thing.”

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Thunderstorms forced Elon Musk’s SpaceX to postpone Thursday’s launch of a navigation satellite for the U.S. military, which was poised to be the rocket company’s first national security space mission for the United States.

SpaceX said its Falcon 9 rocket and payload, a roughly $500 million GPS satellite built by Lockheed Martin Corp, were “in good health” and that it was now targeting a Saturday morning launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral.

The cancellation, which followed two previous launch attempts this week that were scrubbed for technical reasons, came as thunderstorms and wind gusts swirled around the launch site.

Patrick Burke, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said the weather might not clear up until Saturday.

A successful launch would be a significant victory for Musk, a billionaire and Tesla Inc chief executive, who spent years trying to break into the lucrative market for military space launches, long dominated by Lockheed and Boeing Co.

It would have marked SpaceX’s first so-called National Security Space mission, as defined by the U.S. military, SpaceX said.

SpaceX sued the U.S. Air Force in 2014 in protest over the military’s award of a multibillion-dollar, non-compete contract for 36 rocket launches to United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed. It dropped the lawsuit in 2015 after the Air Force agreed to open up competition.

The next year, SpaceX won an $83 million Air Force contract in 2016 to launch the GPS III satellite, which will have a lifespan of 15 years.

The launch would be the first of 32 satellites in production by Lockheed under contracts worth a combined $12.6 billion for the Air Force GPS III program, Lockheed spokesman Chip Eschenfelder said.

Air Force spokesman William Russell said: “Once fully operational, this latest generation of GPS satellites will bring new capabilities to users, including three times greater accuracy and up to eight times the anti-jamming capabilities.”

The launch was originally scheduled for 2014 but has been hobbled by production delays, the Air Force said. The next GPS III satellite is due to launch in mid-2019, Eschenfelder said, while subsequent satellites undergo testing in the company’s Colorado processing facility.
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From: MeNeedIt

Imagine a magical place where lights are designed in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower and dragons. It’s a place where children can enjoy a maze made of Chinese lanterns or see death-defying acts by gymnasts. VOA’s Carolyn Presutti takes us to Light-Up, a Christmas festival near Washington designed, built and managed by Chinese workers visiting the U.S.
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From: MeNeedIt

Seemingly untouched by decades of conflict, a Christian winery near Bethlehem has been making wine since 1885. Owned by Salesian monks, the profits go to charity including for Syrian refugees. Linda Gradstein reports from the West Bank town of Beit Jala.
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From: MeNeedIt