South Africa mine protests hit world No.1 platinum firm

BATHOPELE MINE, South Africa (Reuters) - Labor unrest sweeping through South Africa's mining sector hit top world platinum producer Anglo American Platinum on Wednesday, with stick-waving miners blockading roads leading to shafts and calling for a shut-down of operations.

At the firm's Bathopele shaft in the heart of the platinum belt, a column of 1,500 chanting marchers confronted riot police who were backed by armored vehicles. The protesters jeered at workers inside the plant, a repeat of action taken on Monday at rival Lonmin's nearby Marikana mine, where police shot dead 34 protesters on August 16.

"We are here to say to the men that work here that you must join us in the strike. We are not here to fight," one man, who said he was an employee of Anglo American Platinum, also known as Amplats, told Reuters. He declined to give his name.

The platinum price jumped as much as 3 percent to $1,654.49 an ounce, its highest since early April, amid fears of more disruption to supplies of the precious metal used in jewelry and vehicle catalytic converters.

South Africa is home to 80 percent of known reserves. The platinum price has gained nearly 20 percent since the police shootings at Marikana, the bloodiest security incident since the end of apartheid in 1994.

The "Marikana massacre" has poisoned industrial relations across the mining sector and become a potent symbol of the failure of the ruling African National Congress to deliver on promises to reduce poverty in the post-apartheid era.

The bloodshed and the government's inability to resolve the unrest undermining already shaky growth in Africa's biggest economy is also fuelling a campaign against President Jacob Zuma, who faces an internal ANC leadership battle in December.

Amplats said some operations had been halted by what it described as "widespread cases of intimidation".

Police said the trouble started with a confrontation between 1,000 demonstrators and mine security on Tuesday night before spreading to other shafts in the heart of the platinum belt around Rustenburg, 100 km (60 miles) northwest of Johannesburg.

Four Amplats mines near Rustenburg represent almost 17 percent of total production by the company, which accounts for 40 percent of world platinum output.

They employ more than 19,000 people, but have come under pressure since a collapse in platinum prices in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Analysts expect them to be targeted as "restructuring candidates" by Amplats parent company Anglo American.

"LIVING WAGE"

The strikes, which stem from a challenge by the small but militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) to the dominance of the ANC-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), are also spreading into the gold sector.

The NUM said workers at the Beatrix mine, run by world No. 4 producer Gold Fields were set to strike this week, compounding wildcat industrial action already underway by 15,000 workers at the company's KDC West mine west of Johannesburg.

ANC renegade Julius Malema - the de facto face of an unofficial "Anybody But Zuma" rebellion in the ANC - is also fanning the flames, appearing twice at KDC to speak to striking workers.

He called on Tuesday for a national mining strike, and reiterated the cry in a radio interview on Wednesday.

"We are calling for mine change in South Africa. We want the mines nationalized. We want the workers paid a living wage," Malema said on Talk Radio 702, one of the country's most popular private stations.

Ministers and NUM leaders have dismissed him as an irresponsible opportunist but the expelled Youth League leader is achieving rock star status among the legions of poor whose lives have changed little in the 18 years since apartheid ended.

Malema has tapped into widespread workers' discontent with NUM bosses and ANC bigwigs who are accused of getting rich and cozying up to mine companies while ignoring the still harsh living conditions of many of South Africa's poor majority.

"All they know is to put the money in their pockets," said another Amplats protester, who called himself Mr. Anonymous, declining to give his name.

Shares in Amplats, which had largely avoided the labor unrest this year that had hit rivals Impala Platinum and Lonmin, fell 3.8 percent.

Anglo American, which owns 80 percent of Amplats, shed 3 percent in early trade although later recouped most of the losses.

(Additional reporting by Ed Stoddard and Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Peter Graff)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/south-africa-miners-blockade-amplats-shafts-police-072841684--finance.html

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Getting Economics to Acknowledge Rentier Finance ? naked ...

The economics discipline has for the most part managed to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room: that of the role that the financial services industry has come to play. Astonishingly, even though the reengineering of the world economy along the lines preferred by mainstream economists resulted in a prosperity-wrecking global financial crisis and a soft coup by financiers, the discipline carries on methodologically as if nothing much had happened. And one of its huge blind spots is its refusal to acknowledge the role of banking and finance in modern commerce. Interest rates are simply an input into the preferred form of macro models, DSGE (dynamic stochastic equilibrium models). Economies are assumed to be self correcting, and to automagically ?correct? to full employment. All shocks to the system are exogenous. In other words, boom-bust credit cycles are simply omitted because they are ideologically inconvenient and instability is too hard to model.

Various heterodox economists (as well as some empirically oriented economists that come out of the mainstream, most notably Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England and Claudio Borio and Piti Disyatat of the Bank of International Settlements) are making a concerted effort to represent the role of the finance in modern economies. A new paper by Michael Hudson (University of Missouri at Kansas City) and Dirk Bezemer (University of Groningen, Netherlands) makes an important contribution by looking at financial services from a Classical economics perspective. Classical economists took a decidedly dim view of what they saw as unproductive rent-seeking, with ?rent? seen as the dead hand of the feudal aristocracy weighing on current production:

Rentiers are those who benefit from control over assets that the economy needs to function, and who, therefore, grow disproportionately rich as the economy develops. These proceeds are rents ? revenues from ownership ?without working, risking, or economizing?, as John Stuart Mill (1848) wrote of the landlords of his day, explaining that ?they grow richer, as it were in their sleep?. Classical economics from Adam Smith onwards analysed rents, its effects, and policies towards rents, but the very concept is lost on today?s economics.

Just as landlords were the archetypal rentiers of their agricultural societies, so investors, financiers and bankers are in the largest rentier sector of today?s financialized economies: finance controls the economy?s engine of growth, which is credit in all its forms. Economies obviously need banking services, insurance services, and real estate development and so, of course, not all of finance is ?without working, risking, or economizing?. The problem today remains what it was in the 13th century: how to isolate what is socially necessary for ?retail? banking ? processing payments by checks and credit cards, deciding how to relend savings and new credit under normal (non-speculative) conditions ? from extortionate charges such as 29% interest on credit cards, penalty fees and other charges in excess of what is socially necessary cost-value.

Hudson and Bezemer argue that the failure to distinguish between productive activity versus rent seeking distorts and overstates the accounting for national output:

Creating a more realistic model of today?s financialized economies to trace this phenomenon requires a breakdown of the national income and product accounts (NIPA) to see the economy as a set of distinct sectors interacting with each other. These accounts juxtapose the private and public sectors as far as current spending, saving and taxation is concerned. But the implication is that government budget deficits inflate the private-sector economy as a whole. However, a budget deficit that takes the form of transfer payments to banks, as in the case of the post-September 2008 bank bailout, the Federal Reserve?s $2 trillion in cash-for-trash financial swaps and the $700 billion QE2 credit creation by the Federal Reserve to lend to banks at 0.25% interest in 2011, has a different effect from deficits that reflect social spending programs, Social Security and Medicare, public infrastructure investment or the purchase of other goods and services. The effect of transfer payments to the financial sector ? as well as the $5.3 trillion increase in US Treasury debt from taking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac onto the public balance sheet ? is to support asset prices (above all those of the banking system), not inflate commodity prices and wages. Similarly, the 2009 ?quantitative easing? policy in Britain confused loans used in the real economy (which were stagnating or falling throughout the experiment) with boosting bank balances with the Bank of England which quadrupled over 2009 (Graph 3). Bezemer and Gardiner (2010) show that neither bank loans nor spending nor GDP increased noticeably
during or after the exercise, but there was a curious stock market rally during 2009.

The authors describe how much the financial sector has grown relative to the productive economy. Financial sector total financial assets (as in the asset side of bank balance sheets and off balance sheet vehicles) was one times US GDP in the early 1950s and is roughly 4.5 times GDP now. Financial sector earnings were 10% of total corporate profits in the 1950s and 1950s and rose to 40% in the early 2000s. Yet despite the sorry record, in terms of falling growth rates, stagnant average worker wages, and increasingly frequent and severe financial crises, orthodox economists look favorably upon financial ?deepening,? meaning the proliferation of financial products and services (aka ?innovation?). To put it more simply, the rentiers have the firm backing of mainstream economists, despite the evidenced of its destructiveness:

Just as debt deflation diverts income to pay interest and other financial charges ? often at the cost of paying so much corporate cash flow that assets must be sold off to pay creditors ? so the phenomenon leads to stripping the natural environment. The so-called ?debt-resource-hypothesis? suggests that high indebtedness leads to increased natural resource exploitation as well as more unsustainable patterns of resource use (Neumayer 2012, pp. 127-141)?

Demographically, the effect of debt deflation is emigration and other negative effects. For example, after Latvian property prices soared as Swedish bank branches fueled the real estate bubble, living standards plunged. Families had to take on a lifetime of debt in order to gain the housing that was bequeathed to the country debt-free when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. When Latvia?s government imposed neoliberal austerity policies in 2009-10, wage levels plunged by 30 percent in the public sector, and private-sector wages followed the decline (Sommers et al 2010). Emigration and capital flight accelerated: the Economist (2010) reported that an estimated 30,000 Latvians were leaving every year, on a 2.2m population. In debt-strapped Iceland, the census reported in 2011 that 8% of the population had emigrated (mainly to Norway).

The irony of Hudson?s and Bezemer?s need to look back to the early days of economics is that a view that was widely shared then was the importance of usury ceilings. Why? If bankers were free to seek out the highest yielding loans, they would. And the people who would pay the most would not be businessmen but rich gamblers. So the fact that unconstrained banking would wind up promoting speculation rather than investment was seen as obvious centuries ago, yet supposedly more sophisticated modern economists seem to prefer to truck with Dr. Pangloss and tell us that the system they?ve helped create is both inevitable and virtuous, when neither is true.

Source: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/getting-economics-to-acknowledge-rentier-finance.html

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Coastal Cleanup Day this Saturday: Will volunteers find Japanese tsunami debris? (San Jose Mercury News)

Intense thunderstorms flood Las Vegas area, strands motorists in waterlogged intersections

LAS VEGAS, Nev. - Intense thunderstorms swept through the Las Vegas area on Tuesday, flooding washes, delaying flights, snarling traffic and prompting helicopter rescues of stranded motorists in water-filled intersections, authorities said.

Television news video showed yellow school buses inching along roads after school in areas east of downtown Las Vegas, and muddy brown water up to the lower sills of picture windows of stucco homes in other neighbourhoods.

In southeast Las Vegas, authorities recommended that the residents of about 45 homes damaged by flooding should leave in case the damage start electrical fires. The Clark County Fire Department was going door-to-door Tuesday night suggesting that residents leave their homes, said county spokesman Dan Kulin.

A Twitter photo showed dozens of cars swamped by water up to their headlights in a parking lot outside the Thomas & Mack sports arena at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

But after responding to numerous 911 calls, officials in Clark County, North Las Vegas, Henderson and Las Vegas said no serious injuries were reported.

The National Weather Service issued severe thunderstorm and flash flood warnings before and after almost an inch of rain was reported at McCarran International Airport just before 2 p.m. Meteorologist Michael Staudenmaier said more than 1.75 inches of rain were reported in downtown Las Vegas.

Firefighters responded to more than 20 calls about people in stalled cars, county spokesman Dan Kulin said.

A Las Vegas police helicopter was dispatched during the height of the storm to pluck several people from swamped vehicles on area roadways, Officer Bill Cassell said.

The Las Vegas area is crisscrossed with concrete-lined flood control channels and pocked by lake-sized water retention basins. Since 1985, Clark County Regional Flood Control District officials say they've spent $1.7 billion constructing about 573 miles of storm drains and 90 basins.

Police officer Jose Hernandez noted that homeless people sometimes live in normally dry tunnels beneath key areas like the Las Vegas Strip. After rains fall, the channels and tunnels fill quickly as water flows west to east across Las Vegas toward the Lake Mead reservoir on the Colorado River.

Crews searched in vain along a wash northeast of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after at least two callers separately reported that they saw a person in the water during the height of the storm.

Departures were postponed and arrivals were delayed after the airport ordered a stop on fueling operations during lightning, airport spokeswoman Linda Healey said.

Staudenmaier said the rainfall amounts put the region on pace to exceed the 4.5 inches of rain it normally gets in a year.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/intense-thunderstorms-flood-las-vegas-area-strands-motorists-070021152.html

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Email Marketing ? Effective Modern Marketing Tools For Businesses ...

email marketing

email marketing (Photo credit: opportplanet)

Email Marketing is one of the most effective modern marketing tools for businesses. Generally, all emails sent to prospective customers or current clients can be termed as ?email marketing?. However, email marketing in the context of business is meant to promote brand awareness, build customer loyalty and generate trust in the company or business. This is done through distributing ads, requesting forms of interaction as well as to solicit sales or donations.

To undertake email marketing, the first and most important aspect is the email list (distribution list) or database. Lists can be gathered or culled from various databases or Internet sources and current company customers or visitors? lists. There are also service companies that rent out email addresses for email marketing campaigns and other purposes.

Email marketing can be categorized into different types of emails:

  • Transactional emails are usually sent based on a customer?s relationship with the company. This category includes inquiries about products, purchase orders, order confirmation and email acknowledgments. This type of email can be effective in cross-selling or up-selling products and services.
  • Direct emails are generally sent to promote the company or product, to announce special offers, to invite people to store promotions or events and send brochures or catalogues.
  • Email newsletters are sent out to an email list of customers and/or regular subscribers. ?The newsletter can contain news about the company and company events as well as special offers, new products launching and store promotions.
  • Joint-advertising is when you attach advertisements to other people?s or companies? emails. This is commonly referred to as joint-advertising and both companies usually reciprocate the favour.

Email marketing can be an effective tool in the enhancement of merchant-customer relationships, encouragement of customer loyalty (repeat business) and in attracting new customers. Email messages can also be sent to cold lists, counting on the law of averages, which means that out of hundreds or thousands of emails sent, there should be a number of new customers that will be acquired.

There are software vendors that offer email support for newsletters and transactional e-mails, where promotional messages are embedded into the body of the email. Some software vendors also offer email marketing services and customer referral programs, including sending of personalized email messages for specific and targeted markets.

Email marketing services have, in recent times, replaced direct mailers, more commonly referred to as direct mail. Print marketing campaigns take a lot of time and money to create and most of them end up untouched in mailboxes or thrown in trashcans. Email campaigns, combined with marketing using social media, can be much more effective business strategies. With email marketing software, senders can see how many are opening the emails they sent, and the links viewers are clicking on, as well as the number of subscribers that forward the emails to friends and associates.

An email marketing service provider can also include social networking buttons like ?Tweet?, ?Like? and others to make sharing and forwarding messages easier. Another advantage is the ability to get instant results by viewing reports for the number of emails that bounced and the number of people that unsubscribed from the service, open rates and even click-thrus. This is efficient way of determining if a marketing campaign is effective. Surveys can also be devised through an email marketing service, providing the means to gather quick feedback from customers.

Since the Internet makes communication fast, easy, more effective and convenient, more businesses, whether small or large, have been taking advantage of connecting with customers and prospective clients through this medium. There are email marketing products like iContact, Constant Contact, Benchmark Email and HostPapa Connect, which make an email campaign simple, customized and easy to use. Contact lists can easily be uploaded into the database so that emails can be sent in bulk.

The products are usually flexible, so that users can customize the design of their marketing messages, including the logo and images to reflect the company?s personality. Where before, physical errors in a copy can result in costly reprinting, email marketing services provide the means to edit text and adjust images in the email before it is sent or even after some of them have already gone out without incurring extra costs.

An email service makes creating an email marketing campaign easy, even for a novice user without programming skills. Integrated wizards and help sections guide users to create the type of email that they need; announcement, newsletters or surveys. These email marketing tools also come with inbuilt online tests to determine the probability of the message getting caught in the spam folder by scoring the email on content.

Email marketing software allows for generating reports, statistics and graphs to learn if a particular campaign is working or not. Knowing how the email campaign is performing will help in making corrections and revising content for a more effective marketing campaign. Most email marketing tools are also integrated with Google Analytics that gives access to data beyond just email.

Because email marketing is delivered in real time, a direct mailing campaign is now an almost archaic method to use in marketing. The whole world is going online with purchasers and sellers following the crowd. Business and the way it is conducted have been reinvented by the Internet and email marketing.

Source: http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/email-marketing-effective-modern-marketing-tools-for-businesses-0277167

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Japan to buy disputed islands, angering China

TOKYO (AP) ? Japan's government said Monday it has decided to purchase several disputed islands, prompting China to angrily warn of "serious consequences" if it proceeds with the plan.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said Japan will buy the three uninhabited islands in the East China Sea from a private Japanese family it recognizes as the owner. China and Taiwan also claim the islands, which are part of what Japan calls the Senkakus and China the Diaoyu group.

Fujimura said the decision to nationalize the islands reflects Japan's desire to create a "stable and secure" environment, not to anger China.

"We hope there will be no misunderstandings," he said.

China's Foreign Ministry responded swiftly, saying Beijing would not "sit back and watch its territorial sovereignty violated."

"China strongly urges Japan to immediately stop all action to undermine China's territorial sovereignty and return to a negotiated settlement to the dispute. If Japan insists on going its own way, it will bear all the serious consequences that follow," the ministry said in a statement.

It did not specify the possible consequences.

All the major state newspapers in China ran the ministry statement on their front pages Tuesday, along with comments from Premier Wen Jiabao.

"The Diaoyu Islands are an inalienable part of China's territory, and the Chinese government and its people will absolutely make no concession on issues concerning its sovereignty and territorial integrity," Wen said at an inauguration ceremony for a statue of late Chinese leaders Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.

State-run China Central Television reported that Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi summoned the Japanese ambassador to protest the plan.

Fujimura said the decision to buy the islands was made at a meeting of Cabinet ministers who are involved in the purchase plans. The full Cabinet, led Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, is expected to approve the decision on Tuesday.

Supporters think having the government own the islands will strengthen Japan's claim and control over them and send a tougher message to China.

Under the nationalization plan, the islands are to be left as they are now. China does not recognize the Japanese family's deed to the islands as legitimate.

In April, the outspoken nationalist governor of Tokyo announced that he was hoping that his city would buy the islands and push for their development, a move that would have inflamed relations with China even more.

The dispute has long been a flashpoint in Japan-China relations, and has been heating up in recent months.

Earlier this month, the city of Tokyo sent a team of experts to waters around the islands to survey fishing grounds and possible sites for development, a move that was strongly criticized by China. Activists from Japan and Hong Kong briefly set foot on the islands last month, and hundreds of Chinese have held street protests in various cities in recent weeks.

The dispute over the islands boiled over into a major diplomatic tiff between the two neighbors after a Sept. 7, 2010, incident in which a Chinese fishing boat collided with Japanese coast guard ships near the islands. The fishing boat captain was arrested and later released.

___

Associated Press writer Louise Watt in Beijing contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/japan-buy-disputed-islands-angering-china-121834666.html

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Google Drive mobile app updated, brings editing to iOS

Google Drive mobile app updated, brings editing to iOS

The mobile Google Drive app just keeps getting better and better. Are we ready to ditch the desktop web app for its iOS and Android package? Hardly, but with ever decimal point upgrade the disparity between the two keeps getting smaller. The latest round of updates finally delivers document editing to your iPad and iPhone, including the ability to format text and see live changes made by your collaborators. You can also now view presentations, including speaker notes. The Android version also got a few nice tweaks today, most notable being the ability to see and reply to comments on docs. Google is also promising that real-time updates will be coming to spreadsheets very soon -- which should excite on-the-go number crunchers. Check out the video after the break.

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Nigeria floods kill 137, displace thousands

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nigeria-floods-kill-137-displace-thousands-171429725.html

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West Coast rail franchise to be nationalised - paper

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uks-west-coast-rail-franchise-nationalised-paper-110359879--finance.html

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Coffee skyrockets as weather affects crops

The price of coffee is skyrocketing on speculation that Colombia's harvest will be smaller than expected for the fourth straight year.

Coffee for December delivery jumped 10.6 cents, or 6.5 percent, to finish at $1.7365 per pound. That's the highest level since early August.

Although Brazil's coffee crop appears headed toward a robust harvest, Colombia's crop was hampered by heavy rainfall that caused delays earlier in the season. Colombia could produce a smaller-than-expected crop for the fourth consecutive year, Barclays Capital analysts said in a report on Friday.

Other commodity prices shrugged off fresh signs of slowing economic growth in China, which is a huge importer of raw materials such as copper, oil and soybeans.

China's imports shrank unexpectedly in August, which was an indication that its economic slump is worsening. And the Chinese president warned growth could slow further, prompting expectations of possible new stimulus spending. That could help economic growth, which would benefit metals and other raw materials.

Traders also are waiting to see if the Federal Reserve will approve more measures to aid the U.S. economy at its meeting this week. The government reported weak growth in jobs in August which came on top of weakness in manufacturing.

Gold for December delivery fell $8.70 to end at $1,731.80 per ounce, December silver dropped 5.7 cents to $33.633 per ounce. December copper rose 4.35 cents to $3.6885 per pound, October platinum gained $7.50 to $1,603.80 per ounce and December palladium increased $18, or 2.7 percent, to $672.75 per ounce.

Benchmark oil gained 12 cents to finish at $96.54 per barrel, heating oil increased 1.79 cents to $3.1668 per gallon, gasoline rose 0.44 cent to $3.024 per gallon. Natural gas jumped 13 cents, or 4.8 percent, to $2.812 per 1,000 cubic feet.

In agricultural contracts, December wheat fell 15.25 cents to end at $8.8975 per bushel, December corn dropped 16.25 cents to $7.8325 per bushel and November soybeans decreased 17.75 cents to $17.1875 per bushel.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/coffee-skyrockets-weather-affects-crops-193817432--finance.html

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