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In addition to growth with reckless abandon, the majors allowed operating costs to rise too high. Not just operating costs, but a new cost measure called "all-in sustainable costs," which includes all cash and non-cash expenses to explore for, develop, mine, sell, and reclaim projects. Again, with the gold price at $1,...
Have the majors fixed the problems?
Many of the CEOs of the majors in 2010-11 were fired. Excessive debt, especially at Barrick but also at others, has been reduced. Costs have been cut and assets have been sold. Over the past 18 months, these companies have done a great deal to fix the problems they created. Is it enough? Probably not.
The only way in which the majors would be attractive investments today would be if the gold price were to increase by 20% or more. The majors have made some progress righting the ship, but they now face problems growing production from 2017-18 on. And, they no longer pay attractive dividends. I don't believe the majors...
Late Thursday night, the Supreme Court put on hold a Louisiana law that would require abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic.
In 2016, the Court ruled that a similar Texas law constituted an “undue burden” on access to abortion within the state. In addition to requiring admitting privileges, the Texas law also would have required abortion clinics to meet the same cleanliness and safety standards as ambulatory surgical centers.
The case was argued and decided not long after Justice Antonin Scalia passed away, and Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Anthony Kennedy voted to strike down the Texas law in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt.
One of Louisiana’s four abortion clinics challenged the new law.
A federal district court, citing the Hellerstedt decision, held that the law advanced “minimal” health benefits while placing “substantial burdens” on women seeking an abortion.
>>> Listen to “SCOTUS 101,” a podcast with Elizabeth Slattery and friends bringing you up to speed on what’s happening at the Supreme Court.
But there are a number of reasons why a state would decide that abortion doctors need to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, including furthering the continuity of care for patients who experience complications and addressing the problem of emergency rooms not having enough OB-GYN specialists on call to d...
There’s also an additional quality control element because the application process includes peer review of the applicant. After all, although abortion advocates claim it’s one of the safest types of medical procedure, complications such as infection, hemorrhage, and uterine perforation, among others, can occur even in ...
On appeal, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the district court ruling, finding that the facts on the ground in Louisiana were remarkably different from those in Texas.
Only one doctor in Louisiana had been unable to gain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and no clinics had closed due to the new law.
The abortion clinic asked the Supreme Court to temporarily enjoin Louisiana’s law while it appeals the Fifth Circuit’s ruling. Courts will stay the enforcement of a law that has been challenged in order to preserve the status quo while the legal challenge is pending.
The Supreme Court granted the clinic’s request over the dissent of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
They would not have halted the Louisiana law, as Kavanaugh explained, because “the status quo will be effectively preserved for all parties during the State’s 45-day regulatory transition period.” In his view, it was not necessary for the Court to stop Louisiana from enforcing the law while the legal challenge continue...
The 45-day transition period before the new law would go into effect affords doctors an opportunity to seek admitting privileges without burdening any women who wish to obtain an abortion during that time.
In a brief filed with the Supreme Court, the state explained that the Louisiana Health Department’s first step would be to “collect accurate, current information” about current abortion providers since it has been more than three years since the trial in this case and the facts on the ground may have changed.
During this administrative review process, if a clinic did not comply with the new law, it would have the chance to submit a “plan of correction” to the state. And there would be an administrative appeals process before the state could revoke the license of any clinic that could not, or would not, comply with the new l...
He concluded that he would deny the stay and allow the challengers to file another complaint “if the Fifth Circuit’s factual prediction about the doctor’s ability to obtain admitting privileges proves to be inaccurate.” If these doctors are, in fact, able to obtain admitting privileges, then there would be no basis to ...
The other five members of the Court–including Chief Justice John Roberts–did not explain why they halted the law.
However, the Supreme Court does not typically offer explanations as to why it does or does not grant an application for a stay. Two things to bear in mind are that this action does not reflect the justices’ views of the merits of the case, and halting a law is a good indication that the Supreme Court will decide to rev...
It’s highly likely that abortion will loom large at the Supreme Court next term.
Love, Simon actor Nick Robinson and Paul Dano have been tapped to star in Prada’s latest campaign.
Algee Smith, who impressed in hard-hitting drama Detroit last year, is also part of Prada’s fall/ winter 18 adverts, with the trio joining returning campaign star Joe Alwyn, the actor boyfriend of Taylor Swift.
Willy Vanderperre shot the campaign, with Olivier Rizzo styling.
Various images and video clips have been shared on Instagram, with footage showing the actors walking through the Prada Warehouse, decked out in new season trends, including bucket hats, shirts, overcoats and a patterned short sleeve sweater.
“This warehouse is populated with identities – ambiguous and enticing boxes and crates, demarcated with symbols drawn from Prada collections past – that speak of the multiplicities of interpretations. Comprising a trio of young actors – Joe Alwyn, Nick Robinson and Algee Smith – alongside actor and director Paul Dano, ...
Will Park Su-geun beat his own record?
Park Su-geun’s 1961 work “People at the Marketplace” will be auctioned on Nov. 21 at K Auction’s November sale.
Park is a Korean painter known for his artworks that portray the daily life of the Korean people in the mid-20th century.
The estimated price for “People at the Marketplace” is 4 billion won-5.5 billion won ($3.5 million-$4.9 million), the auction house said. The work was owned by a foreign collector for about 40 years before it was recently sold to a Korean collector, it added.
The highest price ever paid for one of Park’s works was some 4.5 billion won for “A Wash Place,” an auction record set in 2007.
However, the 1950 artwork “A Wash Place” became mired in a forgery controversy, and two years of legal wrangling ended with the Seoul Central District Court ruling in 2009 that the work was authentic, based on Korean Art Appraisal Board’s reviews.
Eight works by Kim Whan-ki, whose work currently holds the record for the most expensive Korean artwork sold at auction, will also be on the block at the upcoming auction. They are “8-XI-69 #133” (1969), “VI-VII-66” (1966), “22-X-73 #325” (1973), “Birds,” “Les Figures” and three untitled works.
K Auction’s November sale will also feature works by internationally acclaimed artists such as Ai Weiwei, Robert Indiana and Yayoi Kusama. A total of 203 items, including traditional artworks, will go under the hammer. The estimated worth of the items reaches some 21.1 billion won, the auction house said.
Netflix has renewed the Ricky Gervais dark comedy After Life for season two. The season airs in 2020 and will contain six episodes. After Life is a Netflix original series from Derek Productions.
The series is created, written and directed by Gervais.
After Life centers around Tony (Gervais), who seemingly had a perfect life. But after his wife dies, Tony changes. After contemplating suicide, he decides to live long enough to punish the world by saying and doing whatever he likes. Tony thinks of it as a superpower, but it turns out to be tricky when everyone is tryi...
Gervais and Duncan Hayes are executive producers.
Is Grexit Back on the Table?
The financial credit crisis in Greece is intensifying yet again. Greece’s debt remains at staggering levels, amounting to approximately 177% of its GDP, the highest in the EU. Greece is scheduled to make a 10.5 billion Euro payment on its debt next summer, but is expected to be unable to make that payment without the a...
However, the Greek government appears to be at an impasse with its creditors, who insist that the conditions for the release of further bailout funds have not been satisfied. Despite the Syriza government’s imposition of extensive, and painful austerity measures on the Greek people. As a result of this impasse, concern...
Now with us to discuss these developments, is Costas Lapavitsas. Costas is a professor of economics at the University of London. In January 2015, he was elected as a member of the Greek parliament for the left wing Syriza Party, and in that election Syriza won and formed a government for the first time.
In August 2015, following the decision of Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, to disregard the result of a referendum in which the Greek people voted against austerity. Costas Lapavitsas defected from Syriza to the newly formed Popular Unity Party. Thanks for joining us today, Costas.
COSTAS LAPAVITSAS: Thank you for the invitation.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: Before we begin speaking about the current impasse, I’d like to discuss with you the economic conditions in Greece. In September 2015, approximately 18 months ago, Syriza was returned to power with a narrow majority in a snap election.
Broadly speaking, how has the Greek economy performed since then, and how would you describe the economic and social conditions in Greece today, following the imposition of these further austerity measures?
COSTAS LAPAVITSAS: In 2015, when Syriza was elected, Greece went into… during that year, went into a mild recession. Essentially the Greek economy had stopped contracting since 2014. In 2015, it went into a mild recession. In 2016, which is the year after the last bailout that you mentioned, the Greek economy has retur...
So, basically over the last three years, including the year since the last bailout, the Greek economy has been doing nothing. Greece is not contracting, but it’s not growing, either. It’s a situation of waiting for something important to happen that might kick-start the economy. Nothing important is going to happen to ...
DIMITRI LASCARIS: Now, yesterday the International Monetary Fund announced the results of its annual review of Greece’s economic policies, and it said that most of its board of directors favor a Greek fiscal surplus target of 1.5% of GDP by 2018. But Eurozone countries continue to insist on a much more demanding target...
In your view, is a fiscal surplus of 3.5% realistically achievable, and if so, broadly speaking, what would be required to achieve such an elevated fiscal surplus target?
COSTAS LAPAVITSAS: Any fiscal surplus demanded of Greece right now, is an absurdity in itself –- any size of fiscal surplus. In economies such as … Greece at the moment, after this enormous contraction, and under the constant recessionary pressures that it finds itself in, cannot make, and should not be required to mak...
To be required to make 3.5%, which is what the last bailout has demanded of Greece, is just taking it to the bounds of absurdity. There is no way that Greece can make 3.5% of primary surplus in 2018, and every year after that, which is what the bailout stipulates. And there is no reason why it should do that. To do tha...
To achieve even the smallest surpluses that the country has managed to achieve in 2016, and hoping to achieve in 2017, the pressure on the population, and on businesses has been enormous. The government has made a surplus in 2016, and it’s done so by jacking up taxation incredibly.
People for instance, running small and medium businesses have got to pay up nearly 30% tax from the first Euro dollar of their profits. And then they have to pay a huge amount of money up front, for next year’s taxes. This is how the system works. Effectively, if you run a small, or medium business in Greece in 2016, o...
Now, how can you run a business that way? It’s impossible. The recessionary pressures are enormous. The tax pressures on pensioners and wage earners have also been enormous. So, this is the reality of making even the small surpluses.
Now, to make the 3.5% surpluses, you can imagine what will have to happen. This is madness, economic madness, and the social implications are obviously very, very severe, because the pressures on pensioners, on wage earners, on small and medium businesses, are just getting worse and worse by the day.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: And in terms of debt relief, what magnitude of debt relief, in your opinion, would be necessary to render Greece’s debt sustainable, and is there any real prospect of Greece achieving an agreement with its creditors for debt relief of that magnitude?
COSTAS LAPAVITSAS: Let’s put this in perspective. Everyone knows –- and has known for many years –- that the Greek debt is unsustainable. The country found itself in 2010 with an enormous debt of about 300 billion Euros at the time. Obviously it was much less, as proportion of GDP, because Greek GDP has contracted fero...
The country was not given debt relief for reasons of politics, and the IMF in its internal reviews, has explicitly said so. The IMF has acceded to an absurd bailout strategy without debt relief because of political pressures, basically to rescue Western European banks.
This has been the bane of Greece since 2010, an unsustainable debt weighing down the country, the implications of which are, basically, the need to secure extraordinary primary surpluses. The 3.5% surplus that I mentioned a few minutes ago derives from an absurd attempt to make the current levels of debt sustainable, w...
So, Greek debt must be written off, substantial relief must be given. The only real question is: what form will it take? In my judgment, the principle must be written off. How much of that? At least 50% right now. Now, this is not on the basis of debt sustainability, we’ve done that in the past, too. But from being inv...
The most important thing though, isn’t just the writing off of the debt, is that fiscal policy must be detached from the obligation to make the debt sustainable. This is the real problem with the debt. Greece needs to detach its fiscal policy from servicing the debt, and it needs to focus its fiscal policy on reducing ...
That is just absurd. Greece must stop targeting its fiscal policy on its debt, and it must start targeting on its unemployed. Greece has got 23% unemployment in official terms. In reality, it’s higher, because a lot of people have left. That’s where fiscal policy should be looking at, that’s what they should be aiming ...
DIMITRI LASCARIS: And, of course, there’s been a lot of talk about the need for debt relief for years now, and is there realistically any prospect of Greece’s creditors, and particularly the Eurozone countries agreeing to the type of debt relief that you’ve described, right down to the principle, to perhaps in excess o...
COSTAS LAPAVITSAS: Yeah, I said at least 50%.
COSTAS LAPAVITSAS: I see no realistic chance of that, of a writing off of the principle. This has been the problem, I repeat, from the very beginning. The creditors to Greece were basically its partners, presumably, in the Eurozone, and the European Union have refused to countenance that. Greece has received a kind of ...
The reason, of course, is first, politics; it will be very difficult for Germany, for instance, or for France, under the present conditions, to tell the electorates of those countries that money has gone the way of Greece. Which has been receiving a very bad press for year after year. And it will also be very difficult...
So, politics is a very important reason for which, I don’t think, serious debt relief will be given to Greece, certainly no writing off of the principle. More fundamental than that though, is the logic of the Eurozone, and people don’t quite understand that. This is not a partnership of countries that share in each oth...
This is a very, very powerful rule at the heart of the Eurozone. For Greece to receive debt relief, including the writing off of principle, it would mean that Germany, for instance, would take over some of the Greek debt. There’s no basis for that. No logical, or treaty basis, for that in the Eurozone. Greece will have...
DIMITRI LASCARIS: Right. And since we’re on the subject of politics, a poll came out last month which showed, not surprisingly in light of the conditions in Greece, and the austerity program implemented by Syriza, that eight in ten Greeks were unhappy with the performance of the government, and that the right wing New ...
One poll showed a 14-point lead, New Democracy up around 30%, far higher than it was in the last election. I think, you, myself, others, foresaw that Syriza would be punished at the polls for the implementation of austerity.
What is perhaps not so readily understandable, is the resurgence in the popularity of New Democracy because, of course, New Democracy, given its political orientation and its history, gives little reason to believe that you’re going to see an abandonment of austerity and the implementation of a progressive economic pro...
How do you explain, in light of New Democracy’s political orientation and its history, the resurgence in its popularity?
COSTAS LAPAVITSAS: Let’s get things again in perspective. The right has come back –- New Democracy, and it leads in the polls. All the polls show that. And I would guess, that if there were an election in Greece now, or soon, the right would win. Syriza, in other words, is paying the price, paying the price essentially...
But there is no real resurgence for the right. Let’s be clear about this. There is no popular… burgeoning popular support for the right. What there is is almost a sense of desperation with all politics. And that appears very clearly in the real winner in the polls, and that’s the question, that’s the section of the pol...
So, really — really people in Greece don’t want any of the parties that are vying for government. That’s the real damage that Syriza has done to Greek politics. Because the population, the working class, the small and medium businesses, the self-employed, the peasantry and so on, such as it is, had hoped, had really be...
It turned out that none of this was realistic. Syriza became just another party in Greece, another set of suits running a bailout program. And that has killed hope. It has killed hope, and that is a terrible thing to do to a people. And it is in this context that the right is topping the polls, not in any sense of righ...
People don’t want the bailouts, people don’t want these policies, but they don’t believe in politics anymore, and they don’t believe in political parties.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: Right. Well, that would certainly be suggested by the fact that eight in ten Greeks don’t approve of the way that the austerity oriented Syriza has governed the country.
In the next part of our interview, Costas, I’d like to talk to you about the road ahead. You talked about the loss of hope. I’d like to talk about ways in which the Greek people might find a path out of the current dilemma and crisis in the country, that has been going on for years. Thank you for joining us today.
COSTAS LAPAVITSAS: Thanks to you.
DIMITRI LASCARIS: And this is Dimitri Lascaris for The Real News.
Hot Toys are releasing an Optimus Prime figure. I know you can't see it, but my wallet is suddenly flapping around like a bat, and I'm having a devil of a time trying to catch it.
The 30cm figure, based on Prime's G1 design, is actually Starscream-inspired, and for whatever reason - I can't remember this ever happening - has the Autobot leader rocking Starscream's wings and arm cannons.
It looks pretty stupid, so thankfully you can remove them all and just have Prime standing there in his articulated, highly-detailed glory. I've got an old masterpiece Prime, which I thought was going to be the ultimate Optimus figure for the rest of time (and in some ways might still be, since this one doesn't transfo...
Be warned: he's selling for $350.
DHS’ data equalizer. Thanks to King’s leadership, DHS is making marked improvement on achieving data-driven decision-making, integrated analysis and advanced data visualization. His efforts are giving decision-makers line-of-site visibility across the historically siloed areas of finance, procurement, human capital, as...
A new synthetic drug called Crack is being sold at Auckland dairies - with one outlet even offering to sell glass pipes to people who buy the white powder.
The product has been condemned as irresponsible by the Drug Foundation, illicit drug users and a pioneer of the legal high industry.
Crack is sold under the street name shared by the illegal drugs crack cocaine and methamphetamine, and comes in a clear plastic bag in a cardboard packet featuring an image of a glass pipe.
The packaging encourages users to snort or smoke the white powder - the same methods used to consume P or cocaine - but does not list its ingredients or the contact details of its manufacturer or distributor.
APNZ visited all the legal high stockists on Auckland's Karangahape Rd.
Two sold Crack - Walia Superette, where it was openly displayed behind the counter, and tobacco shop Shosha, where it was concealed in a cupboard next to the cigarettes. It retailed at both for $75 for 200mgs.
The seller at Walia Superette said Crack did not come with a pipe, but he offered to sell a glass pipe for $20. He did not ask for any identification.
When asked, he said the substance was "completely safe".
NZ Drug Foundation executive director Ross Bell condemned the product as idiotic and irresponsible.
"The industry likes to claim that they are providing safe alternatives to illegal drugs, but their behaviour is no different from what we see in the criminal black market, where customers don't know what they're buying, they don't know what the product has been cut with."

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