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Saturday, February 9, 2013

Blizzard Nemo Paralyzes Northeast States

The potentially historic blizzard that marched into the Northeast Friday put parts of the region in a virtual transportation lockdown, with the Massachusetts and Connecticut governors signing state orders banning cars from the road, trains ceasing service, and airlines halting flights in and out of Boston and New York. The storm picked up in intensity during the day Friday, and was expected to dump as much as 14 inches of snow on the New York City area and as much as three feet across New England before tapering off Saturday afternoon. Forecasters were warning of winds of up to 60 miles per hour, and snow drifts as high as five feet. "It definitely looks like it has the potential to be a historic event," said Lance Franck, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass. City and state officials were desperately trying to avoid the mayhem of the infamous Blizzard of 1978, which dumped three feet of snow across the Northeast, leading to dozens of deaths and scores of drivers stranded on the highways. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick took the rare step of signing an executive order outright banning motorists from all roads as of 4 p.m. Friday. Certain exceptions were being made for public-health workers, emergency vehicles, media and critical services. Violators could receive a civil fine. Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy issued a similar but less comprehensive order. To the north in New Hampshire, Gov. Maggie Hassan didn't go as far as ordering cars off state roads, but she did urge residents to stop driving by early evening. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg encouraged people to leave work early Friday. New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo later declared a state of emergency to give local governments more flexibility in handling the anticipated snowfall, saying New York City and Long Island would be worst hit. "This is a storm of major proportions," warned Boston Mayor Thomas Menino in a public briefing, in which city officials also asked people to look out for the homeless, by alerting authorities if a homeless person was seen on the street and not in a shelter. Meteorologists were blaming the nor'easter on the collision of two storm systems: cold air traveling south from Canada bumping into a moist low pressure system heading north from the Carolinas. As conditions deteriorated in the Northeast, transportation all but ground to a halt. Boston's public commuter rail stopped operations. Amtrak canceled service between New York and Boston for Friday afternoon, and plans limited service for Saturday. A spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights at the three major New York-area airports alone on Friday. He said all operations at the airports would cease by late Friday afternoon, but that airlines could resume some flights on Saturday. At Boston Logan International Airport, officials said all operations would cease at 3 p.m. on Friday and flights may not resume until Sunday. Massachusetts General Hospital expected to have at least 200 employees sleeping on cots Friday night, and the 1,000-bed facility was making accommodations for patients who couldn't make it home because of the storm, said Paul Biddinger, medical director for the Boston hospital's emergency department. "We did try to discharge as many people who could be safely discharged, but the hospital is going to end up very, very full tonight," Dr. Biddinger said.

Silver Wheaton Just Gave You Another 2.2 Million Reasons To Buy

There are many reasons to be bullish on precious metal prices and in particular silver. Additionally, the companies that mine and/or sell the silver are great long-term buys. The endless central bank easy money policies that have been put into place worldwide will debase fiat currencies globally. This will translate into the purchasing power of those currencies diminishing, thus strengthening precious metal demand. Further, it is well known that gold, and to some degree silver and platinum, tend to have an inverse relationship with the dollar. The debt crisis in the United States that is eating the value away of the dollar over time further strengthens the case for the precious metals. I have outlined the bullish case in further detail in sections of prior work, and have also opined that silver could outperform gold in the next few years. In this article, I highlight yet one more reason to get behind Silver Wheaton (SLW), which in

Monday, February 4, 2013

Fortuna Silver acquires mining concessions from Pan American Silver in Mexico

Fortuna Silver Mines, emerging silver producer with mines in Peru (Caylloma) and Mexico (San Jose), announced that it has reached an agreement with Pan American Silver, Vancouver, to acquire for US$4 million, 55% of the Taviche Oeste mining concession, which surrounds the San Jose mine, in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. The transaction was conducted by the subsidiaries of both companies: Cuzcatlan S.A. de C.V., in the case of Fortuna, and Silver Pan American S.A. de C.V., for Pan American. The transaction closure period runs from January 30 to May.

Volatility On The Horizon? Take Advantage Of The Fear

Lately stocks have had strong gains for two months straight after dipping in November. The Dow is now about 50 points from 14,000, which is a major psychological barrier. The Dow Jones ETF (DIA) is at 5 year highs at $139.23. But how did we get here? The economy has not really rebounded strongly. The market seemingly has been propped up by the actions of central banks. First, in late summer of 2012, the European Central Bank announced an unlimited short-term bond-buying program with some conditions, reinforcing its position to do all it can to save the euro. Following this, Ben Bernanke and the U.S. Federal Reserve announced a massive third round of quantitative easing, aka QE3, consisting of buying $40 billion in mortgage assets monthly until unemployment improves. Even the Bank of Japan recently hopped on board the central bank stimulus train and announced its own round of easing. Then the Fed recently made a new announcement to accelerate its debt-buying program, to spend another $40 billion to $45 billion a month in balance sheet expansion to replace Operation Twist. This action has been excellent for stocks. Now that the allure of central bank action is beginning to pass and there is talk of the Fed reducing its overly accommodating stance, earnings and economics reports are returning to the focus of investors. Many professionals believe earnings estimates are too high and will not be beat frequently this quarter and in future quarters. In addition there is the looming debt ceiling debate to contend with in a few weeks, which could cause volatility in the market to spike. Coupled with the fact that the United States is addicted to debt, there is a lot of opportunity for the market to sell-off. After all the action that.......READ MORE

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Twitter, Washington Post targeted by hackers

Social media giant Twitter is among the latest U.S. companies to report that it is among a growing list of victims of Internet security attacks, saying that hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users. And now, The Washington Post is joining the chorus, revealing the discovery of a sophisticated cyberattack in 2011. Twitter said in a blog post on Friday it detected attempts to gain access to its user data earlier in the week. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected. But Twitter discovered that the attackers may have stolen user names, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users they describe as "a very small percentage of our users." The company reset the pilfered passwords and sent emails advising the affected users. The Twitter attack comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of U.S. companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important. On Friday, The Washington Post disclosed in an article published on its website that it was also the target of a sophisticated cyberattack, which was discovered in 2011 and was first reported by an independent cybersecurity blog. Washington Post spokeswoman, Kris Coratti, didn't offer any details including the duration of the attack or the origins. But according to sources that the newspaper quoted, who it said spoke on condition of anonymity, the intruders gained access as early as 2008 or 2009. According to the sources, Chinese hackers are also suspected. Coratti couldn't be reached immediately for comment by The Associated Press. According to her comments made to the newspaper, the company worked with security company Mandiant to "detect, investigate and remediate the situation promptly at the end of 2011." China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyberattacks. Twitter didn't provide any clues as to whether it believes that China was behind its hack. However, the blog post by the company's director of information security, Bob Lord, made clear that the hackers knew what they were doing. Lord said in the blog that the attack "was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident." "The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked," Lord said. "For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users." Reached on Saturday, Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser had no further comment. Based on the few details released about the Twitter and Washington Post attacks it's hard to say whether Chinese hackers were involved, said Rich Mogull, CEO of Securosis, an independent security research and advisory firm. There are certain pieces of malicious software that are characteristic to Chinese hackers, he said, but "the problem is not enough has been made public." One theory is that the Twitter hack happened after an employee's home or work computer was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized. Independent privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani said such a move would give attackers "a toehold" in Twitter's internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company's system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users' passwords. The relatively small number of users affected suggests that attackers weren't on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company's servers, Soltani said. Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hack might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from. That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist's movements. "More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service," Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist's emails.

Silver Wheaton Is A Buy On Recent Weakness

In this article I will lay out why you should consider purchasing Silver Wheaton (SLW) at current levels. Gold and silver are still down heavily since hitting highs in September and October of 2012. As such, the most popular gold and silver ETFs, such as the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) and the iShares Silver Trust (SLV) have lost 7% and 12% respectively since the highs last fall. The ETFs that track many of the companies that mine and sell these metals such as the Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX), the Market Vectors Junior Gold Miners ETF (GDXJ) and the Global X Silver Miners (SIL) are down even further in the last three months compared with the metals they produce, losing 17.9%, 20.1% and 15.4%, respectively. Given these recent sell-offs in the precious metals sector, I am reiterating that the gold and silver stocks, including those mentioned above, are now strong buys after their significant sell-offs. The reasons to be bullish on precious metal prices and subsequently on the companies that mine and/or sell them are...........READ MORE

Gold Industry Frontrunners

NEW YORK, JANUARY 30, 2013 — (Net PR News) – Kinross Gold Corporation (USA) (NYSE:KGC) traded with volume of 14.65 million shares and its average trading volume remained 7.26 million shares. The 5 days graph represented the negative trend of -11.23% and one month performance of KGC was also negative -10.19%. Kinross Gold Corporation (USA) (NYSE:KGC) has intended to unveil its financial statements, as well as operating results for the Q4 and full year 2012, on February 13, 2013, after the New York market close. Newmont Mining Corp (NYSE:NEM) closed at $43.39 by scoring +1.33%, while the market capitalization of NEM was 21.54 billion. NEM traded with volume of 7.14 million shares, which was higher than the average trading volume of 5.88 million shares. The 3 months and 6 month performances showed it as a loser of -18.61% and -2.55%, respectively. Newmont Mining Corp (NYSE:NEM) has reported its preface attributable gold plus copper production and costs appropriate to sales within NEM’s 2012 outlook. The company has reported Q4 Preliminary Operating results, including attributable gold and copper production, of 5.0 million ounces and 143 million pounds for 2012 and 1.3 million ounces and 35 million pounds for the fourth quarter. Goldcorp Inc. (USA) (NYSE:GG) traded with volume of 4.99 million shares, while the average trading volume remained 5.45 million shares. GG showed an upward trend on January 29, 2013 and advanced +2.27% and finally closed the trading session at $36.08. GG plunged -5.82% in its weekly performance and slipped -11.83% in its quarterly performance. GG moved negatively in its 20 days moving average -1.27% and also dropped in its 50 days moving average -3.67%. Eldorado Gold Corp (USA) (NYSE:EGO) was a volume gainer of the Gold Industry by gaining volume of 4.27 million shares, compared to average trading capacity of 2.81 million shares. EGO closed the preceding session at $11.49, by showing a downward movement of -0.42%. Eldorado Gold Corp (USA) (NYSE:EGO) will divulge its year end 2012 financial results prior to the opening of the market on February 22, 2013. EGO’s CEO, Paul N. Wright, has planned to host a conference call on February 22, at 8:30 AM PT.

Almaden Minerals Up 57% Since I Highlighted It And There's Room To Run

In the present article I follow-up on a speculative gold exploration company that I first got behind back on August 8th, 2012, Almaden Minerals (AAU). When I first highlighted the stock, it traded at $1.94. The stock has had a major run to $3.04, appreciating 56.7% since my recommendation to buy. After reviewing its 2012 summary and presentation, I think the stock....READ MORE

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