1 A stock market-economy disconnect, warns OECD (San
Francisco Chronicle) There appears to be a disconnect between the recent surge
in stock markets and the global economy's underlying strength, the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development has warned.
Many indexes, particularly in the US, have rallied
over the winter to hit record highs. The OECD noted, however, that expectations
for company earnings in the US and Europe have not been revised up on the
whole. And growth in consumption and investment is still lagging.
The OECD predicts that global economic growth this
year will be 3.3 percent and rise to around 3.6 percent in 2018. However, it
warned that the "projected modest upturn" could be derailed by a
number of factors, including the possibility of a downturn in markets, greater
barriers to trade set up by governments, and uncertainties about the path of
interest rates around the world.
It said the global economy remains beset by sub-par
growth and high inequality following the financial crisis.
2 CIA snoops via TVs, says Wikileaks (Leo Kelion &
Gordon Corera on BBC) Wikileaks has published details of what it says are
wide-ranging hacking tools used by the CIA. The alleged cyber-weapons are said
to include malware that targets Windows, Android, iOS, OSX and Linux computers
as well as internet routers.
Some of the software is reported to have been
developed in-house, but the UK's MI5 agency is said to have helped build a
spyware attack for Samsung TVs. A spokesman for the CIA would not confirm the
details.
Wikileaks said that its source had shared the
details with it to prompt a debate into whether the CIA's hacking capabilities
had exceeded its mandated powers. These latest leaks - which appear to give
details of highly sensitive technical methods - will be a huge problem for the
CIA. There is the embarrassment factor - that an agency whose job is to steal
other people's secrets has not been able to keep their own.
Then there will be the fear of a loss of
intelligence coverage against their targets who may change their behaviour
because they now know what the spies can do. And then there will be the
questions over whether the CIA's technical capabilities were too expansive and
too secret.
Because many of the initial documents point to
capabilities targeting consumer devices, the hardest questions may revolve
around what is known as the "equities" problem. The NSA has already
faced questions when many of its secrets were revealed by Edward Snowden, and
now it may be the CIA's turn.
The effort to compromise Samsung's F8000 range of
smart TVs was codenamed Weeping Angel, according to documents dated June 2014. They
describe the creation of a "fake-off" mode, designed to fool users
into believing that their screens had been switched off.
Instead, the documents indicate, infected sets were
made to covertly record audio, which would later be transferred over the
internet to CIA computer servers once the TVs were fully switched back on,
allowing their wi-fi links to re-establish. Samsung has not commented on the
allegations.
3 Poachers kill rhino, take horn in Paris (Kim
Willsher in The Guardian) Poachers have broken into a French zoo, killing a
four-year-old white rhinoceros and sawing off its horn. Keepers found the dead
animal, named Vince, in the African enclosure of the zoo at Thoiry, west of
Paris, on Tuesday morning. It had been shot in the head and its large horn
removed with a chainsaw.
The poachers fled before they could remove the
animal’s second horn, either because they were disturbed or because their
equipment failed, police said. Authorities described the incident as the first
of its kind in Europe.
Park director Thierry Duguet said the attack was
“unbelievable” and that Vince had been one of the most popular attractions at
the zoo. “An act of such extreme violence has never happened before in Europe.”
A rhinoceros horn has an estimated value of between
€30,000 and €40,000. Detectives say there is an established trade network in
illegally poached horn between France and Asia. The white rhino is an
endangered species, with an estimated 21,000 remaining in the wild across the
world, mainly in South Africa and Uganda.
Their horns are sought after in Asia, where they are
valued for their supposed aphrodisiac qualities. In Zimbabwe last autumn, the
authorities announced they would remove the horns of 700 adult rhinoceros to
dissuade attacks from poachers.
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