Fatal clash on West Bank could threaten peace talks, Palestinians say

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Fatal clash on West Bank could threaten peace talks, Palestinians say

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Wall Street Week Ahead: Jobs data could spur Fed action on stimulus

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange August 28, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid

By Richard Leong

NEW YORK | Fri Aug 30, 2013 6:24pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street is bracing for a wave of economic reports next week, including the August jobs report, which might prove decisive in determining whether the economy is strong enough for the Federal Reserve to dial back its bond purchases in mid-September.

Anxiety about the Fed possibly reducing its $85 billion monthly stimulus, also known as QE3, has hurt the stock market, which recorded its steepest monthly fall since May 2012.

But the stock market's greater anxiety, which has developed in recent weeks, is that the Fed will press ahead with a reduction in support, even as the economy remains fragile. The recent data has failed to provide evidence of the convincing growth the Fed says it wants to see. Until then, stocks will benefit from the cheap money resulting from the Fed's bond purchases.

"Next week's data should make or break the September expectations," said Mike O'Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading in Greenwich, Connecticut.

A strong jobs report will likely reinforce the view the Fed will opt to decrease its bond purchases at its September 17-18 meeting, while a weak one would do the opposite, analysts said.

"From a real economy perspective, QE3 has done very little. From a financial markets perspective, it has had a major influence. If it is really not helping the real economy beyond pushing financial assets higher, there is no point in continuing the risk of increasing the balance sheet," said O'Rourke.

For the month, the Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 3.1 percent in August; the Dow Jones industrial average lost 4.4 percent and the Nasdaq slipped 1 percent. .N

Speculation on the timing of Fed action has triggered a bond market sell-off that sent mortgage rates to two-year highs. The surge in home borrowing costs this summer has shown signs of slowing the housing recovery. Analysts also are watching if the higher rates have discouraged employers from adding workers.

Economists polled by Reuters forecast domestic employers likely hired 180,000 workers in August, more than 162,000 in July, while the jobless rate likely held steady at 7.4 percent, which is a four-year low.

Deutsche Bank economists said that if the payrolls figure exceeds 190,000 and the unemployment rate falls to 7.3 percent, they expect the Fed will start cutting bond purchases. "August employment would have to meaningfully disappoint for the Fed to back away from the timetable presented by Chairman Bernanke in the June post-meeting press conference," they wrote.

Prior to the payrolls data on Friday, traders will face a heavy schedule of economic releases after the three-day holiday weekend. They include the latest readings on vehicle sales and national factory and service activities.

U.S. financial markets will close on Monday for the Labor Day holiday.

Investors are watching the tense situation between the West and Syria. Signs of a U.S.-led military strike against Syria after chemical weapons were used to kill civilians could hurt the appetite for stocks globally.

Traders pared expectations on such a move after the British parliament voted against a military strike. But France said it supported punishing the Syrian government for the attack on civilians. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday the chemical weapons attack in Damascus last week killed more than 1,400 people.

Despite the sharp moves in equities due to the Syrian unrest, "we still expect the market to stop short of a 10 percent decline," said Mike Dueker, head economist for North America at Russell Investments in Seattle.

Light volume in late summer likely exaggerated August's stock decline, analysts said. The uncertainty has also boosted measures of volatility. The CBOE Volatility Index .VIX rose above 17 on Friday, a two-month high.

Bonds, in comparison, posted small losses. They were poised to lose 0.54 percent in August, according to Barclays' Aggregate bond index that tracks U.S. investment-grade debt returns.

SHAKY SEPTEMBER

While Syria and economic data will be next week's main concerns, other developments, such as President Barack Obama's nominee to succeed Ben Bernanke as Fed chief and another possible showdown between Obama and congressional Republicans over the federal debt might keep investors on edge, analysts said.

"There is no doubt that September is teed up for a tsunami of data coming at us and headlines coming at us," said David Lyon, investment specialist at JP Morgan Private Bank in San Francisco, California, which manages $910 billion in assets.

"So the market will look at September and really start to find its footing based on some of the economic data that comes out as well as clarity around some of these policy decisions at the central bank level or the geopolitical level," he said

History might complicate that view.

September has traditionally been the worst month for stocks, with an average 0.6 percent decline in the S&P 500 index over the past 62 years, although it rose 2.4 percent last September.

This September marks a milestone - the five-year anniversary of the global credit meltdown during which Wall Street witnessed the downfall of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch, the near-demise of insurance giant AIG.

In that turbulent September 2008, the market tumbled 9.1 percent.

(Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak and Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

View the original article here

Wall Street Week Ahead: Jobs data could spur Fed action on stimulus

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange August 28, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid

By Richard Leong

NEW YORK | Fri Aug 30, 2013 6:24pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street is bracing for a wave of economic reports next week, including the August jobs report, which might prove decisive in determining whether the economy is strong enough for the Federal Reserve to dial back its bond purchases in mid-September.

Anxiety about the Fed possibly reducing its $85 billion monthly stimulus, also known as QE3, has hurt the stock market, which recorded its steepest monthly fall since May 2012.

But the stock market's greater anxiety, which has developed in recent weeks, is that the Fed will press ahead with a reduction in support, even as the economy remains fragile. The recent data has failed to provide evidence of the convincing growth the Fed says it wants to see. Until then, stocks will benefit from the cheap money resulting from the Fed's bond purchases.

"Next week's data should make or break the September expectations," said Mike O'Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading in Greenwich, Connecticut.

A strong jobs report will likely reinforce the view the Fed will opt to decrease its bond purchases at its September 17-18 meeting, while a weak one would do the opposite, analysts said.

"From a real economy perspective, QE3 has done very little. From a financial markets perspective, it has had a major influence. If it is really not helping the real economy beyond pushing financial assets higher, there is no point in continuing the risk of increasing the balance sheet," said O'Rourke.

For the month, the Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 3.1 percent in August; the Dow Jones industrial average lost 4.4 percent and the Nasdaq slipped 1 percent. .N

Speculation on the timing of Fed action has triggered a bond market sell-off that sent mortgage rates to two-year highs. The surge in home borrowing costs this summer has shown signs of slowing the housing recovery. Analysts also are watching if the higher rates have discouraged employers from adding workers.

Economists polled by Reuters forecast domestic employers likely hired 180,000 workers in August, more than 162,000 in July, while the jobless rate likely held steady at 7.4 percent, which is a four-year low.

Deutsche Bank economists said that if the payrolls figure exceeds 190,000 and the unemployment rate falls to 7.3 percent, they expect the Fed will start cutting bond purchases. "August employment would have to meaningfully disappoint for the Fed to back away from the timetable presented by Chairman Bernanke in the June post-meeting press conference," they wrote.

Prior to the payrolls data on Friday, traders will face a heavy schedule of economic releases after the three-day holiday weekend. They include the latest readings on vehicle sales and national factory and service activities.

U.S. financial markets will close on Monday for the Labor Day holiday.

Investors are watching the tense situation between the West and Syria. Signs of a U.S.-led military strike against Syria after chemical weapons were used to kill civilians could hurt the appetite for stocks globally.

Traders pared expectations on such a move after the British parliament voted against a military strike. But France said it supported punishing the Syrian government for the attack on civilians. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday the chemical weapons attack in Damascus last week killed more than 1,400 people.

Despite the sharp moves in equities due to the Syrian unrest, "we still expect the market to stop short of a 10 percent decline," said Mike Dueker, head economist for North America at Russell Investments in Seattle.

Light volume in late summer likely exaggerated August's stock decline, analysts said. The uncertainty has also boosted measures of volatility. The CBOE Volatility Index .VIX rose above 17 on Friday, a two-month high.

Bonds, in comparison, posted small losses. They were poised to lose 0.54 percent in August, according to Barclays' Aggregate bond index that tracks U.S. investment-grade debt returns.

SHAKY SEPTEMBER

While Syria and economic data will be next week's main concerns, other developments, such as President Barack Obama's nominee to succeed Ben Bernanke as Fed chief and another possible showdown between Obama and congressional Republicans over the federal debt might keep investors on edge, analysts said.

"There is no doubt that September is teed up for a tsunami of data coming at us and headlines coming at us," said David Lyon, investment specialist at JP Morgan Private Bank in San Francisco, California, which manages $910 billion in assets.

"So the market will look at September and really start to find its footing based on some of the economic data that comes out as well as clarity around some of these policy decisions at the central bank level or the geopolitical level," he said

History might complicate that view.

September has traditionally been the worst month for stocks, with an average 0.6 percent decline in the S&P 500 index over the past 62 years, although it rose 2.4 percent last September.

This September marks a milestone - the five-year anniversary of the global credit meltdown during which Wall Street witnessed the downfall of Lehman Brothers, the sale of Merrill Lynch, the near-demise of insurance giant AIG.

In that turbulent September 2008, the market tumbled 9.1 percent.

(Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak and Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

View the original article here

HP could do acquisitions up to $1.5 billion: CEO

Meg Whitman, chief executive officer and president of Hewlett-Packard, speaks during the grand opening of the company's Executive Briefing Center in Palo Alto, California January 16, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Stephen Lam

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Moore’s Law could stay on track with extreme UV progress

Long-awaited improvements in photolithography could pave the way for the continued shrinking and scaling of microprocessors into the second half of this decade and beyond.

Moore's Law—which says that transistor densities double every 18 to 24 months or so—is not some inevitable consequence of physics. Rather, it's an observation of the way the semiconductor industry has evolved: the investment and technological progress that companies like Intel have made results in an approximate doubling of transistor densities on a regular basis.

Rather than causing the doubling, physics is currently threatening to put an end to the progress we've seen over the last four decades. Microchips are made with a process called photolithography. The silicon wafer on which the chip is built is coated with a light-sensitive layer ("photoresist"). Light is then shone through a patterned mask onto the wafer, essentially burning away the photoresist in the exposed areas. This exposes some parts of the wafer, leaving others covered. The exposed parts are then etched away, and the remaining photoresist washed off.

The limiting factor is the size of pattern that can be created on the photoresist layer. Higher transistor densities require finer mask patterns and shorter light wavelengths. Here's the pressing issue: current photolithography uses ultraviolet light with a 193nm wavelength, but at some point in the near future, probably around the 10nm process, a switch to extreme UV (EUV) with a 13.5nm wavelength will be required.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was confidence within the semiconductor industry that EUV equipment was coming soon. It has failed to materialize, however, due to the technical difficulties that EUV imposes. Optically, EUV is harder to work with. It precludes the use of lenses, as most optical materials strongly absorb EUV light. Instead only mirrors can be used.

Further, it's hard to generate EUV light. Two methods are used: discharge production passes a large current through a metal plasma or laser production heats droplets of tin with a high intensity laser beam. Neither method is very energy-efficient.

But good news could be on the horizon. ASML, the world's largest supplier of photolithographic equipment, has said (via HotHardware) that it could have production-ready commercial equipment by 2015, suitable for producing chips with 10nm features.

However, the company still has work to do to meet that goal. Its current prototype machine, using lasers to produce the EUV, produces about 55W of light. Commercial hardware will need to produce about 250W of light. (As if to highlight the difficulties that EUV has faced, ASML once expected to have 80W machines by the end of 2011.) Intel says that it needs 1kW light sources for its lithographic needs.

The problems with EUV photolithography could derail Moore's Law. Although there are workarounds that extend regular UV photolithographic techniques, such as using multiple exposures with different masks, these have challenges of their own (due to the tight alignment requirements of the different masks). The more masks and exposures used, the higher the chance of a misalignment ruining the wafer.

Current fabrication uses double patterning with two exposures. In the event that EUV hardware can't reach the power levels required, quadruple patterning is the next step, even with its attendant difficulties.

Listing image by Intel

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Holy Grail of Books Could Fetch $30M

One of 11 remaining copies, the Bay Psalm Book is predicted to sell for $30 million at Sotheby's.

A rare psalm book from 1640 could fetch between $15 million to $30 million at a Sotheby’s auction on Nov. 26 in New York.

“It’s going to be far and away the most expensive book ever sold,” David Redden, vice chairman of Sotheby’s auction house, told ABCNews.com.

The Bay Psalm Book, which is the first book printed in what is now the United States, comes from the Old South Church in Boston, one of two copies of the book in its collection.

“One copy, the copy we are keeping, was bequeathed to us by our fifth minister, the Reverend Thomas Prince,” Nancy Taylor, Old South Church’s senior minister and CEO, told ABCNews.com.

Sotheby’s specialists used comparables to value the book.  “We have sold books as much as $11.5 million in the past, which are far less rare than this,” Redden said.  The last Bay Psalm Book was bought at a Sotheby’s auction in 1947 for $151,000 by Yale University.

RELATED: Letter on DNA Structure Sells for Record $5.3 Million

“One is so rare, no one could conceive of just owning one,” Redden said.  “It’s the greatest rarity in the book world.  Nothing is desirable as the Bay Psalm Book.”

Old South Church’s particular Bay Psalm Book is one of the best copies and in excellent condition, but what makes it incredibly sought after is its origin.

When the Bay Psalm Book was first printed, 1,700 copies were made, and few survive.  “It would literally have been used to pieces by the early Puritans,” Redden said.

SLIDESHOW: Expensive Items

While the Bay Psalm Book is not on everybody’s lips, Redden expects that many institutions, such as Princeton or the University of Texas, and private book collectors would desperately desire to have one.  However, he is certain that it will be an American buyer to win the auction.

“It’s a great story, the idea that in the middle of the wilderness the first Americans were able to produce a quite elaborate book,” Redden said.  “It’s the first American book made in America.”

Old South Church is hoping to use profits from the sale to help pay for building repairs and support its ministries. The church will maintain ownership of its other 2,000 rare books and manuscripts.

RELATED: Is Met Museum’s Fabulous Cubist Donation Worth Billions?

Sotheby’s plans to give people many opportunities to see the hymnal and will exhibit it widely before its November auction.

“For people in the book world, this is an earthquake,” Redden said.

View the original article here

Cannabis Care: Signing the therapeutic marijuana law just the first step in a process that could take years

View the original article here