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"Covid-19 is spreading to America’s South with unnerving speed

Southern governors are beginning to reopen their states. For most, it is too early.

The South is entering the most dangerous period in which case numbers are large, growth is still high and health systems start to buckle."

economist.com/united-states/20

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Happy Earth Day. You Go, Gaia!
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RT @TomFulop@twitter.activitypub.actor
Happy Earth day!! 🤣🤣🤣
twitter.com/TomFulop/status/12

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Full body Stretch, Cat's Yoga session with Gladstone, Esquire.


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RT @TreasuryMog
Lie on your back and stretch every leg out straight. Pretend you are in the middle of a tug-of-war
twitter.com/TreasuryMog/status

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Warming up stretch; for Cat's Yoga session. 🐈😊👍


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RT @TreasuryMog
Hello everyone and a snuggly welcome to We can all do a big stretch as a warm up.
twitter.com/TreasuryMog/status

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Relaxin'...


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RT @PiandNeko1@twitter.activitypub.actor
I dare ya...

twitter.com/PiandNeko1/status/

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A delicious Cake recipe, from Portugal.

Original recipe in Portuguese : receitasdeportugal.com/2018/11

And a quick Bing Translator English Version here : translatetheweb.com/?from=pt&t

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Campbell's 1945 canned soup advert.
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RT @doctorow
“Wouldn’t I be silly to make it myself? Go to all that bother, when Campbell’s is so homey and nourishing?”, Campbells Vegetable Soup, 1945 advertisingpics.tumblr.com/pos
twitter.com/doctorow/status/12

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Wilson catching some sun rays on his beautiful black coat.


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RT @Blackcatwilson1@twitter.activitypub.actor
Made a freind in the garden today..
twitter.com/Blackcatwilson1/st

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"Saudi Arabia’s decision to trigger an oil price war has backfired badly"

By Eric Reguly, The Globe and Mail Europe Bureau chief. Full text, as the link is Paywalled. Great article.

"Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is learning the hard way that barrels of oil with nowhere to go are worth approximately zero. Saudi barrels aren’t worth nothing – yet – but they’re getting close.

On Tuesday, the day after U.S. oil prices actually went negative, Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 25 per cent to US$19 a barrel. A year ago, it was trading at US$70.

In early March, MBS, as the crown prince is known, apparently thought he had figured it all out. He wanted OPEC, which is led by Saudi Arabia, and Russia, an OPEC ally, to cut production to support prices, which were sagging as the novel coronavirus was bursting out of China. Russia said nyet.

MBS didn’t take Russia’s refusal to play well. He broke Saudi Arabia’s alliance with Russia and vowed to open Saudi Aramco’s spigots, flooding the world with oil. For him, it would be a nice little twofer: Punish Russia and punish the shale-oil industry, whose burgeoning output had transformed the United States into the world’s biggest oil producer and one of its biggest oil exporters.

What could go wrong?

A week later, on March 11, Saudi Arabia signalled that it would dump another 2.3 million barrels a day onto the global market, taking the country’s total output to 12.3 million barrels. Energy analysts were astonished. Olivier Jakob, a former oil trader who is now the managing director of Swiss oil consultancy Petromatrix, called the move highly aggressive, “forcing as much crude as possible in a market that does not want it.”

Indeed. By mid-March, oil was falling fast, and MBS apparently realized that his timing was rather off. So he did a U-turn and convinced OPEC and its allies to cut production by almost 10 million barrels a day. But the cuts would take months to implement, and by then, it would be too late anyway. The COVID-19 crisis had shut down economies around the world. Unsold oil was filling storage tanks and parked supertankers to the brim.

This week, the dire situation reached the point where the cost of storing American oil was higher than the price of oil itself. That’s when prices turned deeply negative. (On Tuesday, West Texas Intermediate rebounded to US$6 a barrel – a price that would still destroy the shale industry within months.)

MBS seems to have lost more than he has gained. Yes, the U.S. shale industry – the business that had the audacity to challenge Saudi Arabia’s dominance of the market – is in deep trouble. U.S. oil-company bankruptcies have started and will continue.

But the Saudi economy is also taking punishing blows. The prospect of oil going back to US$70, even US$50, this year appears slim, as big economies make only tentative steps to dismantle their quarantines. Demand could stay unusually low until a COVID-19 vaccine is developed, which may not happen until sometime next year. Italy gives you a sense of the demand destruction. Figures released Tuesday reveal that March oil sales were 34-per-cent lower than a year ago. Gasoline sales were down 52 per cent, and diesel was down 41 per cent. April’s consumption figures will be even lower, because the Italian quarantine did not start until March 9.

Saudi Arabia is not facing financial and economic catastrophe, as Italy is. The kingdom has ample foreign currency reserves and a low public debt – its debt-to-GDP ratio is 24 per cent (Italy’s is 135 per cent and rising). Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest company, has the lowest pumping costs of any oil producer and can endure US$20 oil for some time, though the price could keep falling.

That’s pretty much where the good news ends, because Saudi Arabia itself is a high-cost operation. The extended royal family has some 15,000 members, and a lot of them like their yachts and Ferraris. The country is an undiversified welfare state with a small entrepreneurial class. The upshot is that the government needs oil at about US$80 to balance its budget.

Already, there are signs of stress in the kingdom. Fitch Ratings has placed the top 10 Saudi banks on “rating watch negative.” It did so after oil prices plunged in mid-March (the high rating of the country itself was left stable). The budget deficit is widening fast. The Finance Minister in late March said he expects the deficit to reach 7 per cent to 9 per cent of GDP. But that was when Brent crude was still hovering around US$30. The price has fallen by a third since then, suggesting the deficit could be much higher.

MBS knows that he has to wean Saudi Arabia off its oil dependence. In 2016, he unveiled his Vision 2030 plan to modernize and diversify the economy. The plan would recruit women into the work force, create tech and logistical centres, build new cities along the Red Sea, open the country up to tourism and develop a manufacturing base. But turning the vision into reality would require fortunes; those fortunes would, by definition, have to come from oil production.

Vision 2030 is looking ambitious within the next decade as oil falls out of favour and Saudi Arabia’s financial health deteriorates. The pandemic, of course, propelled prices down at an alarming rate. But MBS’s decision to go to war against Russian and American oil producers last month was badly timed, spectacularly so. Vision 2040 anyone?"

theglobeandmail.com/business/c

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Background story from Guayaquil, Equador, from the beginning of the month -- the bleakest period yet there.

theguardian.com/world/2020/apr

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"'Like the horror of war': mayor of virus-ravaged Ecuador city calls for drastic response "

Equador was hit very hard by the pandemic -- horrific video filmed on the streets showing abandoned bodies, dumped on the streets or outside the overwhelmed cemiteries gave a graphic idea of how bad it was.

"The mayor of the Latin American city hardest hit by the coronavirus has urged regional governments to take drastic steps to slow its spread and avoid the devastation she said had left Guayaquil looking like a war zone.

Cynthia Viteri told the Guardian she believed thousands had probably lost their lives in the Ecuadorian port city in recent weeks and compared Covid-19’s deadly impact there to “an unexpected bomb falling on a peaceful town”.

theguardian.com/world/2020/apr

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Bill Gates, at Odds With Trump on Virus, Becomes a Right-Wing Target

The Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist has been attacked with falsehoods that he created the coronavirus and wants to profit from it.

nytimes.com/2020/04/17/technol

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Dems fail. Argh.
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RT @MikeGrunwald@twitter.activitypub.actor
Democrats cave: Nothing for states or cities, nothing for election protection or the post office, no oversight, no limits on fossil fuel bailouts, no food stamps. They got some testing - somehow that’s a GOP concession! - but no contact tracing. politico.com/news/2020/04/21/s
twitter.com/MikeGrunwald/statu

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💕
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RT @gayocats
1169988506708
twitter.com/gayocats/status/12

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Willow is a Maine Coon, a lot of Cat and lovely fur to love. 💕🐈


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RT @CoonWillow@twitter.activitypub.actor
Jusy Chilling!! 🐾💜
twitter.com/CoonWillow/status/

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Aliece, Grey cat on grey carpet. Looking good, gal. 😊💕


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RT @GandalfGreyCat
Alice is proudly showing her whiskers this
twitter.com/GandalfGreyCat/sta

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One Tuxedo, one Tortoise, both enjoying morning sunshine in an English garden. Lovely gals, Molly and Bella. 💕


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RT @MollyMoggy26@twitter.activitypub.actor
It is and sun ☀️out again and another lovely breakfast with mum outside 😸😸. We could get used to this. Bella and I have been chasing each other non stop round the garden😸😸. Great fun 😸😹😸. Wishing you all a safe day 💕🐾…
twitter.com/MollyMoggy26/statu

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Please IGNORE the sign.


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RT @InternetMeows@twitter.activitypub.actor

twitter.com/InternetMeows/stat

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taking back. Great photos.
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RT @UrbanFoxxxx@twitter.activitypub.actor
Abandoned houses in Mirlo Beach, a once thriving oceanfront town on North Carolina's Outer Banks now slowly being reclaimed by the sea (some of these buildings have since been moved or have collapsed)

[photos: Greg Fitzgerald/ Island Free Press/ Don McCullough]
twitter.com/UrbanFoxxxx/status

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❤️

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