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Half of Americans back Trump’s handling of North Korea – Reuters/Ipsos poll – AOL News

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Your Wi-Fi Security Is Probably Weak. Here’s How to Fix That. – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/personaltech/wi-fi-router-security.html
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Your Wi-Fi Security Is Probably Weak. Here’s How to Fix That.
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CreditMinh Uong/The New York Times
By Brian X. Chen
June 13, 2018

Chances are that when you bought a Wi-Fi router, you probably did not prioritize strong network security.

After all, when we think about wireless connectivity in our homes, most of us generally care more about speed of data transmissions and how much range the router can cover.

But it’s time to change our views. Network security needs to be high on our list of considerations because a Wi-Fi station is the gateway for devices to get on the internet. If your router is infected with malicious software, all your internet-connected devices become vulnerable, including your smartphone, computer, smart watch, television and Amazon Echo.

A recent cyberthreat underscores the need to take network security more seriously. Last month, Cisco’s threat research arm Talos, in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, discovered that a malware system with links to Russia had infected hundreds of thousands of Wi-Fi routers made by popular brands like Netgear, TP-Link and Linksys. This month, Talos revealed the problem was even worse than initially thought: Routers from other brands like Asus and D-Link had also been infected.

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That means base stations from every well-known router brand were a target for this malware, known as VPNFilter, which is capable of manipulating your web traffic. Attackers could use it to load a fake banking site on your computer browser that looks like the one you normally use and steal your credentials and clean out your bank accounts. They could also load spoof versions of an email site you use to steal your password and gain access to your communications.

Netgear, D-Link and Linksys said they advised people to install the latest security updates and to choose strong usernames and passwords. TP-Link and Asus did not respond to requests for comment.

Our remedy? For starters, make sure your Wi-Fi station is always running the latest version of its “firmware,” or software system, just as you are supposed to keep operating systems up-to-date for your smartphone and computer. In a 2014 survey of I.T. professionals and employees who work remotely conducted by the security firm Tripwire, only 32 percent said they knew how to update their routers with the latest firmware.

“Most consumers don’t know to patch these things,” said Matt Watchinski, a senior director of Cisco Talos, who helped research the VPNFilter malware. “They don’t treat it like they do their air-conditioner or refrigerator, where we all know we should change the filters.”

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Here’s a guide to some of the best practices you can embrace to ensure that your router — and, by extension, all your internet gadgets — is safe.

Routinely update the firmware
Even though a router lacks moving parts, it needs to be maintained with the latest security updates. Easier said than done, right? Here is a basic step-by-step for how to do that:

■ Consult the instruction manual for your router to get its IP address, a string of numbers that you will punch into a web browser for access to the router’s web dashboard. Jot down the number and store it somewhere safe like your filing cabinet.

■ After entering the router’s IP address into a web browser, log in to the base station with your username and password. In the router’s web dashboard, click on the firmware settings. Look for a button that lets you check for the latest firmware version.

■ If an update is available, choose to install it and let the router restart. Repeat this process every three to six months.

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Set a unique username and password
When you log in to your router, if your username and password are something like “admin” and “password,” you have a problem. Many Wi-Fi stations come with weak, generic passwords by default that manufacturers intend for you to change.

The problem with having a weak username and password is that anybody within range of your router could log in to it and change its settings, potentially opening it up to the outside world, said Dave Fraser, chief executive of Devicescape, a company that helps make public Wi-Fi networks more reliable for mobile phone service.

So while you are checking for firmware updates in your router’s web dashboard, make sure to also check your security settings and change the username and password to something strong and unique. Security experts recommend creating long, complex passwords consisting of nonsensical phrases and added numbers and special characters. (Examples: My fav0rite numb3r is Gr33n4782# or The cat ate the C0TT0n candy 224%.) Write down these credentials on the same piece of paper where you recorded your IP address.

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Replace your router every few years
Even if your router still appears to work properly, the device has reached the end of its life when manufacturers stop supporting it with firmware updates, leaving it vulnerable to future cyberthreats. You can expect this to happen every three to five years. At that point, it is crucial to upgrade to a new piece of hardware.

The best way to check is to look up your router on the manufacturer’s website and read notes about its firmware releases. If there hasn’t been a firmware update in the last year, the router has probably been discontinued.

Among the routers affected by the VPNFilter malware, a significant portion of them were more than five years old, said Cisco’s Mr. Watchinski.

How did we get here in the first place? Historically, manufacturers have designed routers by cobbling together open-source software platforms with commodity components to produce base stations as cheaply as possible — with little care for long-term security, Mr. Fraser said.

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“It is a miserable situation, and it has been from day one,” he said. But Mr. Fraser added that there were now “new world” routers with operating systems, tougher security and thoughtful features to make network management easy.

If it is time to update your router, rid yourself of some of these headaches by looking for a smarter router. Check for Wi-Fi systems that offer automatic updates to spare you the headache of having to check and download updates periodically. Many modern Wi-Fi systems include automatic updates as a feature. My favorite ones are Eero and Google Wifi, which can easily be set up through smartphone apps.

The caveat is that smarter Wi-Fi systems tend to cost more than cheap routers that people are accustomed to. Eero’s base stations start at $199, and a Google Wifi station costs $119, compared with $50 for a cheap router. For both of these systems, you can also add base stations throughout the home to extend their wireless connections, creating a so-called mesh network.

Another bonus? Mr. Fraser noted that more modern Wi-Fi systems should have longer life spans because the companies sometimes relied on different revenue streams, like selling subscriptions to network security services.

Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology reporter, writes Tech Fix, a column about solving tech-related problems like sluggish Wi-Fi, poor smartphone battery life and the complexity of taking your smartphone abroad. What confuses you or makes you angry about your tech? Send your suggestions for future Tech Fix columns to brian.chen@nytimes.com.

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Trump-Kim summit: How many US soldiers are buried in North Korea? – BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44455104

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Trump-Kim summit: How many US soldiers are buried in North Korea?
By Reality Check team
BBC News
12 June 2018
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The two leaders signed the agreement at their historic summit in Singapore
During the summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, the US and North Korea committed to recovering the remains of American troops missing in action during the Korean War.

Thousands of US military personnel remain unaccounted for. The number varies from state-to-state. For example 431 Texans and 593 Californians are unaccounted for, while there is one man from Alaska on the list of missing.

Most of them – about 5,300 – were lost in what is now North Korea, according to the US defence agency that oversees the process of recovering the remains of American troops.

And the US Army says it knows exactly where many are buried.

Fighting stopped in 1953 – but technically the two Koreas remain at war. The conflict ended with an armistice agreement not a peace treaty.

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American-led UN forces, including troops from the UK, supported the South, while Chinese forces joined the war on the North’s side.

Estimates vary, but at least two million Korean civilians, up to 1.5 million communist and about 400,000 South Korean, 30,000 US and 1,000 UK service personnel are believed to have died.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image caption
The 187th Infantry Regiment regimental combat team in May 1951
Why raise this issue now?
For years, teams of American researchers and scientists, with the help of North Koreans, uncovered and returned the remains of US troops found in North and South Korea.

Between 1996 and 2005, 33 recovery operations were conducted in North Korea and 200 sets of remains were returned. And the US government paid compensation to North Koreans involved in the relief effort, $15m (£11m) according to the Congressional Research Service.

Another six sets of remains were returned in a one-off operation in 2007.

But joint operations have stalled for more than a decade because the US government said it could not guarantee the safety of the investigators.

And in 2012, the US Army said it had suspended efforts to find the remains of US servicemen due to North Korean threats to launch a ballistic missile.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES
Image caption
South Koreans marking the 64th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement
The remains of soldiers are believed to be in:

prisoner of war camps – many perished during the winter of 1950
the sites of major battles, such as the areas around Unsan and Chongchon in the north-west of the country – said to contain approximately 1,600 dead
temporary UN military cemeteries – China and North Korea returned about 3,000 dead Americans in an effort called Operation Glory in 1954, but others remain
the demilitarised zone that separates North and South Korea – said to contain 1,000 bodies
In the past, North Korean defectors have been screened for information concerning Americans who might be alive in the North.

But since 1995, and after interviews with 25,000 North Korean defectors, no “useful information” has been revealed, according to the US.

Some American soldiers have lived in North Korea, though. Sgt Charles Jenkins, who defected to North Korea, returned to the US in 2004.

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The Search for Cancer Treatment Beyond Mutant-Hunting – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/magazine/the-search-for-cancer-treatment-that-is-personal-and-useful.html
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The Search for Cancer Treatment Beyond Mutant-Hunting
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CreditPhoto illustration by Cristiana Couceiro. Cells: National Cancer Institute, via Wikipedia.
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
June 13, 2018

On my way to a meeting on cancer and personalized medicine a few weeks ago, I found myself thinking, improbably, of the Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover illustration “View From Ninth Avenue.” Steinberg’s drawing (yes, you’ve seen it — in undergraduate dorm rooms, in subway ads) depicts a mental map of the world viewed through the eyes of a typical New Yorker. We’re somewhere on Ninth Avenue, looking out toward the water. Tenth Avenue looms large, thrumming with pedestrians and traffic. The Hudson is a band of gray-blue. But the rest of the world is gone — irrelevant, inconsequential, specks of sesame falling off a bagel. Kansas City, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles are blips on the horizon. There’s a strip of water denoting the Pacific Ocean, and faraway blobs of rising land: Japan, China, Russia. The whole thing is a wry joke on self-obsession and navel gazing: A New Yorker’s world begins and ends in New York.

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CreditPhoto illustration by Cristiana Couceiro. Source Credit: Michael Bonert, via Wikimedia Commons.
In the mid-2000s, it felt to me, at times, as if cancer medicine were viewing the world from its own Ninth Avenue. Our collective vision was dominated by genomics — by the newfound capacity to sequence the genomes of cells (a “genome” refers to the complete set of genetic material present in an organism or a cell). Cancer, of course, is typically a disease caused by mutant genes that drive abnormal cellular growth (other features of cellular physiology, like the cell’s metabolism and survival, are also affected). By identifying the mutant genes in cancer cells, the logic ran, we would devise new ways of killing the cells. And because the exact set of mutations was unique to an individual patient — one woman’s breast cancer might have mutations in 12 genes, while another breast cancer might have mutations in a different set of 16 — we would “personalize” cancer medicine to that patient, thereby vastly increasing the effectiveness of therapy.

This kind of thinking had an exhilarating track record. In the 2000s, a medicine called Herceptin was shown to be effective for women with breast cancer, but only if the cancer cells carried a genetic aberration in a gene called HER-2. Another drug, Gleevec, worked only if the tumor cells had a mutant gene called BCR-ABL, or a mutation in a gene called c-kit. In many of our genome-obsessed minds, the problem of cancer had become reduced to a rather simple, scalable algorithm: find the mutations in a patient, and match those mutations with a medicine. All the other variables — the cellular environment within which the cancer cell was inescapably lodged, the metabolic and hormonal milieu that surrounded the cancer or, for that matter, the human body that was wrapped around it — might as well have been irrelevant blobs receding in the distance: Japan, China, Russia.

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To bring the promise of mutation-directed therapies to life, researchers began two kinds of trials. The first was called a “basket trial,” in which different forms of cancer (e.g., lung, breast and stomach) containing the same mutations were treated with the same drug — in essence, lumping genetically similar cancers into the same “basket.” The obverse of the basket trial was an “umbrella trial.” Here, one kind of cancer — say, lung cancer or melanoma — was divided into different subtypes based on genetic mutations, and each subtype was targeted by a different medicine. Under a seemingly common umbrella — lung cancer, say — genetically distinct tumors would be treated with therapeutically distinct drugs.

Basket trials worked — somewhat. In one landmark study published in 2015, 122 patients with several different types of cancer — lung, colon, thyroid — were found to have the same mutation in common, and thus treated with the same drug, vemurafenib. The drug worked in some cancers — there was a 42 percent response rate in lung cancer — but not at all in others: Colon cancers had a 0 percent response rate. More recent basket trials with newer drugs have demonstrated striking, even durable, response rates, although the mutations targeted by the drugs are relatively rare across all human cancers.

And the umbrella trials? The record here was also mixed — and, to some, disappointing. In the so-called BATTLE-2 study, patients with lung cancer were divided into different groups based on gene sequencing, and each group was treated with four different drug combinations. The hope was that patients with tumors that contained a mutant version of a gene called K-ras would be uniquely susceptible to one particular drug combination (preclinical data, gathered in mice, suggested that this combination would be potent in these patients). But the laborious strategy deployed in this study — biopsying the tumor, sequencing it and then dividing the patients into mutation-guided treatments — provided few novel therapeutic inroads. In general, patients carrying mutations in the K-ras gene, a key driver of cancer growth, did not survive longer when given the combined drug therapy. “Ultimately,” one reviewer commented, “the trial failed to identify any new promising treatments.” Sequencing, it seemed, had made us none the wiser about treatment.

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The disappointments of these early studies fueled public criticisms of precision medicine. Perhaps we had been seduced by the technology of gene sequencing — by the sheer wizardry of being able to look at a cancer’s genetic core and the irresistible desire to pierce that core with targeted drugs. “We biomedical scientists are addicted to data, like alcoholics are addicted to cheap booze,” Michael Yaffe, a cancer biologist from M.I.T., wrote in the journal Science Signaling. “As in the old joke about the drunk looking under the lamppost for his lost wallet, biomedical scientists tend to look under the sequencing lamppost where the ‘light is brightest’ — that is, where the most data can be obtained as quickly as possible. Like data junkies, we continue to look to genome sequencing when the really clinically useful information may lie someplace else.”

It’s that vision of “someplace else” — a view of the world beyond Ninth Avenue — that oncologists and patients are now seeking. Mutations within a cancer cell certainly carry information about its physiology — its propensity for growth, its vulnerabilities, its potential to cause lethal disease — but there’s a world of information beyond mutations. To grow and flourish within its human host, the cancer cell must co-opt dozens, or even thousands, of nonmutant genes to its purpose — turning these genes “on” and “off,” like a pathological commander who has hijacked a ship and is now using all its normal gears and levers to take a new, malignant course. And the cell must live in a particular context within its host — dodging the immune system, colonizing some tissues and not others, metastasizing to very particular sites: bones but not kidneys for some cancers; liver but not the adjacent spleen for others. What if the “really clinically useful information” lies within these domains — in the networks of normal genes co-opted by cancer cells, in the mechanisms by which they engage with their host’s immune system or in the metabolic inputs that a cell needs to integrate in order to grow?

At the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago this year, it was this altered — and more expansive — vision of precision cancer medicine that was on display. Perhaps the most significant among the presented studies was a very large clinical trial that identified breast cancers that were unlikely to benefit from chemotherapy based on information carried by patterns of gene expression — not single gene mutations — in cancer cells. By identifying tumors that carry these “safer” genetic fingerprints, the study hopes to reduce the use of toxic, expensive — and ineffective — chemo for tens of thousands of women every year. This, too, is precision medicine: Our capacity to find women who should not be lumped into the basket of standard chemotherapy must rank among one of the most worthwhile goals of personalized cancer therapy. Other teams at ASCO reported responses to new generations of drugs that enable the immune system to attack certain cancers, beginning an intensive search for biological markers on cancer cells that predict which tumors are likely to respond (hint: It may not be a single gene mutation).

The point is that precision medicine is not just precision mutant-hunting. It may be decidedly low-tech and may apply to conditions other than cancer. In orthopedics, precision medicine might involve finding an anatomical variant in some shoulders that have sustained fractures, say, that predicts that conventional shoulder surgery will not succeed for those patients. It might invoke gene sequencing again — but this time with computational algorithms that use combinations of genes to predict outcomes (Does A plus B without C predict a response to a drug?). Or it might skip gene sequencing altogether: In my own laboratory, a postdoctoral researcher is trying to grow cancer cells from individual patients in the form of tiny “organoids” — three-dimensional cellular structures that recapitulate living tumors — and testing thousands of drugs to find ones that might work in these organoids before deploying them on patients.

These strategies must, of course, be tested in randomized clinical trials to see if they provide benefit. Can they be deployed at reasonable costs? Will the benefits have an impact on a public scale? But the reinvention of cancer therapy needs time, patience and diligence — and, yes, skepticism. By narrowing our definition of precision medicine too much, we almost narrowed our ambition to deliver precise, thoughtful therapy — or, at times, no therapy — to our patients. It would be a shame to view cancer through such narrow lenses again.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” and, more recently, “The Gene: An Intimate History.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 16, 2018, on Page 12 of the Sunday Magazine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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Federal Reserve raises interest rates amid stronger inflation – AOL Finance

https://www.aol.com/article/finance/2018/06/13/federal-reserve-raises-interest-rates-amid-stronger-inflation/23458297/

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Federal Reserve raises interest rates amid stronger inflation

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HOWARD SCHNEIDER AND JASON LANGE
Jun 13th 2018 2:27PM

WASHINGTON, June 13 (Reuters) – The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on Wednesday, a move that was widely expected but still marked a milestone in the U.S. central bank’s shift from policies used to battle the 2007-2009 financial crisis and recession.

In raising its benchmark overnight lending rate a quarter of a percentage point to a range of between 1.75 percent and 2 percent, the Fed dropped its pledge to keep rates low enough to stimulate the economy “for some time” and signaled it would tolerate above-target inflation at least through 2020.

The Fed has raised rates seven times since late 2015 on the back of the economy’s continuing expansion and solid job growth, rendering the language of its previous policy statements outdated.

Inflation is also snapping into line, with fresh projections from policymakers on Wednesday indicating it would run above the central bank’s 2 percent target, hitting 2.1 percent this year and remaining there through 2020.

Policymakers projected a slightly faster pace of rate increases in the coming months, with two additional hikes expected by the end of this year, compared to one previously.

They see another three rate increases next year, a pace unchanged from their previous forecast.

“The labor market has continued to strengthen … economic activity has been rising at a solid rate,” the central bank’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee said in its unanimous statement after the end of a two-day meeting.

“Household spending has picked up while business fixed investment has continued to grow strongly,” the Fed said.

U.S. Treasury yields rose after the release of the statement while U.S. stocks were trading marginally lower. The dollar pared losses against a basket of currencies.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is scheduled to hold a press conference at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT).

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Jerome Powell listens as US President Donald Trump announces Powell as nominee for Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
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U.S. President Donald Trump announces Jerome Powell as his nominee to become chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, U.S., November 2, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
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US President Donald Trump announces his nominee for Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
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U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Jerome Powell, governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve and Trump’s nominee for chairman of the Federal Reserve, walk to a nomination announcement in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2017. If approved by the Senate, the 64-year-old former Carlyle Group LP managing director and ex-Treasury undersecretary would succeed Janet Yellen. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Jerome Powell (R) speaks after being nominated for Chairman of the Federal Reserve by US President Donald Trump (L) in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
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US President Donald Trump announces his nominee for Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
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US President Donald Trump (L) signals the end of ceremony after announcing Jerome Powell (R) as nominee for Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
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Jerome Powell (R) speaks after being nominated for Chairman of the Federal Reserve by US President Donald Trump (L) in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
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US President Donald Trump walks with Jerome Powell, his nominee to be Federal Reserve chairman, at the White House in Washington, DC, on November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)
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US President Donald Trump walks with Jerome Powell, his nominee to be Federal Reserve chairman, at the White House in Washington, DC, on November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)
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US President Donald Trump walks with Jerome Powell, his nominee to be Federal Reserve chairman, at the White House in Washington, DC, on November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)
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Jerome Powell (R) leaves with US President Donald Trump leave after he was nominated for Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
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US President Donald Trump shakes hands with his nominee for Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell (R), in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, November 2, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
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U.S. President Donald Trump arrives shakes hands with Jerome Powell, his nominee to become chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve at the White House in Washington, U.S., November 2, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
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U.S. President Donald Trump announces Jerome Powell as his nominee to become chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, U.S., November 2, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
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U.S. President Donald Trump arrives in the Rose Garden to announce Jerome Powell as his nominee to become chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve at the White House in Washington, U.S., November 2, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
“The Fed’s path of gradual rate hikes and slow (balance) sheet reduction seems well established at this point. The trajectory of U.S. inflation or the broader U.S. economy would likely need to change materially for the FOMC to deviate from that path,” said Aaron Anderson, senior vice president of research at Fisher Investments.

The Fed’s short-term policy rate, a benchmark for a host of other borrowing costs, is now roughly equal to the rate of inflation, a breakthrough of sorts in the central bank’s battle in recent years to return monetary policy to a normal footing.

Though rates are now roughly positive on an inflation-adjusted basis, the Fed still described its monetary policy as “accommodative,” with gradual rate increases likely warranted as a sturdy economy enters a 10th straight year of growth.

Estimates of longer-run interest rates were unchanged and seen reaching as high as 3.4 percent in 2020 before dropping to 2.9 percent in the longer run.

FED CONFIDENCE

The Fed now sees gross domestic product growing 2.8 percent this year, slightly higher than previously forecast, and dipping to 2.4 percent next year, unchanged from policymakers’ March projections. The unemployment rate is seen falling to 3.6 percent in 2018, compared to the 3.8 percent forecast in March.

The rate increase was in line with investors’ expectations and showed policymakers’ confidence in the economy’s growth prospects, continued low unemployment and steady inflation. Investors had given just over a 91 percent chance of a rate rise on Wednesday, according to an analysis by CME Group.

The Fed said its policy of further gradual rate increases will be “consistent with sustained expansion of economic activity, strong labor market conditions, and inflation near the Committee’s symmetric 2 percent objective.”

In a technical move, the central bank also decided to set the interest rate it pays banks on excess reserves – its chief tool for moderating short-term interest rates – at just below the upper level of its target range. The step was needed, the Fed said, to be sure rates stay within the intended boundaries.

The policy statement bypassed discussion about the tensions over the Trump administration’s trade policies, including a decision two weeks ago to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico.

Individual Fed policymakers have expressed concerns about the economic risks of a broad tit-for-tat tariff retaliation, but have said they would not change their policies or forecasts until those risks are realized.

(Reporting by Howard Schneider Editing by Paul Simao)

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Today’s Holiday: New Zealand National Agricultural Fieldays

Today’s Holiday:
New Zealand National Agricultural Fieldays

The largest agricultural show in New Zealand takes place for four days during the second week in June in Hamilton, and attracts visitors from more than 40 countries. There are exhibits covering every type of rural activity, demonstrations of how to use the latest farm equipment, and contests in such areas as hay-baling, wire-fencing, tractor-driving, and helicopter log-lifting. In a country that in 1990 had more than 60 million sheep and only 3.3 million people, these regional agricultural shows attract the kind of audience that is usually associated with major athletic competitions. More…: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tfd.mobile.TfdSearch

Today’s Birthday: Lucy Christiana, Lady Duff Gordon (1863)

Today’s Birthday:
Lucy Christiana, Lady Duff Gordon (1863)

A leading British fashion designer of the Edwardian era, Gordon made less restrictive clothing for women that she sold in her own “Lucile, Ltd.” shops in London, Paris, Chicago, and New York. To promote her wares, she organized tea times when models would parade around in her designs, a precursor of the modern fashion show. Gordon was a passenger on the Titanic and survived its sinking by boarding Lifeboat 1 with her husband. What did the tabloids allege about their escape from the ship? More…: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tfd.mobile.TfdSearch

This Day in History: “The Cinderella Man” Becomes World Heavyweight Champion (1935)

This Day in History:
“The Cinderella Man” Becomes World Heavyweight Champion (1935)

For budding boxer James J. Braddock, 1929 was a bad year. The promising pugilist narrowly lost a 15-round championship fight and, months later, the Great Depression struck. Braddock, struggling to support his family and losing many more bouts than he won, eventually gave up boxing to work the docks. In 1934, he returned to the ring, and a year later, he landed a title shot against Max Baer. Braddock was a 10-to-1 underdog but won in a stunning upset. Who beat Braddock for the title in 1937? More…: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tfd.mobile.TfdSearch

Article of the Day: Crystal Gazing

Article of the Day:
Crystal Gazing

Also called crystal gazing, scrying is the magical practice of divining the past, present, or future by gazing into a usually reflective, translucent, or luminescent medium, such as crystal, mirror, water, or fire. The Cup of Jamshid, described in Persian mythology as a magical cup containing an elixir of immortality, is said to have revealed to the observer all the layers of the universe. Mirrors, meanwhile, have been said to reveal what to young women who gaze into them in a darkened room? More…: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tfd.mobile.TfdSearch

Idiom of the Day: meet trouble halfway

Idiom of the Day:
meet trouble halfway

To worry, grow anxious, or distress oneself unnecessarily over something that has yet to happen. Watch the video…: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tfd.mobile.TfdSearch

Word of the Day: carrel

Word of the Day:
carrel

Definition: (noun) A partially partitioned nook in or near the stacks in a library, used for private study.
Synonyms: cubicle, stall
Usage: There are too many distractions at home, so when I really need to study, I go to the library, find a secluded carrel, and study there.: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tfd.mobile.TfdSearch

The Thinking Tree – an ancient olive tree in Puglia, Italy.

The Thinking Tree – an ancient olive tree in Puglia, Italy.

Soros

Way too much money into the wrongs hands, belonging to a bolshevick without shame!