MARKETWATCH
"API data reportedly show U.S. crude supplies little changed for the week"
By Myra P. Saefong
Published: Aug 28, 2018 5:03 p.m. ET
The American Petroleum Institute reported Tuesday that U.S. crude supplies barely budged for the week ended Aug. 24, climbing 38,000 barrels, according to sources.
The API data also showed supplies of gasoline up 21,000 barrels, while distillate stockpiles rose 982,000 barrels, sources said.
Supply data from the Energy Information Administration will be released Wednesday.
Analysts polled by S&P Global Platts expect the EIA to report a fall of 1 million barrels in crude supplies.
They also forecast a supply decline of 160,000 barrels for gasoline and an increase of 1.7 million barrels for distillates.
October crude was at $68.53 a barrel in electronic trading, unchanged from the settlement on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/api-d ... ewer_click
THE DAILY NEWS
Re: THE DAILY NEWS
YOU HAVE TO BE BRAIN-DEAD TO BELIEVE ANY OF THE FAKE NEWS AND CRAP TRUMP SPEWS IN AN ENDLESS STREAM ON MINDLESS TWITTER …
And so ...
REUTERS
"Trump, without evidence, blames China for hacking Clinton emails"
29 AUGUST 2018
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter early on Wednesday China hacked the emails of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton but did not offer any evidence or further information.
"Hillary Clinton’s Emails, many of which are Classified Information, got hacked by China."
"Next move better be by the FBI & DOJ or, after all of their other missteps (Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, FISA, Dirty Dossier etc.), their credibility will be forever gone!" he tweeted a little after midnight on Wednesday.
Trump said in an earlier tweet on Tuesday night: "China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private Email Server."
"Are they sure it wasn’t Russia (just kidding!)?"
"What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this?"
"Actually, a very big story."
"Much classified information!"
U.S. intelligence officials have said Russia orchestrated the hacking of Democratic officials to meddle with the 2016 presidential election.
A U.S. federal grand jury indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers in July on charges of hacking the computer networks of Clinton and the Democratic Party.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 election and whether the campaign of Republican candidate Trump colluded with Moscow.
Russia denies meddling in the elections, while Trump has denied any collusion.
Trump said in April 2017 China may have hacked the emails of Democratic officials to meddle with the 2016 presidential election.
He also did not provide any evidence backing his allegation at that time.
(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee Editing by Paul Tait)
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... id=HPDHP17
And so ...
REUTERS
"Trump, without evidence, blames China for hacking Clinton emails"
29 AUGUST 2018
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter early on Wednesday China hacked the emails of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton but did not offer any evidence or further information.
"Hillary Clinton’s Emails, many of which are Classified Information, got hacked by China."
"Next move better be by the FBI & DOJ or, after all of their other missteps (Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, FISA, Dirty Dossier etc.), their credibility will be forever gone!" he tweeted a little after midnight on Wednesday.
Trump said in an earlier tweet on Tuesday night: "China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private Email Server."
"Are they sure it wasn’t Russia (just kidding!)?"
"What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this?"
"Actually, a very big story."
"Much classified information!"
U.S. intelligence officials have said Russia orchestrated the hacking of Democratic officials to meddle with the 2016 presidential election.
A U.S. federal grand jury indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers in July on charges of hacking the computer networks of Clinton and the Democratic Party.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 election and whether the campaign of Republican candidate Trump colluded with Moscow.
Russia denies meddling in the elections, while Trump has denied any collusion.
Trump said in April 2017 China may have hacked the emails of Democratic officials to meddle with the 2016 presidential election.
He also did not provide any evidence backing his allegation at that time.
(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee Editing by Paul Tait)
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... id=HPDHP17
Re: THE DAILY NEWS
MARKETWATCH
"U.S. economy accelerates to 4.1% rate in second quarter, fastest in almost 4 years"
By Greg Robb
Published: July 28, 2018 1:02 p.m. ET
The numbers:
Consumers and government spending powered the economy to a 4.1% rate of gross domestic product growth in the second quarter, the fastest pace in almost four years.
Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had forecast a 4.2% increase in GDP, the official scorecard for the U.S. economy.
Growth was revised up in the first quarter to 2.2% from 2%.
What happened:
Consumer spending accelerated to a 4% annual pace of growth after a sharp pullback in the first quarter.
Government spending also accelerated at both the federal and state levels.
Business fixed investment increased 5.4% in the second quarter, down from a 8% gain in the first three months of the year.
Residential investment declined for the second straight quarter but at a slower pace than the first quarter.
The trade gap narrowed, boosting GDP.
But this was offset by a downturn in inventory investment.
Still, perhaps a truer reading of economic power, real final sales for domestic purchasers, which excludes trade and inventories, rose a strong 3.9% in the second quarter.
Inflation moderated a bit.
The personal consumption expenditure price index rose at a 1.8% annual rate in the second quarter, down from a 2.5% rate in the first quarter.
The core rate rose at a 2% rate, down from 2.2% in the first quarter.
Big picture:
Activity boomed in the second quarter and the growth does not seem to be due to one-off factors, as some economists had feared.
Over the past year, the economy has expanded at a 2.8% annual pace, up from a 2.6% annual rate in the first quarter.
Economists say this is strong enough to keep putting downward pressure on the unemployment rate.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has said that strong growth is one reason the central bank should keep raising interest rates.
With inflation moderate, the Fed is expected to stay on the pace of a quarter-percentage point rate hike every three months.
Many analysts think growth should stay strong, helped by stimulative fiscal policies, such as tax cuts.
There is concern reported in various business surveys that trade disputes could slow activity, but so far there is little evidence of any disruption in the economic data.
What are economists saying?:
“This is the high watermark for the year as it will be difficult to surpass."
"There will be some deceleration, but to 3% growth from 4%,” said Ryan Sweet, director of real-time economics at Moody’s Analytics.
He said the strength of consumer spending was a surprise and was fueled in part by the Trump tax cut.
But it wasn’t all taxes.
The tight labor market is helping consumers as well, Sweet added.
Market reaction:
U.S. stocks saw little movement on Friday, as investors juggled another batch of corporate results.
The dollar held its modest gain after the data hit.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-ec ... 2018-07-27
"U.S. economy accelerates to 4.1% rate in second quarter, fastest in almost 4 years"
By Greg Robb
Published: July 28, 2018 1:02 p.m. ET
The numbers:
Consumers and government spending powered the economy to a 4.1% rate of gross domestic product growth in the second quarter, the fastest pace in almost four years.
Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had forecast a 4.2% increase in GDP, the official scorecard for the U.S. economy.
Growth was revised up in the first quarter to 2.2% from 2%.
What happened:
Consumer spending accelerated to a 4% annual pace of growth after a sharp pullback in the first quarter.
Government spending also accelerated at both the federal and state levels.
Business fixed investment increased 5.4% in the second quarter, down from a 8% gain in the first three months of the year.
Residential investment declined for the second straight quarter but at a slower pace than the first quarter.
The trade gap narrowed, boosting GDP.
But this was offset by a downturn in inventory investment.
Still, perhaps a truer reading of economic power, real final sales for domestic purchasers, which excludes trade and inventories, rose a strong 3.9% in the second quarter.
Inflation moderated a bit.
The personal consumption expenditure price index rose at a 1.8% annual rate in the second quarter, down from a 2.5% rate in the first quarter.
The core rate rose at a 2% rate, down from 2.2% in the first quarter.
Big picture:
Activity boomed in the second quarter and the growth does not seem to be due to one-off factors, as some economists had feared.
Over the past year, the economy has expanded at a 2.8% annual pace, up from a 2.6% annual rate in the first quarter.
Economists say this is strong enough to keep putting downward pressure on the unemployment rate.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has said that strong growth is one reason the central bank should keep raising interest rates.
With inflation moderate, the Fed is expected to stay on the pace of a quarter-percentage point rate hike every three months.
Many analysts think growth should stay strong, helped by stimulative fiscal policies, such as tax cuts.
There is concern reported in various business surveys that trade disputes could slow activity, but so far there is little evidence of any disruption in the economic data.
What are economists saying?:
“This is the high watermark for the year as it will be difficult to surpass."
"There will be some deceleration, but to 3% growth from 4%,” said Ryan Sweet, director of real-time economics at Moody’s Analytics.
He said the strength of consumer spending was a surprise and was fueled in part by the Trump tax cut.
But it wasn’t all taxes.
The tight labor market is helping consumers as well, Sweet added.
Market reaction:
U.S. stocks saw little movement on Friday, as investors juggled another batch of corporate results.
The dollar held its modest gain after the data hit.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-ec ... 2018-07-27
Re: THE DAILY NEWS
MARKETWATCH
"Pending home sales stumble as housing market momentum wanes"
By Andrea Riquier
The numbers:
Pending-home sales declined 0.7% in July, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday.
What happened:
NAR’s index, which tracks real-estate transactions in which a contract has been signed but the transaction hasn’t yet closed, fell to a reading of 106.2, missing the consensus forecast of a flat reading.
It was the seventh-straight month in which the index was lower on an annual basis — by 2.3% in July.
In the first eight months of 2018, the index has charted monthly increases four times and monthly decreases four times.
In July, the pending home sales index in the Northeast rose 1.0%, while the index in the Midwest inched up 0.3%.
Pending home sales in the South fell 1.7%, while in the West, they were down 0.9%.
Big picture:
Housing has stalled out.
In July, total home sales — existing and new — sank below a key psychological benchmark to the lowest in two years.
What had been a seller’s market across most of the U.S. hit a tipping point this year, as buyers decided the slim pickings on the market weren’t worth it.
The Realtors’ pending home sales data are frequently considered an early read on the important existing-home sales reports, since contract signings precede closings by several weeks.
In recent years, that relationship has broken down somewhat.
But the big picture remains constant: a market starved for supply isn’t conducive to healthy momentum.
The group forecasts a full-year decline for existing-home sales in 2018, and only a 2% increase in 2019.
What they’re saying:
“It appears sales activity crested in late 2017,” said Freddie Mac Chief Economist Sam Khater earlier in August.
“It is clear affordability constraints have cooled the housing market, especially in expensive coastal markets."
"Many metro areas desperately need more new and existing affordable inventory to break out of this slump.”
Market reaction:
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was little-changed in mid-morning trading.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/pendi ... 2018-08-29
"Pending home sales stumble as housing market momentum wanes"
By Andrea Riquier
The numbers:
Pending-home sales declined 0.7% in July, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday.
What happened:
NAR’s index, which tracks real-estate transactions in which a contract has been signed but the transaction hasn’t yet closed, fell to a reading of 106.2, missing the consensus forecast of a flat reading.
It was the seventh-straight month in which the index was lower on an annual basis — by 2.3% in July.
In the first eight months of 2018, the index has charted monthly increases four times and monthly decreases four times.
In July, the pending home sales index in the Northeast rose 1.0%, while the index in the Midwest inched up 0.3%.
Pending home sales in the South fell 1.7%, while in the West, they were down 0.9%.
Big picture:
Housing has stalled out.
In July, total home sales — existing and new — sank below a key psychological benchmark to the lowest in two years.
What had been a seller’s market across most of the U.S. hit a tipping point this year, as buyers decided the slim pickings on the market weren’t worth it.
The Realtors’ pending home sales data are frequently considered an early read on the important existing-home sales reports, since contract signings precede closings by several weeks.
In recent years, that relationship has broken down somewhat.
But the big picture remains constant: a market starved for supply isn’t conducive to healthy momentum.
The group forecasts a full-year decline for existing-home sales in 2018, and only a 2% increase in 2019.
What they’re saying:
“It appears sales activity crested in late 2017,” said Freddie Mac Chief Economist Sam Khater earlier in August.
“It is clear affordability constraints have cooled the housing market, especially in expensive coastal markets."
"Many metro areas desperately need more new and existing affordable inventory to break out of this slump.”
Market reaction:
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was little-changed in mid-morning trading.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/pendi ... 2018-08-29
Re: THE DAILY NEWS
NBC NEWS
"FBI rebuts Trump claim about China hacking Clinton's email"
Ken Dilanian
29 AUGUST 2018
WASHINGTON — Sixteen hours after President Trump tweeted about a right-wing media story alleging that China hacked Hillary Clinton's private email server, an FBI official is refuting the report in a comment to NBC News.
"The FBI has not found any evidence the (Clinton) servers were compromised," the official said.
It's the latest example of the widening breach between a president who traffics in unverified news accounts and the law enforcement agencies he frequently maligns.
The FBI official, speaking for the bureau, also pointed to a report issued in June by the Justice Department inspector general that examined the FBI's investigation of Clinton's use of a private email server.
In the report, the IG noted that while the FBI assessed that it was "possible" that hostile actors gained access to Clinton's private email server, the bureau "acknowledged that the FBI investigation and its forensic analysis did not find evidence that Clinton's email server systems were compromised."
According to the IG report, an FBI forensics agent assigned to the case told investigators that, although he did not believe there was "any way of determining ...100%" whether Clinton's servers had been compromised, he felt "fairly confident that there wasn't an intrusion."
When asked whether a sophisticated foreign adversary was likely to be able to cover its tracks, he stated, "They could."
"Yeah."
"But I, I felt as if we coordinated with the right units at headquarters ... for those specific adversaries …"
"And the information that was returned back to me was that there was no indication of a compromise."
The FBI statement came after a right-wing media organization, the Daily Caller, published a story alleging that "a Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton's private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails."
The story cited two sources briefed on the matter.
The story cited a remark at a July hearing by a conservative Republican congressman, Louis Gohmert of Texas, that another inspector general — the Intelligence Community Inspector General — found that virtually all of Clinton's emails were sent to a "foreign entity."
The story said the Chinese firm "obtained Clinton's emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server," and that "the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation."
The story appeared to prompt this tweet last night by Trump:
"Report just out: 'China hacked Hillary Clinton's private Email Server.'"
"Are they sure it wasn't Russia (just kidding!)?"
"What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this?"
"Actually, a very big story."
"Much classified information!"
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment about Gohmert's allegation or the Daily Caller story.
The Justice Department IG's report noted that the FBI conducted "'intrusion analyses' on each of Clinton's devices and other evidence to determine whether any classified information had been compromised," and said the agent assigned to conduct forensic analysis "described the team's efforts in this regard as exhaustive."
"He stated that these efforts included (1) examining the servers and others devices to identify suspicious logins or other activity, and (2) searching numerous datasets to determine whether foreign adversaries or known hostile domestic actors had accessed emails that the (team) had confirmed to contain classified information."
Former FBI Director James Comey, in his July 5, 2016, press conference regarding possible cyber intrusion of Clinton's email servers, said the FBI had not found direct evidence of any intrusion into her personal email domain, but didn't rule out the possibility.
"Given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence."
"We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account …"
"She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries."
"Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account."
Comey's remarks were widely reported.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... id=HPDHP17
"FBI rebuts Trump claim about China hacking Clinton's email"
Ken Dilanian
29 AUGUST 2018
WASHINGTON — Sixteen hours after President Trump tweeted about a right-wing media story alleging that China hacked Hillary Clinton's private email server, an FBI official is refuting the report in a comment to NBC News.
"The FBI has not found any evidence the (Clinton) servers were compromised," the official said.
It's the latest example of the widening breach between a president who traffics in unverified news accounts and the law enforcement agencies he frequently maligns.
The FBI official, speaking for the bureau, also pointed to a report issued in June by the Justice Department inspector general that examined the FBI's investigation of Clinton's use of a private email server.
In the report, the IG noted that while the FBI assessed that it was "possible" that hostile actors gained access to Clinton's private email server, the bureau "acknowledged that the FBI investigation and its forensic analysis did not find evidence that Clinton's email server systems were compromised."
According to the IG report, an FBI forensics agent assigned to the case told investigators that, although he did not believe there was "any way of determining ...100%" whether Clinton's servers had been compromised, he felt "fairly confident that there wasn't an intrusion."
When asked whether a sophisticated foreign adversary was likely to be able to cover its tracks, he stated, "They could."
"Yeah."
"But I, I felt as if we coordinated with the right units at headquarters ... for those specific adversaries …"
"And the information that was returned back to me was that there was no indication of a compromise."
The FBI statement came after a right-wing media organization, the Daily Caller, published a story alleging that "a Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton's private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails."
The story cited two sources briefed on the matter.
The story cited a remark at a July hearing by a conservative Republican congressman, Louis Gohmert of Texas, that another inspector general — the Intelligence Community Inspector General — found that virtually all of Clinton's emails were sent to a "foreign entity."
The story said the Chinese firm "obtained Clinton's emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server," and that "the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation."
The story appeared to prompt this tweet last night by Trump:
"Report just out: 'China hacked Hillary Clinton's private Email Server.'"
"Are they sure it wasn't Russia (just kidding!)?"
"What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this?"
"Actually, a very big story."
"Much classified information!"
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment about Gohmert's allegation or the Daily Caller story.
The Justice Department IG's report noted that the FBI conducted "'intrusion analyses' on each of Clinton's devices and other evidence to determine whether any classified information had been compromised," and said the agent assigned to conduct forensic analysis "described the team's efforts in this regard as exhaustive."
"He stated that these efforts included (1) examining the servers and others devices to identify suspicious logins or other activity, and (2) searching numerous datasets to determine whether foreign adversaries or known hostile domestic actors had accessed emails that the (team) had confirmed to contain classified information."
Former FBI Director James Comey, in his July 5, 2016, press conference regarding possible cyber intrusion of Clinton's email servers, said the FBI had not found direct evidence of any intrusion into her personal email domain, but didn't rule out the possibility.
"Given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence."
"We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account …"
"She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries."
"Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account."
Comey's remarks were widely reported.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... id=HPDHP17
Re: THE DAILY NEWS
THE SUN SENTINEL
"How the FBI botched tips about the Parkland school shooter"
By Paula McMahon and Brittany Wallman, Sun Sentinel
29 AUGUST 2018
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - The FBI's quest to protect the public - a job it bungled in the case of the Parkland school shooter - has long depended on low-paid, overworked employees who were evaluated partly on how quickly they disposed of tips from callers.
The FBI has spread the message that "if you see something, say something," but then it mishandled two ominous tips to its national call center about Nikolas Cruz, the teenager who later gunned down 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with an AR-15 rifle.
Both tips suggested that Cruz was a school shooter in the making, but neither was sent to agents in South Florida to check out.
The episode has exposed serious questions about how the FBI's call center operates, years after it was established to try to head off deadly trouble before it happened.
And it has left the FBI scrambling to plug holes that allowed Cruz to slip through despite warnings that he was a danger.
Theoretically, the national operation was supposed to free agents in the FBI's 56 field offices to focus on investigations, not sit in the office taking phone calls.
FBI bosses also wanted a cheaper and more effective way to analyze information at one location, spot trends and then forward tips to investigators.
But the South Florida Sun Sentinel has found:
- Call-takers, classified as "customer service representatives," are among the FBI's lowest-paid employees, despite serving as the first line of defense against killers and terrorists while handling thousands of calls a day.
- Figuring out how they made decisions, including the botched Cruz case, has been impossible because no one was required to document precisely what information was considered.
- The most-detailed tip about Cruz seems to have been ignored partly because an earlier tip, which received only a cursory investigation, had already been rejected.
- With Cruz, the confusion is compounded because the call-taker and her supervisor give conflicting accounts of why the second tip was mishandled - each pointing the finger at the other.
- Now, FBI agents say they're being forced to chase pointless tips in an overly cautious system that fears a repeat of the Cruz debacle.
Senior FBI officials have admitted the FBI "committed serious, grave errors" with the Cruz tips, but they called the mistakes "judgment errors."
"The FBI could have and should have done more to investigate the information it was provided prior to the shooting," the deputy director of the FBI, David Bowdich, said earlier this year during congressional hearings on the Parkland shooting.
"While we will never know if we could have prevented this tragedy, we clearly should have done more."
The FBI has since decided to assign more call-takers and supervisors at the call center in Clarksburg, W.Va.; step up training for staff and agents; hire contractors to process online tips; create a management team to review all calls about terrorism or threats to life; and re-examine tips received in the past couple of years and send any potentially useful information to field offices for follow-up.
FBI acting assistant director Jill Tyson outlined many of those changes in a letter Monday to U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat who sits on the House Judiciary Committee.
He provided a copy Tuesday to the Sun Sentinel.
Deutch has called repeatedly for the FBI to brief all victims' families about the improvements and to reveal whether any employee was disciplined - a fact the FBI has refused to discuss.
"A terrible mistake happened," said Deutch, whose district includes Parkland.
"They acknowledge it."
"We expect accountability."
Nancy Savage, executive director of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, called the handling of the Cruz case "egregious."
She attributed it to inadequate staffing, failure to follow proper protocols and lack of experience by the call-taker and her supervisor, an FBI agent.
She considers the case a rare exception in a system that is overwhelmed with calls and emails, due to the explosion of social media and to the success of campaigns that encourage people to report suspicious behavior.
"They're doing phenomenal work at the call center and, personally, I think it's an improvement on what we had before," Savage said.
"A bad judgment call here on something so significant is a call to action for the FBI, and they're certainly taking it very seriously."
"They're fixing it."
___
The center that handles the tip line - known as the Public Access Line, or PAL - has a mammoth job to perform.
An average of 3,540 calls and tips come into the center each day.
The center has been inundated as social media has made it easy for anyone to spread a threat online.
A total of 142 civilians work in the center, handling calls and emails and reporting to 18 supervisors who are FBI agents.
The call-takers are hired at a starting salary of $33,394, well below the median income in West Virginia.
The staff - many with no previous law enforcement experience - go through an eight-week training period that includes getting useful information from callers, writing reports, searching FBI databases and understanding criminal violations.
Their job is to screen tips and pass along the credible ones to a supervisor, who decides whether further action is called for.
In the first six months of this year, the most recent figures available, the call-takers processed more than 296,787 calls and 344,142 emailed tips - or about 25 calls or emails per call-taker per day.
One of those employees took the first tip about Cruz less than five months before the Parkland shooting.
It came in through the FBI's online page on Sept. 25, 2017, submitted by a bail bondsman in Mississippi.
"I am going to be a professional school shooter," someone with the username "nikolas cruz" had commented on a YouTube video.
The information was correctly flagged and forwarded from the call center to the FBI's field office in Jackson, Miss.
An FBI agent and a local law enforcement officer, assigned to a counterterrorism task force, interviewed the tipster and took a copy of a screen shot the man had taken of Cruz's comment.
The investigators checked FBI databases and did online searches but decided that the true identity of the person who posted the comment could not be determined.
They closed their investigation 16 days later, on Oct. 11.
They did not ask Google, which owns YouTube, to voluntarily turn over information that could have been used to identify Cruz.
And they did not ask federal prosecutors to consider subpoenaing the information.
Less than three months later, on Jan. 5, a longtime friend of the Cruz family became so concerned about Cruz's posts on Instagram that she phoned the FBI call center.
For more than 13 minutes, the woman provided detailed information about Cruz's online postings, in which he said he planned to harm himself and others.
She said he had made comments about the Islamic State terrorist group; had bought multiple guns; had mutilated small animals; had the mental capacity of a 12- to 14-year-old; and was going to explode.
She had contacted local police, she said.
The woman gave the call-taker the name, address and phone number of the Parkland family, James and Kimberly Snead, who let Cruz move in with them in late November or early December after his mom had died.
The tipster also spelled out his Instagram usernames.
"I just want someone to know about this so they can look into it. ... I just know I have a clear conscience if he takes off and, and just starts shooting places up," the woman said on the call.
She also said she was concerned about his "getting into a school and just shooting the place up."
Under questioning at the congressional hearings shortly after the Parkland shootings, Bowdich, the deputy FBI director, acknowledged that investigators still don't know precisely what went wrong with the handling of the second tip.
After hanging up, the call-taker ran Cruz's name through several FBI databases and found he had no criminal record.
She also found the prior tip, submitted by the Mississippi man a couple of months earlier, which investigators had closed out.
That's where the information gets muddled.
___
When questioned after the Parkland shootings, the call-taker told investigators that she had presented the relevant information to her supervisor.
Based on what she told him, the agent told her to close the file as having "no lead value."
The tip was never forwarded to the FBI field office in Miramar for investigation.
"We still to this day don't, and I'm not sure we will ever, know how it was presented to the supervisor because we have two different recollections between those two employees," Bowdich, the deputy director, told legislators.
"They have two different recollections ... probably because of the volume of calls they're taking every day."
Worse, agents and workers were not required at the time to document how they made their decisions, so there were no records to show precisely what information was used to make the decision.
By the time the agent and worker were questioned about the call, shortly after the shooting, six weeks had passed.
Call-takers at the time were evaluated in part on how quickly they processed calls and the follow-up checks of databases and prior tips.
Bowdich said internal investigations are examining whether that standard caused call-takers to value speed over thoroughness.
Officials have declined to say whether they've changed the evaluation method.
Savage, from the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, said the agency is tightening up protocols - such as documenting how decisions were made - to create more "fail-safe accountability systems."
Under questioning from legislators, Bowdich said the decision to close the first Cruz tip might have influenced the decision on the second one.
And, because the second caller said she had contacted the Broward Sheriff's Office, the agent may have inappropriately assumed that local law enforcement was handling it, he said.
In the letter to Deutch, the agency said it plans to assign an additional 12 agents and 50 civilians to the center's staff - adding to the current 18 supervisors and 142 civilians.
Deutch said he appreciated the FBI's improvements, but he said he will keep pushing for more information about how online and over-the-phone tips will be handled.
"When Americans see something and say something, law enforcement has to do something," Deutch said Tuesday.
The agency's reluctance to reveal information also drew the ire of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who issued a blistering letter Monday calling the situation unacceptable.
Grassley said committee staff had asked the FBI seven times for its final report detailing why it failed to prevent the shooting.
He demanded that the FBI brief the committee by Sept. 14 at the latest and issue the report to the committee at least 48 hours ahead of the briefing.
"If we want to prevent future tragedy," Grassley said in a written statement, "we must have an understanding of what mistakes may have led to the shooting in Parkland."
___
In an interview in June, Joshua Skule, the FBI's executive assistant director for intelligence, said agents are continuing to look for ways they "can connect the dots faster while staying within the lines of what the laws provide."
The agency also is working on developing more effective ways to comb through the huge volume of social media posts for threats, he said.
"It's much broader than the single (Parkland) incident," Skule said.
"It's how we are going to move forward as an organization in handling tips such as this."
"It wouldn't be fair to focus on a single issue, knowing that there's a much broader issue."
"We have got to fix this today but also going into the future because the volume is not going to stop."
The call center handled more than 1.5 million phone calls and e-tips in 2017 - almost as many as the 1.8 million tips it received in the first five years it operated.
Only 2 percent of those tips - about 30,000 last year - are considered significant enough to be forwarded for investigation by FBI agents in local field offices.
The center sent more than 600 leads to the FBI in South Florida last year, and the number doubled in just the first six months of this year, when more than 1,300 tips were forwarded for further investigation, officials told the Sun Sentinel.
The missteps in the Cruz case have exposed how local agents had been left in the dark about important leads and how, even when the tips were forwarded, the investigations didn't always yield the kind of results the public expects.
Several current and former agents told the Sun Sentinel the reasons for setting up the call center were well-intended, allowing higher-paid agents to focus on investigations instead of answering phone calls.
They say there is no question the serious, specific tips about Cruz were bungled, but they also say that, since the Parkland shootings, agents are routinely sent scurrying on tips with little value.
"Nobody wants to be the agent or the call-taker who messed up the warning about the school shooting, so we spend a lot of time following up on these tips about some kid or some co-worker who made a vague, dumb post on social media," said one South Florida agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to comment for the agency.
"Even if the call center people had sent the Cruz tips to us, we'd have gone and talked to him and if he'd told us he was just kidding around, we couldn't have done anything to him - until he did what he did."
The FBI supervisor on duty should have had his "hair on fire" given the troubling and specific details the caller shared about Cruz, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said during one of the congressional hearings.
Stephen L. Morris, a former FBI agent who was involved in establishing the public access line, was reluctant to comment about the Cruz case.
But he said: "Putting myself in that position ... I really struggle with believing an agent hearing that set of facts would even think that it was an iffy case or a close call."
"Even the most junior, green agent is going to send that out to the field office for investigation."
Call-takers also have to deal with a huge percentage of callers who have no good reason for calling the FBI: "people venting about things they've seen on news; people calling because they didn't get their Social Security check; people calling because they think their local fire department didn't act as responsively as they should have."
But Morris said the call center is still more efficient than the old system.
The problems identified by the Parkland missteps can be fixed, he said.
"Despite the criticism and the Monday-morning quarterbacking, overall, the system is an effective one," Morris said.
"It was a human error."
"I don't believe it was a breakdown in policies or processes."
___
(Staff writers Stephen Hobbs and Skyler Swisher contributed to this report.)
Visit the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) at http://www.sun-sentinel.com
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how ... id=HPDHP17
"How the FBI botched tips about the Parkland school shooter"
By Paula McMahon and Brittany Wallman, Sun Sentinel
29 AUGUST 2018
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - The FBI's quest to protect the public - a job it bungled in the case of the Parkland school shooter - has long depended on low-paid, overworked employees who were evaluated partly on how quickly they disposed of tips from callers.
The FBI has spread the message that "if you see something, say something," but then it mishandled two ominous tips to its national call center about Nikolas Cruz, the teenager who later gunned down 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with an AR-15 rifle.
Both tips suggested that Cruz was a school shooter in the making, but neither was sent to agents in South Florida to check out.
The episode has exposed serious questions about how the FBI's call center operates, years after it was established to try to head off deadly trouble before it happened.
And it has left the FBI scrambling to plug holes that allowed Cruz to slip through despite warnings that he was a danger.
Theoretically, the national operation was supposed to free agents in the FBI's 56 field offices to focus on investigations, not sit in the office taking phone calls.
FBI bosses also wanted a cheaper and more effective way to analyze information at one location, spot trends and then forward tips to investigators.
But the South Florida Sun Sentinel has found:
- Call-takers, classified as "customer service representatives," are among the FBI's lowest-paid employees, despite serving as the first line of defense against killers and terrorists while handling thousands of calls a day.
- Figuring out how they made decisions, including the botched Cruz case, has been impossible because no one was required to document precisely what information was considered.
- The most-detailed tip about Cruz seems to have been ignored partly because an earlier tip, which received only a cursory investigation, had already been rejected.
- With Cruz, the confusion is compounded because the call-taker and her supervisor give conflicting accounts of why the second tip was mishandled - each pointing the finger at the other.
- Now, FBI agents say they're being forced to chase pointless tips in an overly cautious system that fears a repeat of the Cruz debacle.
Senior FBI officials have admitted the FBI "committed serious, grave errors" with the Cruz tips, but they called the mistakes "judgment errors."
"The FBI could have and should have done more to investigate the information it was provided prior to the shooting," the deputy director of the FBI, David Bowdich, said earlier this year during congressional hearings on the Parkland shooting.
"While we will never know if we could have prevented this tragedy, we clearly should have done more."
The FBI has since decided to assign more call-takers and supervisors at the call center in Clarksburg, W.Va.; step up training for staff and agents; hire contractors to process online tips; create a management team to review all calls about terrorism or threats to life; and re-examine tips received in the past couple of years and send any potentially useful information to field offices for follow-up.
FBI acting assistant director Jill Tyson outlined many of those changes in a letter Monday to U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat who sits on the House Judiciary Committee.
He provided a copy Tuesday to the Sun Sentinel.
Deutch has called repeatedly for the FBI to brief all victims' families about the improvements and to reveal whether any employee was disciplined - a fact the FBI has refused to discuss.
"A terrible mistake happened," said Deutch, whose district includes Parkland.
"They acknowledge it."
"We expect accountability."
Nancy Savage, executive director of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, called the handling of the Cruz case "egregious."
She attributed it to inadequate staffing, failure to follow proper protocols and lack of experience by the call-taker and her supervisor, an FBI agent.
She considers the case a rare exception in a system that is overwhelmed with calls and emails, due to the explosion of social media and to the success of campaigns that encourage people to report suspicious behavior.
"They're doing phenomenal work at the call center and, personally, I think it's an improvement on what we had before," Savage said.
"A bad judgment call here on something so significant is a call to action for the FBI, and they're certainly taking it very seriously."
"They're fixing it."
___
The center that handles the tip line - known as the Public Access Line, or PAL - has a mammoth job to perform.
An average of 3,540 calls and tips come into the center each day.
The center has been inundated as social media has made it easy for anyone to spread a threat online.
A total of 142 civilians work in the center, handling calls and emails and reporting to 18 supervisors who are FBI agents.
The call-takers are hired at a starting salary of $33,394, well below the median income in West Virginia.
The staff - many with no previous law enforcement experience - go through an eight-week training period that includes getting useful information from callers, writing reports, searching FBI databases and understanding criminal violations.
Their job is to screen tips and pass along the credible ones to a supervisor, who decides whether further action is called for.
In the first six months of this year, the most recent figures available, the call-takers processed more than 296,787 calls and 344,142 emailed tips - or about 25 calls or emails per call-taker per day.
One of those employees took the first tip about Cruz less than five months before the Parkland shooting.
It came in through the FBI's online page on Sept. 25, 2017, submitted by a bail bondsman in Mississippi.
"I am going to be a professional school shooter," someone with the username "nikolas cruz" had commented on a YouTube video.
The information was correctly flagged and forwarded from the call center to the FBI's field office in Jackson, Miss.
An FBI agent and a local law enforcement officer, assigned to a counterterrorism task force, interviewed the tipster and took a copy of a screen shot the man had taken of Cruz's comment.
The investigators checked FBI databases and did online searches but decided that the true identity of the person who posted the comment could not be determined.
They closed their investigation 16 days later, on Oct. 11.
They did not ask Google, which owns YouTube, to voluntarily turn over information that could have been used to identify Cruz.
And they did not ask federal prosecutors to consider subpoenaing the information.
Less than three months later, on Jan. 5, a longtime friend of the Cruz family became so concerned about Cruz's posts on Instagram that she phoned the FBI call center.
For more than 13 minutes, the woman provided detailed information about Cruz's online postings, in which he said he planned to harm himself and others.
She said he had made comments about the Islamic State terrorist group; had bought multiple guns; had mutilated small animals; had the mental capacity of a 12- to 14-year-old; and was going to explode.
She had contacted local police, she said.
The woman gave the call-taker the name, address and phone number of the Parkland family, James and Kimberly Snead, who let Cruz move in with them in late November or early December after his mom had died.
The tipster also spelled out his Instagram usernames.
"I just want someone to know about this so they can look into it. ... I just know I have a clear conscience if he takes off and, and just starts shooting places up," the woman said on the call.
She also said she was concerned about his "getting into a school and just shooting the place up."
Under questioning at the congressional hearings shortly after the Parkland shootings, Bowdich, the deputy FBI director, acknowledged that investigators still don't know precisely what went wrong with the handling of the second tip.
After hanging up, the call-taker ran Cruz's name through several FBI databases and found he had no criminal record.
She also found the prior tip, submitted by the Mississippi man a couple of months earlier, which investigators had closed out.
That's where the information gets muddled.
___
When questioned after the Parkland shootings, the call-taker told investigators that she had presented the relevant information to her supervisor.
Based on what she told him, the agent told her to close the file as having "no lead value."
The tip was never forwarded to the FBI field office in Miramar for investigation.
"We still to this day don't, and I'm not sure we will ever, know how it was presented to the supervisor because we have two different recollections between those two employees," Bowdich, the deputy director, told legislators.
"They have two different recollections ... probably because of the volume of calls they're taking every day."
Worse, agents and workers were not required at the time to document how they made their decisions, so there were no records to show precisely what information was used to make the decision.
By the time the agent and worker were questioned about the call, shortly after the shooting, six weeks had passed.
Call-takers at the time were evaluated in part on how quickly they processed calls and the follow-up checks of databases and prior tips.
Bowdich said internal investigations are examining whether that standard caused call-takers to value speed over thoroughness.
Officials have declined to say whether they've changed the evaluation method.
Savage, from the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, said the agency is tightening up protocols - such as documenting how decisions were made - to create more "fail-safe accountability systems."
Under questioning from legislators, Bowdich said the decision to close the first Cruz tip might have influenced the decision on the second one.
And, because the second caller said she had contacted the Broward Sheriff's Office, the agent may have inappropriately assumed that local law enforcement was handling it, he said.
In the letter to Deutch, the agency said it plans to assign an additional 12 agents and 50 civilians to the center's staff - adding to the current 18 supervisors and 142 civilians.
Deutch said he appreciated the FBI's improvements, but he said he will keep pushing for more information about how online and over-the-phone tips will be handled.
"When Americans see something and say something, law enforcement has to do something," Deutch said Tuesday.
The agency's reluctance to reveal information also drew the ire of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who issued a blistering letter Monday calling the situation unacceptable.
Grassley said committee staff had asked the FBI seven times for its final report detailing why it failed to prevent the shooting.
He demanded that the FBI brief the committee by Sept. 14 at the latest and issue the report to the committee at least 48 hours ahead of the briefing.
"If we want to prevent future tragedy," Grassley said in a written statement, "we must have an understanding of what mistakes may have led to the shooting in Parkland."
___
In an interview in June, Joshua Skule, the FBI's executive assistant director for intelligence, said agents are continuing to look for ways they "can connect the dots faster while staying within the lines of what the laws provide."
The agency also is working on developing more effective ways to comb through the huge volume of social media posts for threats, he said.
"It's much broader than the single (Parkland) incident," Skule said.
"It's how we are going to move forward as an organization in handling tips such as this."
"It wouldn't be fair to focus on a single issue, knowing that there's a much broader issue."
"We have got to fix this today but also going into the future because the volume is not going to stop."
The call center handled more than 1.5 million phone calls and e-tips in 2017 - almost as many as the 1.8 million tips it received in the first five years it operated.
Only 2 percent of those tips - about 30,000 last year - are considered significant enough to be forwarded for investigation by FBI agents in local field offices.
The center sent more than 600 leads to the FBI in South Florida last year, and the number doubled in just the first six months of this year, when more than 1,300 tips were forwarded for further investigation, officials told the Sun Sentinel.
The missteps in the Cruz case have exposed how local agents had been left in the dark about important leads and how, even when the tips were forwarded, the investigations didn't always yield the kind of results the public expects.
Several current and former agents told the Sun Sentinel the reasons for setting up the call center were well-intended, allowing higher-paid agents to focus on investigations instead of answering phone calls.
They say there is no question the serious, specific tips about Cruz were bungled, but they also say that, since the Parkland shootings, agents are routinely sent scurrying on tips with little value.
"Nobody wants to be the agent or the call-taker who messed up the warning about the school shooting, so we spend a lot of time following up on these tips about some kid or some co-worker who made a vague, dumb post on social media," said one South Florida agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to comment for the agency.
"Even if the call center people had sent the Cruz tips to us, we'd have gone and talked to him and if he'd told us he was just kidding around, we couldn't have done anything to him - until he did what he did."
The FBI supervisor on duty should have had his "hair on fire" given the troubling and specific details the caller shared about Cruz, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said during one of the congressional hearings.
Stephen L. Morris, a former FBI agent who was involved in establishing the public access line, was reluctant to comment about the Cruz case.
But he said: "Putting myself in that position ... I really struggle with believing an agent hearing that set of facts would even think that it was an iffy case or a close call."
"Even the most junior, green agent is going to send that out to the field office for investigation."
Call-takers also have to deal with a huge percentage of callers who have no good reason for calling the FBI: "people venting about things they've seen on news; people calling because they didn't get their Social Security check; people calling because they think their local fire department didn't act as responsively as they should have."
But Morris said the call center is still more efficient than the old system.
The problems identified by the Parkland missteps can be fixed, he said.
"Despite the criticism and the Monday-morning quarterbacking, overall, the system is an effective one," Morris said.
"It was a human error."
"I don't believe it was a breakdown in policies or processes."
___
(Staff writers Stephen Hobbs and Skyler Swisher contributed to this report.)
Visit the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) at http://www.sun-sentinel.com
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/how ... id=HPDHP17
Re: THE DAILY NEWS
YOUNG ANDY, WHO DOESN'T LIKE ANYONE ELSE'S VOICE BEING HEARD, IS GETTING QUITE TESTY HERE, IT SEEMS …
AND NIXON IS VERY MUCH ON THE MONEY WHEN SHE CALLS YOUNG ANDY A "CORRUPT CORPORATE DEMOCRAT" ...
THE DAILY BEAST
"Nixon-Cuomo Debate Has Tempers Flaring: ‘Can You Stop Interrupting?’"
By Gideon Resnick
30 AUGUST 2018
LONG ISLAND, New York—“Can you stop interrupting?” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sneered at Cynthia Nixon, who was seated across from him before a blue curtain in a Hofstra University gymnasium.
“Can you stop lying?” Nixon shot back.
“As soon as you do,” Cuomo said.
Such was the tenor of the first and only debate between the incumbent governor and his insurgent challenger, who faced each other just two weeks before the state’s Sept. 13 Democratic primary.
As the two traded barbs in Cuomo’s first head-to-head debate in a decade—he stood across from Jeanine Pirro (yes, that one) in 2006, when they jockeyed to be New York attorney general—Cuomo sought to portray himself as the leader of a vanguard against President Trump, while Nixon challenged him on his progressive bonafides, corruption in the state’s capital, and his vision for improving public transportation in the state.
Cuomo’s focus on Trump even prompted an early question from the moderators about whether he could commit to being governor for four additional years and not mount a presidential run in 2020.
“Yes and yes,” Cuomo responded.
“Double yes.”
He added that “the only caveat is if God strikes me dead.”
Nixon, who has been trailing by double digits in publicly available polling—though New Yorkers are all too familiar with those polls failing them recently—spent more time attacking Cuomo, labeling him a “corrupt corporate Democrat.”
Best known as an actress, Nixon hasn’t held office, and she was questioned about her experience and whether it would translate to a successful tenure in the governor’s office.
“I’m not an Albany insider like Governor Cuomo, but experience doesn’t mean that much if you’re not actually good at governing,” she answered.
Cuomo’s response to questions about experience, and the lofty goals—single payer, marijuana legalization among them—of a prospective Nixon administration, was to argue that he was effective and to dismissively say that “you don’t snap your fingers” just to get stuff done.
Both of their respective camps suggested that their opponent was losing their temper throughout the debate.
Melissa DeRosa, secretary to Cuomo, tweeted early on that Nixon “appears unhinged.”
A release from Nixon’s camp after the event said the governor’s temper erupted.
“Now we know why Andrew Cuomo hates debates so much,” Cynthia for New York spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said in a statement.
“The governor was visibly angry about Cynthia contrasting his corrupt, centrist administration with her progressive vision for New York—and his resulting temper flare-ups and rants told the story.”
Neither of the candidates showed up in the spin room for reporters, held on the side of the gym where the debate took place.
(The room was, in fact, quite cold following a reported battle about what temperature it would be.)
On policy specifics, Nixon went after Cuomo for his handling of New York’s mass transit system, the MTA, saying he used “the MTA like an ATM.”
"As someone who is on the subway literally every day, I know that delays have tripled under Cuomo," she said, promising to delay the next fair hike.
“It has been declining for decades,” Cuomo said, passing the buck.
During an exchange about corruption, specifically Cuomo aide Joe Percoco, who was found guilty in a bribery conspiracy, Cuomo hit Nixon for asking for favors from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office, saying, “You are a corporation.”
“I’m a person,” Nixon responded.
They also differed on New York’s Taylor Law, which curtails the right to strike for public employees.
Nixon is against it, saying, “We’re in a moment of unprecedented attacks on labor."
"Our labor unions are the most important counterbalance we have to unrivaled corporate power and greed."
Cuomo disagreed, saying that if workers were allowed to strike, it “would cripple the city,” with teachers possibly going on strike, sanitation going on strike, and subway workers going on strike.
The debate ended in a brief lightning round of short answers in which Nixon promised not to take a salary as governor of New York and both candidates were noncommittal about getting an endorsement from de Blasio.
“I love Mayor de Blasio."
"I’m sure he loves me in a strange sort of way,” Cuomo remarked of their notorious relationship.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... id=HPDHP17
AND NIXON IS VERY MUCH ON THE MONEY WHEN SHE CALLS YOUNG ANDY A "CORRUPT CORPORATE DEMOCRAT" ...
THE DAILY BEAST
"Nixon-Cuomo Debate Has Tempers Flaring: ‘Can You Stop Interrupting?’"
By Gideon Resnick
30 AUGUST 2018
LONG ISLAND, New York—“Can you stop interrupting?” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sneered at Cynthia Nixon, who was seated across from him before a blue curtain in a Hofstra University gymnasium.
“Can you stop lying?” Nixon shot back.
“As soon as you do,” Cuomo said.
Such was the tenor of the first and only debate between the incumbent governor and his insurgent challenger, who faced each other just two weeks before the state’s Sept. 13 Democratic primary.
As the two traded barbs in Cuomo’s first head-to-head debate in a decade—he stood across from Jeanine Pirro (yes, that one) in 2006, when they jockeyed to be New York attorney general—Cuomo sought to portray himself as the leader of a vanguard against President Trump, while Nixon challenged him on his progressive bonafides, corruption in the state’s capital, and his vision for improving public transportation in the state.
Cuomo’s focus on Trump even prompted an early question from the moderators about whether he could commit to being governor for four additional years and not mount a presidential run in 2020.
“Yes and yes,” Cuomo responded.
“Double yes.”
He added that “the only caveat is if God strikes me dead.”
Nixon, who has been trailing by double digits in publicly available polling—though New Yorkers are all too familiar with those polls failing them recently—spent more time attacking Cuomo, labeling him a “corrupt corporate Democrat.”
Best known as an actress, Nixon hasn’t held office, and she was questioned about her experience and whether it would translate to a successful tenure in the governor’s office.
“I’m not an Albany insider like Governor Cuomo, but experience doesn’t mean that much if you’re not actually good at governing,” she answered.
Cuomo’s response to questions about experience, and the lofty goals—single payer, marijuana legalization among them—of a prospective Nixon administration, was to argue that he was effective and to dismissively say that “you don’t snap your fingers” just to get stuff done.
Both of their respective camps suggested that their opponent was losing their temper throughout the debate.
Melissa DeRosa, secretary to Cuomo, tweeted early on that Nixon “appears unhinged.”
A release from Nixon’s camp after the event said the governor’s temper erupted.
“Now we know why Andrew Cuomo hates debates so much,” Cynthia for New York spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said in a statement.
“The governor was visibly angry about Cynthia contrasting his corrupt, centrist administration with her progressive vision for New York—and his resulting temper flare-ups and rants told the story.”
Neither of the candidates showed up in the spin room for reporters, held on the side of the gym where the debate took place.
(The room was, in fact, quite cold following a reported battle about what temperature it would be.)
On policy specifics, Nixon went after Cuomo for his handling of New York’s mass transit system, the MTA, saying he used “the MTA like an ATM.”
"As someone who is on the subway literally every day, I know that delays have tripled under Cuomo," she said, promising to delay the next fair hike.
“It has been declining for decades,” Cuomo said, passing the buck.
During an exchange about corruption, specifically Cuomo aide Joe Percoco, who was found guilty in a bribery conspiracy, Cuomo hit Nixon for asking for favors from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office, saying, “You are a corporation.”
“I’m a person,” Nixon responded.
They also differed on New York’s Taylor Law, which curtails the right to strike for public employees.
Nixon is against it, saying, “We’re in a moment of unprecedented attacks on labor."
"Our labor unions are the most important counterbalance we have to unrivaled corporate power and greed."
Cuomo disagreed, saying that if workers were allowed to strike, it “would cripple the city,” with teachers possibly going on strike, sanitation going on strike, and subway workers going on strike.
The debate ended in a brief lightning round of short answers in which Nixon promised not to take a salary as governor of New York and both candidates were noncommittal about getting an endorsement from de Blasio.
“I love Mayor de Blasio."
"I’m sure he loves me in a strange sort of way,” Cuomo remarked of their notorious relationship.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ ... id=HPDHP17
Re: THE DAILY NEWS
MARKETWATCH
"Stocks snap 4-day winning streak to close lower as trade-war jitters resurface"
By Sue Chang and Mark DeCambre
Published: Aug 30, 2018 4:32 p.m. ET
U.S. stocks snapped a four-day winning streak to finish lower Thursday, with the Dow falling back below 26,000, on a report that President Donald Trump is likely to press ahead with tariffs against $200 billion worth of Chinese products.
Trade-related news has played a central role in the market recently amid worries that heightened tensions between U.S. and its major trading partners could not only hamper U.S. economic growth but derail the global economy at large.
How did major indexes fare?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.53% fell 137.65 points, or 0.5%, to 25,986.92. The S&P 500 index SPX, -0.44% lost 12.91 points, or 0.4%, to 2,901.13. The Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -0.26% fell 21.32 points, or 0.3%, to 8,088.36 after earlier testing an intraday record of 8,133.30.
What factors drove the market?
Trump reportedly wants to move ahead with his plan to slap tariffs on billions in additional Chinese imports as early as next week, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Companies have until Sept. 6 to comment on the proposed duties and Trump wants to impose the tariffs once that deadline passes.
Recent gains on Wall Street had come on a belief that disagreements between the U.S. and its major trading partners may be easing.
Late Tuesday, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland met with Trump administration officials in an attempt to resolve testy discussions between the two countries on trade, coming on the heels of the U.S. and Mexico’s announcement of progress toward a bilateral trade agreement that may ultimately result in a retooling of the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement.
Investors, who had viewed these events as signs of progress that could help the economy avoid a full-blown trade war, are expected to turn more jittery if Trump remains aggressive about penalizing trade partners on what he perceives are unfair policies.
Market participants are already on the edge about global risk adversely affecting U.S. stocks, given currency woes in Argentina and Turkey as confidence in the governments to rehabilitate their respective economies deteriorated further.
What data were in focus?
Initial jobless claims, a barometer of layoffs, rose by 3,000 to 213,000 in the week ended Aug. 25.
Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 212,000 reading.
Nonetheless, the monthly average of claims fell by 1,500 to 212,250, the lowest level since December 1969.
Consumer spending climbed 0.4% in July, according to a government reading, matching the estimate of economists polled by MarketWatch.
Incomes rose 0.3%.
And the 12-month increase in the PCE index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, rose to 2.3% from 2.2%, marking the highest level since April 2012, suggesting the Fed is likely to maintain its hawkish bias.
What were market analysts saying?
Global risk is back in the spotlight, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Wealth Advisors, with emerging-market currencies taking a hit.
Investors are also fretting over the implications of higher interest rates in the wake of the latest inflation data.
Reports that the U.S. and Mexico have reached a preliminary deal is “alleviating some of the uncertainty faced by businesses surrounding trade and supply chains between the two countries,” said Niladri Mukherjee, head of CIO portfolio strategy at Merrill Lynch and U.S. Trust.
“We feel that the potential for Canada to return to the negotiations would be a positive signal for the prospects of a more comprehensive deal and could support investor sentiment…any de-escalation of trade hostilities could drive equities higher,” he said.
What stocks were in focus?
Salesforce.com Inc. fell 1.7% after issuing a third-quarter outlook that was below expectations but reported quarterly results that came in ahead of forecasts.
Apple Inc. gained 0.9% following an announcement that it will host an event on Sept. 12 where the company is expected to announce its latest iteration of the iPhone.
Campbell Soup shares fell 2.1% after the food company reported quarterly sales that missed expectations.
It also plans to sell its international operations and refrigerated-foods business, abandoning efforts to become a more fresh food-oriented company and leaving the door open to a full sale.
Ciena Corp. jumped 13% after it reported third-quarter results that beat expectations.
Signet Jewelers Ltd. soared 24% after it reported second-quarter results that were much stronger than expected. It also raised its full-year outlook.
Electronic Arts Inc. sank 9.8% after it pushed back the release date for its “Battlefield V” game by four weeks to Nov. 20 and tweaked its guidance for net bookings to reflect the later release.
Dollar Tree Inc. shares tumbled 16% after CFRA cuts its price target on the stock to $100 from $105.
What were other markets doing?
European stocks fell broadly and Asian markets finished mostly lower.
Gold futures settled lower, while the ICE U.S. Dollar Index edged up and U.S. crude-oil futures rose.
—Ryan Vlastelica contributed to this article
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump ... ewer_click
"Stocks snap 4-day winning streak to close lower as trade-war jitters resurface"
By Sue Chang and Mark DeCambre
Published: Aug 30, 2018 4:32 p.m. ET
U.S. stocks snapped a four-day winning streak to finish lower Thursday, with the Dow falling back below 26,000, on a report that President Donald Trump is likely to press ahead with tariffs against $200 billion worth of Chinese products.
Trade-related news has played a central role in the market recently amid worries that heightened tensions between U.S. and its major trading partners could not only hamper U.S. economic growth but derail the global economy at large.
How did major indexes fare?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.53% fell 137.65 points, or 0.5%, to 25,986.92. The S&P 500 index SPX, -0.44% lost 12.91 points, or 0.4%, to 2,901.13. The Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -0.26% fell 21.32 points, or 0.3%, to 8,088.36 after earlier testing an intraday record of 8,133.30.
What factors drove the market?
Trump reportedly wants to move ahead with his plan to slap tariffs on billions in additional Chinese imports as early as next week, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Companies have until Sept. 6 to comment on the proposed duties and Trump wants to impose the tariffs once that deadline passes.
Recent gains on Wall Street had come on a belief that disagreements between the U.S. and its major trading partners may be easing.
Late Tuesday, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland met with Trump administration officials in an attempt to resolve testy discussions between the two countries on trade, coming on the heels of the U.S. and Mexico’s announcement of progress toward a bilateral trade agreement that may ultimately result in a retooling of the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement.
Investors, who had viewed these events as signs of progress that could help the economy avoid a full-blown trade war, are expected to turn more jittery if Trump remains aggressive about penalizing trade partners on what he perceives are unfair policies.
Market participants are already on the edge about global risk adversely affecting U.S. stocks, given currency woes in Argentina and Turkey as confidence in the governments to rehabilitate their respective economies deteriorated further.
What data were in focus?
Initial jobless claims, a barometer of layoffs, rose by 3,000 to 213,000 in the week ended Aug. 25.
Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 212,000 reading.
Nonetheless, the monthly average of claims fell by 1,500 to 212,250, the lowest level since December 1969.
Consumer spending climbed 0.4% in July, according to a government reading, matching the estimate of economists polled by MarketWatch.
Incomes rose 0.3%.
And the 12-month increase in the PCE index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, rose to 2.3% from 2.2%, marking the highest level since April 2012, suggesting the Fed is likely to maintain its hawkish bias.
What were market analysts saying?
Global risk is back in the spotlight, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Wealth Advisors, with emerging-market currencies taking a hit.
Investors are also fretting over the implications of higher interest rates in the wake of the latest inflation data.
Reports that the U.S. and Mexico have reached a preliminary deal is “alleviating some of the uncertainty faced by businesses surrounding trade and supply chains between the two countries,” said Niladri Mukherjee, head of CIO portfolio strategy at Merrill Lynch and U.S. Trust.
“We feel that the potential for Canada to return to the negotiations would be a positive signal for the prospects of a more comprehensive deal and could support investor sentiment…any de-escalation of trade hostilities could drive equities higher,” he said.
What stocks were in focus?
Salesforce.com Inc. fell 1.7% after issuing a third-quarter outlook that was below expectations but reported quarterly results that came in ahead of forecasts.
Apple Inc. gained 0.9% following an announcement that it will host an event on Sept. 12 where the company is expected to announce its latest iteration of the iPhone.
Campbell Soup shares fell 2.1% after the food company reported quarterly sales that missed expectations.
It also plans to sell its international operations and refrigerated-foods business, abandoning efforts to become a more fresh food-oriented company and leaving the door open to a full sale.
Ciena Corp. jumped 13% after it reported third-quarter results that beat expectations.
Signet Jewelers Ltd. soared 24% after it reported second-quarter results that were much stronger than expected. It also raised its full-year outlook.
Electronic Arts Inc. sank 9.8% after it pushed back the release date for its “Battlefield V” game by four weeks to Nov. 20 and tweaked its guidance for net bookings to reflect the later release.
Dollar Tree Inc. shares tumbled 16% after CFRA cuts its price target on the stock to $100 from $105.
What were other markets doing?
European stocks fell broadly and Asian markets finished mostly lower.
Gold futures settled lower, while the ICE U.S. Dollar Index edged up and U.S. crude-oil futures rose.
—Ryan Vlastelica contributed to this article
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump ... ewer_click
Re: THE DAILY NEWS
MARKETWATCH
"Stocks snap 4-day winning streak to close lower as trade-war jitters resurface"
By Sue Chang and Mark DeCambre
Published: Aug 30, 2018 4:32 p.m. ET
U.S. stocks snapped a four-day winning streak to finish lower Thursday, with the Dow falling back below 26,000, on a report that President Donald Trump is likely to press ahead with tariffs against $200 billion worth of Chinese products.
Trade-related news has played a central role in the market recently amid worries that heightened tensions between U.S. and its major trading partners could not only hamper U.S. economic growth but derail the global economy at large.
How did major indexes fare?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 137.65 points, or 0.5%, to 25,986.92.
The S&P 500 index lost 12.91 points, or 0.4%, to 2,901.13.
The Nasdaq Composite Index fell 21.32 points, or 0.3%, to 8,088.36 after earlier testing an intraday record of 8,133.30.
What factors drove the market?
Trump reportedly wants to move ahead with his plan to slap tariffs on billions in additional Chinese imports as early as next week, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Companies have until Sept. 6 to comment on the proposed duties and Trump wants to impose the tariffs once that deadline passes.
Recent gains on Wall Street had come on a belief that disagreements between the U.S. and its major trading partners may be easing.
Late Tuesday, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland met with Trump administration officials in an attempt to resolve testy discussions between the two countries on trade, coming on the heels of the U.S. and Mexico’s announcement of progress toward a bilateral trade agreement that may ultimately result in a retooling of the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement.
Investors, who had viewed these events as signs of progress that could help the economy avoid a full-blown trade war, are expected to turn more jittery if Trump remains aggressive about penalizing trade partners on what he perceives are unfair policies.
Market participants are already on the edge about global risk adversely affecting U.S. stocks, given currency woes in Argentina and Turkey as confidence in the governments to rehabilitate their respective economies deteriorated further.
What data were in focus?
Initial jobless claims, a barometer of layoffs, rose by 3,000 to 213,000 in the week ended Aug. 25.
Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 212,000 reading.
Nonetheless, the monthly average of claims fell by 1,500 to 212,250, the lowest level since December 1969.
Consumer spending climbed 0.4% in July, according to a government reading, matching the estimate of economists polled by MarketWatch.
Incomes rose 0.3%.
And the 12-month increase in the PCE index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, rose to 2.3% from 2.2%, marking the highest level since April 2012, suggesting the Fed is likely to maintain its hawkish bias.
What were market analysts saying?
Global risk is back in the spotlight, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Wealth Advisors, with emerging-market currencies taking a hit.
Investors are also fretting over the implications of higher interest rates in the wake of the latest inflation data.
Reports that the U.S. and Mexico have reached a preliminary deal is “alleviating some of the uncertainty faced by businesses surrounding trade and supply chains between the two countries,” said Niladri Mukherjee, head of CIO portfolio strategy at Merrill Lynch and U.S. Trust.
“We feel that the potential for Canada to return to the negotiations would be a positive signal for the prospects of a more comprehensive deal and could support investor sentiment…any de-escalation of trade hostilities could drive equities higher,” he said.
What stocks were in focus?
Salesforce.com Inc. fell 1.7% after issuing a third-quarter outlook that was below expectations but reported quarterly results that came in ahead of forecasts.
Apple Inc. gained 0.9% following an announcement that it will host an event on Sept. 12 where the company is expected to announce its latest iteration of the iPhone.
Campbell Soup shares fell 2.1% after the food company reported quarterly sales that missed expectations.
It also plans to sell its international operations and refrigerated-foods business, abandoning efforts to become a more fresh food-oriented company and leaving the door open to a full sale.
Ciena Corp. jumped 13% after it reported third-quarter results that beat expectations.
Signet Jewelers Ltd. soared 24% after it reported second-quarter results that were much stronger than expected.
It also raised its full-year outlook.
Electronic Arts Inc. sank 9.8% after it pushed back the release date for its “Battlefield V” game by four weeks to Nov. 20 and tweaked its guidance for net bookings to reflect the later release.
Dollar Tree Inc. shares tumbled 16% after CFRA cuts its price target on the stock to $100 from $105.
What were other markets doing?
European stocks fell broadly and Asian markets finished mostly lower.
Gold futures settled lower, while the ICE U.S. Dollar Index edged up and U.S. crude-oil futures rose.
—Ryan Vlastelica contributed to this article
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump ... ewer_click
"Stocks snap 4-day winning streak to close lower as trade-war jitters resurface"
By Sue Chang and Mark DeCambre
Published: Aug 30, 2018 4:32 p.m. ET
U.S. stocks snapped a four-day winning streak to finish lower Thursday, with the Dow falling back below 26,000, on a report that President Donald Trump is likely to press ahead with tariffs against $200 billion worth of Chinese products.
Trade-related news has played a central role in the market recently amid worries that heightened tensions between U.S. and its major trading partners could not only hamper U.S. economic growth but derail the global economy at large.
How did major indexes fare?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 137.65 points, or 0.5%, to 25,986.92.
The S&P 500 index lost 12.91 points, or 0.4%, to 2,901.13.
The Nasdaq Composite Index fell 21.32 points, or 0.3%, to 8,088.36 after earlier testing an intraday record of 8,133.30.
What factors drove the market?
Trump reportedly wants to move ahead with his plan to slap tariffs on billions in additional Chinese imports as early as next week, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Companies have until Sept. 6 to comment on the proposed duties and Trump wants to impose the tariffs once that deadline passes.
Recent gains on Wall Street had come on a belief that disagreements between the U.S. and its major trading partners may be easing.
Late Tuesday, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland met with Trump administration officials in an attempt to resolve testy discussions between the two countries on trade, coming on the heels of the U.S. and Mexico’s announcement of progress toward a bilateral trade agreement that may ultimately result in a retooling of the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement.
Investors, who had viewed these events as signs of progress that could help the economy avoid a full-blown trade war, are expected to turn more jittery if Trump remains aggressive about penalizing trade partners on what he perceives are unfair policies.
Market participants are already on the edge about global risk adversely affecting U.S. stocks, given currency woes in Argentina and Turkey as confidence in the governments to rehabilitate their respective economies deteriorated further.
What data were in focus?
Initial jobless claims, a barometer of layoffs, rose by 3,000 to 213,000 in the week ended Aug. 25.
Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 212,000 reading.
Nonetheless, the monthly average of claims fell by 1,500 to 212,250, the lowest level since December 1969.
Consumer spending climbed 0.4% in July, according to a government reading, matching the estimate of economists polled by MarketWatch.
Incomes rose 0.3%.
And the 12-month increase in the PCE index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, rose to 2.3% from 2.2%, marking the highest level since April 2012, suggesting the Fed is likely to maintain its hawkish bias.
What were market analysts saying?
Global risk is back in the spotlight, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Cresset Wealth Advisors, with emerging-market currencies taking a hit.
Investors are also fretting over the implications of higher interest rates in the wake of the latest inflation data.
Reports that the U.S. and Mexico have reached a preliminary deal is “alleviating some of the uncertainty faced by businesses surrounding trade and supply chains between the two countries,” said Niladri Mukherjee, head of CIO portfolio strategy at Merrill Lynch and U.S. Trust.
“We feel that the potential for Canada to return to the negotiations would be a positive signal for the prospects of a more comprehensive deal and could support investor sentiment…any de-escalation of trade hostilities could drive equities higher,” he said.
What stocks were in focus?
Salesforce.com Inc. fell 1.7% after issuing a third-quarter outlook that was below expectations but reported quarterly results that came in ahead of forecasts.
Apple Inc. gained 0.9% following an announcement that it will host an event on Sept. 12 where the company is expected to announce its latest iteration of the iPhone.
Campbell Soup shares fell 2.1% after the food company reported quarterly sales that missed expectations.
It also plans to sell its international operations and refrigerated-foods business, abandoning efforts to become a more fresh food-oriented company and leaving the door open to a full sale.
Ciena Corp. jumped 13% after it reported third-quarter results that beat expectations.
Signet Jewelers Ltd. soared 24% after it reported second-quarter results that were much stronger than expected.
It also raised its full-year outlook.
Electronic Arts Inc. sank 9.8% after it pushed back the release date for its “Battlefield V” game by four weeks to Nov. 20 and tweaked its guidance for net bookings to reflect the later release.
Dollar Tree Inc. shares tumbled 16% after CFRA cuts its price target on the stock to $100 from $105.
What were other markets doing?
European stocks fell broadly and Asian markets finished mostly lower.
Gold futures settled lower, while the ICE U.S. Dollar Index edged up and U.S. crude-oil futures rose.
—Ryan Vlastelica contributed to this article
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump ... ewer_click
Re: THE DAILY NEWS
MARKETWATCH
"Oil extends August climb, with U.S. crude benchmark prices topping $70 a barrel"
By Myra P. Saefong and Mark DeCambre
Published: Aug 30, 2018 3:30 p.m. ET
Oil prices on Thursday extended a climb to their highest levels in August, buoyed by two consecutive weekly declines in U.S. crude supplies and ongoing concerns over tighter global inventories tied to U.S. sanctions on Iran.
October West Texas Intermediate crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the U.S. oil benchmark, topped $70 a barrel for the first time since July, tacking on 74 cents, or 1.1%, to settle at $70.25 a barrel.
That was the highest finish for the front-month contract since July 20, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Global benchmark October Brent crude, which expires on Friday, gained 63 cents, or 0.8%, at $77.77 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe.
Both contracts marked their highest settlements for the month of August and were poised to notch gains for the week and month, according to FactSet data.
On Wednesday, the Energy Information Administration reported that U.S. crude supplies declined by 2.6 million barrels for the week ended Aug. 24.
That followed a drop of 5.8 million barrels reported by the EIA the week before.
WTI oil prices have been holding on to its U.S. supply-data inspired gains from Wednesday, “but the primary bullish factor remains rooted in Iran sanctions,” said Stephen Innes, head of trading at OANDA.
Indeed, potential disruptions to global crude supplies, including U.S. sanctions on Iran that take effect in early November, have been at the center of the recent rally in WTI and Brent oil.
Also adding to upward momentum for crude were reports that Iran is threatening to halt the flow of oil via the Strait of Hormuz, which is the thoroughfare for 30% of seaborne crude, according to Bloomberg News.
In other energy trading, futures prices for oil products ended higher.
September gasoline added 1.8% to nearly $2.144 a gallon and September heating oil added 0.3% to $2.248 a gallon.
The September contracts expire at Friday’s settlement.
At the U.S. retail level, AAA said this week that it expects prices for gasoline to drop to an average $2.70 a gallon this fall, in part due to expectations for a decline in consumer demand after Labor Day.
Natural-gas futures, meanwhile, ended with a modest gain after the EIA on Thursday said U.S. supplies of the commodity rose by 70 billion cubic feet for the week ended Aug. 24.
That was higher than the average 64 billion-cubic-foot climb forecast by analysts polled by S&P Global Platts.
October natural gas, on its first full trading day as a front-month contract, settled at $2.874 per million British thermal units, up 0.4%.
The contract was still set to end the month about 2.7% higher.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oil-e ... 2018-08-30
"Oil extends August climb, with U.S. crude benchmark prices topping $70 a barrel"
By Myra P. Saefong and Mark DeCambre
Published: Aug 30, 2018 3:30 p.m. ET
Oil prices on Thursday extended a climb to their highest levels in August, buoyed by two consecutive weekly declines in U.S. crude supplies and ongoing concerns over tighter global inventories tied to U.S. sanctions on Iran.
October West Texas Intermediate crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the U.S. oil benchmark, topped $70 a barrel for the first time since July, tacking on 74 cents, or 1.1%, to settle at $70.25 a barrel.
That was the highest finish for the front-month contract since July 20, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Global benchmark October Brent crude, which expires on Friday, gained 63 cents, or 0.8%, at $77.77 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe.
Both contracts marked their highest settlements for the month of August and were poised to notch gains for the week and month, according to FactSet data.
On Wednesday, the Energy Information Administration reported that U.S. crude supplies declined by 2.6 million barrels for the week ended Aug. 24.
That followed a drop of 5.8 million barrels reported by the EIA the week before.
WTI oil prices have been holding on to its U.S. supply-data inspired gains from Wednesday, “but the primary bullish factor remains rooted in Iran sanctions,” said Stephen Innes, head of trading at OANDA.
Indeed, potential disruptions to global crude supplies, including U.S. sanctions on Iran that take effect in early November, have been at the center of the recent rally in WTI and Brent oil.
Also adding to upward momentum for crude were reports that Iran is threatening to halt the flow of oil via the Strait of Hormuz, which is the thoroughfare for 30% of seaborne crude, according to Bloomberg News.
In other energy trading, futures prices for oil products ended higher.
September gasoline added 1.8% to nearly $2.144 a gallon and September heating oil added 0.3% to $2.248 a gallon.
The September contracts expire at Friday’s settlement.
At the U.S. retail level, AAA said this week that it expects prices for gasoline to drop to an average $2.70 a gallon this fall, in part due to expectations for a decline in consumer demand after Labor Day.
Natural-gas futures, meanwhile, ended with a modest gain after the EIA on Thursday said U.S. supplies of the commodity rose by 70 billion cubic feet for the week ended Aug. 24.
That was higher than the average 64 billion-cubic-foot climb forecast by analysts polled by S&P Global Platts.
October natural gas, on its first full trading day as a front-month contract, settled at $2.874 per million British thermal units, up 0.4%.
The contract was still set to end the month about 2.7% higher.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oil-e ... 2018-08-30