Comparisons are being drawn between the rush to escape Kabul after the Taliban takeover and the evacuation of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.  There were chaotic scenes at Kabul Airport as hundreds of people attempted to flee Afghanistan. People were filmed climbing on to planes and running across the tarmac in an attempt to secure a seat on a flight out of the capital.  The scenes appeared akin to the evacuation from Saigon in 1975, when hundreds of Vietnamese and Americans flocked to the US Embassy to be airlifted out of the country when the Vietnam War ended. Watch the video above to see archival footage from 1975 compared to today’s events.

Kabul: people who tied themselves to the plane wheels – fell off the plane

Kabul is in chaos since the Taliban swept into Afghanistan’s capital on Sunday. The country’s Western-trained security forces collapsed or fled in the face of an insurgent offensive. Thousands of residents have gathered at Kabul airport trying to leave the country. As residents of Kabul try desperately to leave the capital city, some horrifying scenes were captured on camera. One such video showed Afghans who had clung on to the underbelly of a C-17 Globemaster falling from the plane on Monday.

The people are trying to leave Kabul, and Afghanistan, after insurgent group Taliban took control of the country, just weeks after launching an offensive in the wake of the withdrawal of US and Nato forces.

The video showed that Afghans, believed to be clinging on to the landing gear of C-17 transport plane, falling due to the huge G-force exerted during take-off. Nick Note: Sure looks like the fall of Saigon to me….. Only worse..

BEIJING, Aug 16 (Reuters) – China’s factory output and retail sales growth slowed sharply and missed expectations in July, as new COVID-19 outbreaks and floods disrupted business operations, adding to signs the economic recovery is losing momentum. Industrial production in the world’s second largest economy increased 6.4% year-on-year in July, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on Monday. Analysts had expected output to rise 7.8% after growing 8.3% in June. Retail sales increased 8.5% in July from a year ago, far lower than the forecast 11.5% rise and June’s 12.1% uptick. China’s economy has rebounded to its pre-pandemic growth levels, but the expansion is losing steam as businesses grapple with higher costs and supply bottlenecks. New COVID-19 infections in July also led to fresh restrictions, disrupting the country’s factory output already hit by severe weather this summer.  Asian share markets slipped on Monday after the data showed a surprisingly sharp slowdown in the engine of global growth. Data earlier this month also showed export growth, which has been a key driver of China’s impressive rebound from the COVID-19 slump in early 2020, unexpectedly slowed in July. Consumption, industrial production and investment could all slow further in August, analysts from Nomura said in a note, due to COVID-19 controls and tightening measures in the property sector and high-polluting industries. Production controls sent crude steel output to the lowest monthly level since April 2020 in July.

Meanwhile China tightened social restrictions to fight its latest COVID-19 outbreak in several cities, hitting the services sector, especially travel and hospitality in the country.

“Given China’s ‘zero tolerance’ approach to Covid, future outbreaks will continue to pose significant risk to the outlook, even though around 60% of the population is now vaccinated,” said Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics, in a note. The country has also faced severe weather in several provinces, with record rainfall in Henan province last month causing floods that killed more than 300 people  Higher commodity prices are also pressuring small and medium-sized firms in particular. Smaller companies are unable to pass on recent rises in raw material costs to buyers, said a sales manager at a medical equipment factory in the eastern province of Jiangsu. “We don’t dare to increase our prices…but our prices cannot fall, otherwise there will be no profit at all,” he said. China’s producer price inflation, which grew 9.0% from a year earlier in July, will likely remain high for some time, the NBS said on Monday. A growing number of analysts have been cutting their third quarter growth estimates for China. The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) expanded 7.9% in the April-June quarter from a year earlier. ANZ downgraded its GDP forecast for 2021 to 8.3% from 8.8% after the disappointing July data. “Although they are unlikely to inject massive stimulus to boost headline growth, the central bank will maintain an easing bias,” said ANZ analysts in a note. After the central bank reduced the amount of cash banks must hold as reserves in July, many analysts expect another cut later this year to support growth. China’s central bank injected billions of yuan through medium-term loans into the financial system on Monday, which many market participants interpreted as an effort to prop up the economy, although the cost of such borrowing was left unchanged Policy insiders told Reuters earlier in August that China is poised to quicken spending on infrastructure projects while the central bank supports the economy with modest easing steps. Fixed asset investment grew 10.3% in January-July from the same period a year ago, compared with an 11.3% rise tipped by a Reuters poll and a 12.6% increase in January-June. Property investment, a crucial growth driver of China’s recovery from COVID-19 disruptions, grew 12.7% in January-July, versus a 15% rise in the first half of this year. China’s new home prices rose at the slowest clip in six months in July, as authorities further tightened rules in the red-hot property sector. Nick Note: It is obvious to me the global economy is on the verge of sucking shut again…. And the fact that global markets and hahahaha leaders are in denial….. That makes my dick hard…..

WASHINGTON (REUTERS) – The Pentagon authorised another 1,000 troops to help evacuate United States citizens and Afghans who worked for them from Kabul, as the US government said it would assume air traffic control to facilitate the departure of thousands of Americans. A joint statement from the State Department and Pentagon after Taleban insurgents entered the Afghan capital confirmed that the United States over the next 48 hours will “have expanded our security presence to nearly 6,000 troops, with a mission focused solely on facilitating these efforts and will be taking over air traffic control.” The statement said it was working to secure the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul “to enable the safe departure of US and allied personnel from Afghanistan via civilian and military flights.” State Department spokesman Ned Price said late Sunday in a statement “the safe evacuation of all Embassy personnel is now complete. All Embassy personnel are located on the premises of Hamid Karzai International Airport, whose perimeter is secured by the US military.”  The joint statement added the United States “will be transferring out of the country thousands of American citizens” and others and added the government would “accelerate the evacuation of thousands of Afghans eligible for US Special Immigrant Visas.” Afghan President Ashraf Ghani confirmed he has left the country, leaving it unclear how power would be transferred following the sweep across Afghanistan that brought the Taleban back to the capital two decades after it was overthrown by US-led forces. Residents reported sporadic gunfire in the area of the Kabul airport, the main point of evacuations out of Afghanistan. “There are reports of the airport taking fire; therefore we are instructing US citizens to shelter in place,” the US Embassy said in a security alert. Two sources familiar with the situation at the airport could not confirm the reports of firing there. A State Department official told Reuters late on Sunday that almost all embassy personnel had relocated to a facility at the Kabul airport and that the American flag had been lowered from the embassy compound. Sources told Reuters that most US staff were expected to be evacuated from Kabul in the coming day or two. France and Germany, members of Nato, said on Sunday they were moving their diplomats to the airport and sending military transport planes to Kabul to evacuate their citizens and their Afghan helpers. Asked if the evacuation was evocative of the US departure from Vietnam in 1975, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier on Sunday: “Let’s take a step back. This is manifestly not Saigon.”  A US intelligence assessment earlier in the week had said Kabul could be encircled in 30 days and could fall to the Taleban within 90 days, but the insurgents captured most of Afghanistan’s major cities in less than a week and entered the capital on Sunday. Some 4,200 people remained in the US embassy until Thursday, when the Taleban’s rapid gains forced the Biden administration to begin flying in thousands of troops to help pull out many of the remaining diplomats. The deployment would include an additional 1,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, who President Joe Biden said on Saturday would help evacuate citizens and ensure an “orderly and safe” drawdown of US military personnel. On Sunday, US officials said they were weighing whether more troops were needed. Another 3,000 are on standby in Kuwait. Washington invested billions of dollars over four US administrations in Afghan government forces, giving them advantages over the Taleban, but they were unable to defend the country in the face of the militants’ advance, Mr Blinken told CNN. The US’ original mission in Afghanistan, launched to oust Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, had been fulfilled, Mr Blinken said, saying Washington had prevented further attacks by militants harboured by the Taleban. But President Joe Biden has faced rising domestic criticism after sticking to the plan to withdraw, which was agreed under his Republican predecessor Donald Trump. On Saturday, Mr Biden defended his decision, saying an “endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me”.

Republican lawmaker Michael McCaul said a Taleban takeover would revive the threat to the US.  “We are going to go back to a pre-9/11 state. A breeding ground for terrorism,” he told CNN on Sunday.

Mr Biden met his national security team on Sunday by secure videoconference from the presidential retreat at Camp David to hear updates on evacuations and the security situation, a White House official said. US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat like Mr Biden, said at a news conference that the safety of US personnel and of Afghans who supported the Americans should be Washington’s top concern. (Nick Bit: hahahaha…. Any fool that added America that believes that shit deserves to be tortured to death because they are ALL doomed and America is not going to bring in the hundred thousand people that bought into American bullshit….. They will be abandoned to a horrible death) “Job number one is for us to bring back, first, all American personnel… But second, all of the brave Afghans who helped our military, they have to be provided an exit to come to America,” Mr Schumer said. Nick Note: America told out 2,000 troops and you saw what happened. Now they will send back 6,000 to get US staff out. Does that make any sense…. Their was no real money being spent no people lost. You get in, its not so easy or so smart to jump back out. We have created a monster that will eat us…… Well armed, well funded, well motivitated that no longer fears America…. and that is a bad thing!

SINGAPORE/BEIJING, Aug 16 (Reuters) – China’s daily crude throuhgput last month fell to the lowest since May 2020 as independent plants slashed production amid a tighter quotas, high inventories and weakening profits. Last month’s processing volumes were 59.06 million tonnes, or 13.9 million barrels per day (bpd), 0.9% below the same month of 2020, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on Monday. That was the first year-on-year decline since March last year when coronavirus hammered Chinese fuel demand, and the July level was down 6% from off June’s record at 14.8 million bpd. Total throughput during the first seven months of 2021 reached 412.41 million tonnes, up 8.9% from a year earlier, largely reflecting the economy’s recovery from the initial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Volumes fell in July as independent plants scaled back processing in the face of tightening quotas as Beijing stepped up scrutiny of irregular trading of the permits. “Independent plants were facing tighter feedstock supplies and weakening margins. Some took to overhauls, other cut processing,” said Zhou Mi, analyst at Chinese commodities consultancy JLC.

These plants, sometimes known as teapots, operated crude processing capacity at 64.4% in July, down almost 14 percentage points from July 2020, according to JLC.

Throughput could take a further hit this month as a resurgence of coronavirus case in more than a dozen provinces is set to curb mobility. “It’s going to dampen refined fuel sales, we’re trimming August throughput by about 3% from previous months,” said an official with a north China-based refinery. The NBS data also showed China’s crude oil output in July at 16.87 million tonnes, up 2.5% from year-earlier level. Over the first seven this year, output rose 2.4% to 116.21 million tonnes. Natural gas output last month gained 9.8% from a year earlier to 15.8 billion cubic metres (bcm), while January to July production expanded 10.7% to 120.2 bcm. (tonne = 7.3 barrels for crude conversion) Nick Note: It is rare for us to go this long without a trade. It usually happens before major market transitions. The Stock market is in the end stages of a mindless bull market. We have stood out of the way of this steam roller. Soon Very SOON we will begin operations… The oil markets know a shut down shut in and lock down is coming call it the Delta wipe out.

Vitamin D deficiency (VDD) partly explains geographical differences in COVID-19 susceptibility, severity, and mortality. VDD among African-Americans, diabetics, hypertensive, and aged populations possibly explain the higher death rate, aggravated by cocooning. Vitamin D is pleiotropic, mediating bone metabolism, calcium homeostasis, and immune functions, whereas VDD is associated with inflammatory reactions and immune dysfunction, predisposing individuals to severe infections. Vitamin D modulates innate and adaptive immunity via the expression of genes that code antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). And the expression of cluster of differentiation (CD)14, the co-receptor for epidermal toll-like receptor (TLR)4. AMPs stimulate TLR2 in macrophages, increasing the conversion of vitamin D into its active form by cytochrome P450 27B1. Antiviral properties of vitamin D-induced AMPs can shift the polarization of the adaptive immune response from helper T cells (Th)1 to the more regulatory Th2 responses that suppress immune over-reactivity by preventing cytokine storm, which is already demonstrated during the Spanish flu episode. Vitamin D induces antiviral effects by both direct and indirect mechanisms via AMPs, immunomodulation, the interplay between major cellular and viral elements, induction of autophagy and apoptosis, variation of genetic and epigenetic factors. The crosstalk between vitamin D and intracellular signaling pathways may operate as a primary regulatory action on viral gene transcription. VDD may increase the likelihood of infection with enveloped viruses, including retrovirus, hepatitis, and dengue. Global data correlates severe VDD with COVID-19 associated coagulopathy, disrupted immune response and mortality, reduced platelet count, and prolonged prothrombin time, suggesting benefits from supplementation.Key teaching pointsVitamin D induces antiviral effects by direct and indirect mechanisms via AMPs, immunomodulation, induction of autophagy, etc.Epidemiology of VDD partly explains geographical differences in COVID-19 susceptibility, severity, and mortality.Global data correlates severe VDD with COVID-19 associated coagulopathy, disrupted immune response and mortality, reduced platelet count, and prolonged prothrombin time, together suggesting benefits from supplementation.Many clinical trials are underway globally to delineate the role of vitamin D in both prevention and treatment of COVID-19.