Four million people in central Chile were left without drinking water as torrential rain in the Andean foothills, since Friday, triggered landslides into the Maipo and Mapocho rivers. This led to the fouling of the city’s water supply and forced the closure of the world largest underground copper mine, El Teniente. The capital, Santiago was deluged after the Mapocho River overflowed its banks for the first time in 30 years. The violent storms also caused widespread devastation across Uruguay with seven people killed and leaving more than 2,000 homeless.
It's all fun and games until someone is caught cheating. That is the lesson that Volkswagen learned last fall, when the German car manufacturer was caught using software that could detect when an emissions test was taking place in order to give better results. Today, it looks like Mitsubishi Motors will learn that very same lesson.
The biggest catalyst for overnight markets, first reported on this site, was the announcement by Kuwait that its oil workers had ended their strike which disrupted oil production in the 4th largest OPEC producer for 3 days cutting it by as much as 1.7 mmb/d, and had served to offset the negative news from the Doha debacle. Kuwait Petroleum also added that it would boost output to 3m b/d within 3 days, which in turn has pressured the price of oil overnight, and the May WTI contract was back to just over $40 at last check, sliding 2%.
A message on a postcard inside a glass bottle thrown into the sea by a Plymouth biologist in 1906 and recovered in Germany has been confirmed by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest message-in-a-bottle. Metro reports: The historic message was sent by George Parker Bidder between 1904 and 1906 – along with a postcard and the promise of a shilling to the finder. It was eventually picked up in April last year by retired post office worker Marianne Winkler who was holidaying on the island of Amrum, off the north coast of Germany.