North Korea's regime defied an increasingly broader chorus of voices, including the US, Japan, China, South Korea and Russia, saying on Monday that it will continue its nuclear weapons tests, and warned it would "speed up to the maximum” its measures for bolstering its nuclear deterrence in response to the U.S. increasing "aggression and hysteria" against the country, a North Korea Foreign Ministry spokesman says in statement distributed by the official Korean Central News Agency.
Besides the upcoming FOMC meeting on May 2-3, and French & Italian politics - the decisive runoff round of the French election takes place this Sunday - this week's releases are dominated by US payrolls expected to come around 170k. The busy release calendar continues with Norges bank and RBA meetings as well as global manufacturing PMIs.
With much of Europe and Asia, including the U.K., France, Germany and China markets closed for Labor Day, Asian stocks and the dollar rose buoyed by news that Congress had reached a deal to keep the US government funded through the end of September. S&P futures are up 4 points or 0.2%. Oil declined as rigs targeting crude in the U.S. rose for a fifteenth week and output from Libya rebounded.
Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
A senior Rand analyst, inadvertently, gave the game away in a recent article inculpating Syrian President Bashar al Assad over the alleged toxic massacre of civilians on April 4. The Rand Corporation, a longtime conduit for CIA propaganda, wrote: «The use of chemical weapons today provokes international condemnation… Those who order their deployment risk being charged with war crimes».