While record numbers of indebted Americans are increasingly turning to exchanging bodily fluids directly for cash, it appears (by implication) British students are taking a similar (but indirect) path to reducing their debt loads. As Sky News reports, thousands of British students are funding their way through university on so-called "Sugar Daddy" websites. One site, SeekingArrangement.com, claims 12,600 UK students have signed up with proof of university enrolment, with some making over $3,000 per month for her 'arrangement' enabling her to pay off her student loan and travel more. While sex is not 'expected', as one female student explained, "there's a fine line between being a 'sugar baby' and prostitution."
Well, not really...
The sites advertise themselves as a way for "beautiful,
ambitious people to graduate debt free" through "arrangements" with
older "sponsors"...
"Attending
college means you have a choice: take out loans and eat ramen, or get a
Sugar Daddy and live the life you always wanted." (on your back?) All seems above board?!?? In an interview with Sky News,Brandon
Wade, the founder of SeekingArrangement.com denied it was an escort
site but that it enabled "sugar babies" to "upgrade their lifestyle".
He said sex was never expected, but it is aspired to and that the website had led to countless marriages worldwide.
"You want to find somebody who is well educated, who can provide for you financially, you know it's sort of the Disney dream so to say," said Mr Wade.
However, a married 62-year-old sugar daddy who is currently seeing four sugar babies told Sky News:
"I wouldn't be able to meet girls as young and as beautiful as this through an ordinary dating website".
He also said that "sex is an integral part of the site".
He believed consensual relationships were "really appropriate for students" looking to supplement their bank accounts.
"What a great way to get a little bit of extra pocket
money and much better than having to spend eight hours slogging in a bar
earning the minimum wage," he added.
Traders
see no move at the ECB meeting on Thursday, but expect central bank
chief Mario Draghi to hint about additional easing steps.
By Hiroyuki Kachi
The euro remained flat against the dollar in Asia
trade Thursday, as many investors avoided making large bets ahead of the
European Central Bank’s policy-setting meeting later in the day.
The euro traded at $1.1338 from $1.1339 late Wednesday in New York. The common currency was at ¥135.67 from ¥135.99.
Many currency market dealers and analysts in Tokyo expect the ECB will stand pat by keeping intact the central bank’s €60 billion-a-month bond-buying program. But they also expect the central bank chief Mario Draghi to hint about additional easing steps.
Speculation has been growing that the ECB and the Bank of Japan will
increase monetary stimulus to support growth, while the Federal Reserve
is widely expected to wait longer before raising short-term rates. U.S.
and Japan monetary authorities will hold policy meetings next week.
“Investors continue to find it difficult to make moves,” said Yasuaki
Amatatsu, senior analyst of global markets research at Bank of
Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, adding that the euro “can’t go either upside or
downside.”
“Expectation is high for the ECB officials to go into depth about (future monetary) easing,” said Mr. Amatatsu.
“I think the currency market has priced in (dovish) comments by Mr.
Draghi after the ECB meeting,” said Daiwa Securities senior FX
strategist Yukio Ishizuki, especially after remarks by a member of the
ECB Governing Council last week that sent the common currency into a
tailspin from its high near $1.15.
“Even if the euro falls below the $1.13 mark, that may be only temporarily,” said Mr. Ishizuki.
ECB member Ewald Nowotny said last week officials should use more
policy instruments to raise the region’s competitiveness. But he later
expressed resistance toward an imminent expansion of quantitative easing
in the single-currency bloc.
In other currency trade, the U.S. dollar was at ¥119.63, compared with ¥119.93 late Wednesday.
The WSJ Dollar Index , a measure of the dollar against a basket of major currencies, was down 0.07% at 87.42.
Uptrend is likely short-lived as the latest data suggests a respite from low prices could still be a long way off.
By Jenny W. Hsu
Crude-oil
prices recouped earlier losses in Asia trade Thursday, mainly thanks to
bargain hunting, but the uptrend is likely short-lived as the latest
data suggests a respite from low prices could still be a long way off.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for
delivery in December traded at $45.42 a barrel, up $0.22 in the Globex
electronic session. December Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures
exchange rose $0.25 to $48.10 a barrel. Oil prices plunged overnight
after the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported domestic
crude-oil stockpiles expanded by 8 million barrels last week, much
larger than the 3.5 million-barrel addition expected by the market and
the 7.1 million-barrel build-up estimated by industry group American
Petroleum Institute. Both the West Texas Intermediate and Brent saw the
steepest fall this month by dropping 2.4% and 1.8% respectively.
The latest increase brings the U.S. total commercial crude
inventories to 476.6 million barrels, nearing their highest levels in 80
years and around 26% higher than the same period last week.
“The slight improvement [in prices] isn’t going to last because not
much has changed,” said a Singapore-based trader, adding that although
China’s demand for crude has not trailed off too badly, the increasing
global supply means lower prices for longer.
The market was also unimpressed by the Wednesday meeting between
members and non-members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries. As mostly expected, the meeting offered no measures on
reviving prices which have been down more than 40% from levels a year
ago.
“Russian officials said at an OPEC arranged meeting that the
production restrictions on crude output were not discussed in Vienna
meeting,” ANZ Research said in a report.
In a bid to protect market shares, cash-rich oil producers such as
Saudi Arabia and Russia have refused to trim output even though oil
revenues have been low, leaving players with smaller coffers–such as
Venezuela–eagerly lobbying for help. The anticipated resumption of
Iranian oil, most likely later this year, is also exacerbating concerns
of a longer global glut.
“Apart from the occasional pep talk by oil ministers, the idea has
always been kept the same–maintaining market share. We would think the
main reason why the stance has not changed is because this strategy is
seen to be working,” said Daniel Ang, energy analyst at Phillip Futures,
referring to the decreasing U.S. crude oil production.
According to the EIA, the U.S. daily production of crude last week
was 9.1 million barrels, steady from a week earlier, but about 2% lower
than the same period last year which had 8.9 million barrels per day.
Nymex reformulated gasoline blendstock for November — the benchmark
gasoline contract — rose 86 points to $1.2894 a gallon, while November
diesel traded at $1.4581, 81 points higher.
ICE gasoil for November changed hands at $443.75 a metric ton, unchanged from Wednesday’s settlement.
Some analysts are skeptical Thursday’s gains mark a turnaround form the panicked selling a day earlier.
By Chao Deng
China shares recovered Thursday from a sudden selloff
in the previous session, though investors remain wary of weakness in the
world’s No. 2 economy.
The Shanghai Composite Index climbed in the morning to trade up 0.2%
at 3328.49 after wavering between gains and losses earlier in the day.
The benchmark lost 3% on Wednesday.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index slipped 0.8%, with the market reopening after a holiday Wednesday.
Japan’s Nikkei Stock Average recovered to trade up 0.1% and
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was flat. South Korea’s Kospi Composite
Index slipped 0.6%.
Smaller stocks helped China’s market rebound Thursday, with a gauge
of startup shares in Shenzhen, the ChiNext Price Index , rising more
than 4%, after dropping 3% the previous day. The index is one of the
most volatile share benchmarks in China.
The central bank’s moves to add liquidity to the market, announced
after the market closed Wednesday, has helped restore some confidence,
analysts said. The People’s Bank of China said it injected 105.5
billion yuan ($16.6 billion) to 11 financial institutions via
medium-term lending facilities–part of its goal to boost liquidity in
the banking system and encourage lending to small businesses and the
agricultural sector.
‘The bounce back is only because of the selling yesterday
and we think the benchmark will have a difficult time climbing above
3500.’
Jacky Zhang, BOC International
Still, some analysts are skeptical Thursday’s gains mark a turnaround form the panicked selling a day earlier.
“The bounce back is only because of the selling yesterday and we
think the benchmark will have a difficult time climbing above 3500,”
said Jacky Zhang, an analyst at BOC International.
A gauge of Shanghai’s largest 50 stocks fell 0.9%, with state-owned
industrial firms like China Communications Construction Co. , down
3.1%, among the biggest losers.
Earlier this week, state-owned Chinese steel trader Sinosteel Co.
postponed interest payments due earlier in the week on 2 billion yuan
($315 million) of onshore bonds, the latest sign that Chinese companies
are struggling from heavy debt loads.
“If we start seeing the equity market acting violently negative
again, you may well see some risky assets…come back under pressure,”
said Chris Weston, a market strategist at brokerage IG. Volatility in
China’s markets over the summer pressured many commodities and
emerging-market currencies.
As of Wednesday’s close, the MSCI Asia Pacific Index was down 1.2%
for the week, after three straight weeks of gains. The decline marks a
reversal from the past few weeks, when hopes for a delay in higher U.S.
interest rates and expectations of central-bank stimulus from Tokyo to
Beijing fueled stock gains.
China’s economic backdrop remains a concern for investors. While the
country grew at its slowest pace during the third quarter since 2009,
authorities still haven’t given clear signs on whether they will
introduce further stimulus. Policy makers meet in Beijing later this
month for an annual economic planning meeting.
Investors also are looking ahead to an European Central Bank meeting later Thursday to see whether the bank will expand its €60 billion ($68 billion) a month bond-buying program, known as quantitative easing.
The U.S. dollar was flat in early Asia trade at ¥119.87 Japanese yen.
In the U.S., health-care shares capped a volatile session with losses after a negative report about Canadian drug maker Valent Pharmaceuticals International .
Prices for brent crude oil were up 0.5% at $48.11 a barrel. U.S. crude-oil prices fell 2.4% in overnight, as U.S. stockpiles surged.
Gold prices were down 0.1% at $1,165.70 an ounce.
An artist’s impression of VFTS 352, the kissing stars.
Stars dubbed VFTS 352 could merge into one or lead scientists down a new evolutionary path
Ah, young love.
Just like teens on Earth, these two “young”
stars, found by astronomers in a real galaxy somewhat far, far away,
can’t bear to be parted. Their fate, however, is likely to be like that
of Romeo and Juliet: a brutal death.
Scientists say the stars
could merge into one and eventually explode — or separate and explode.
But it could take 600,000 years — or even a few million years — for that
to happen.
The pair of stars, known as VFTS 352, orbit each other in little more than a day about 160,000 light years away from Earth. That’s far even for Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon, and the surface temperature — above 40,000 degrees Celsius — makes it inhospitable for a “Star Wars” colony.
The
two stars and their overlapping surfaces are “brightest, hottest, most
massive” type of a rare phenomena formally called “overcontact
binaries,” said Richard Hook, a spokesman with the European Southern Observatory,
which operates three major astronomy sites in Chile. Unusually, the
stars are of similar size, and they are estimated to be sharing about
30% of their material
The Tarantula Nebula, where they were
found, is an area with clouds of dust, lots of gas and many hot young
stars — young being millions of years, rather than the billions of years
of our sun. These two stars are estimated to be about 2.5 million to
3.5 million years old.
Tarantula Nebula’s galaxy, the Large
Magellanic Cloud, is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. It is 50,000
parsecs away from us and is visible from the southern hemisphere with
the naked eye and no light pollution. (Han Solo boasted of making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.)
Amateur
astronomers could faintly see the pair with their own telescope, Hook
said, “but it would be hard to find and unremarkable to look at.”
The
stars were discovered in March 2014 with data compiled by Hugues Sana, a
scientist at the University of Leuven, in Belgium, who was then working
for the Hubble Space Telescope at the Space Telescope Scientist
Institute in Baltimore, and analyzed by Leonardo Almeida, then at Johns
Hopkins University and now at the Insitituto de Astronomia in São Paulo,
Brazil.
“Understanding the life cycle of massive stars (how they
form, live and die) is important for our comprehension of the evolution
of galaxies,” Sana said. Studying a binary system like VFTS 352 is a
key part of understanding how such massive stars live and die.
So
what will happen to VTFS 352? Scientists are still debating the likely
answer. Under one scenario, they will merge into a single gigantic star
in about 600,000 years. That could then continue spinning rapidly and
end its life in another three million or four million years with “one of
the most energetic explosions in the universe,” Sana said.
A
second possibility is that the stars continue mixing material but avoid
merging, leading scientists down a new evolutionary path. Their lives
could end in 2 million or 3 million years with supernova explosions that
form binary black holes that could eventually merge.
Scientists are now analyzing fresh data from the Hubble telescope and could agree on an answer in about a year, Sana said.
