30+ pages of report was issued by the Dutch this morning and no conclusions as to what actually brought down MH-17.
What the report did say was that the crash was the result of multiple highs-peed objects hitting the aircraft.
This is an incredibly frustrating story to try and piece together. When I went to download the entire report, turns out it is in PDF form and they set the security settings to prevent curious reporters (like Ures truly) from plugging the document into Google Translate (or other newsroom tools) and that stinks. Reporters are by nature “trust buy verify” kinds of people.
While the MSM “narrative” like this NY Times article go a long ways towards reporting what was released, the Dutch are keeping theirs report inaccessible fort widespread review by locking it down to where copying is not permitted, and that prevents full (and nearly instant) machine translations.
The root problem is the Dutch report doesn’t add much clarity to the situation. It was already an article of faith that it was not an aircraft failure.
Meantime, the Russians are bound to be upset with a new round of punitive sanctions on them from the EU and the military types on both sides will likely continue working weekends trying to gear up for any eventualities.
Economic Outlook, NoDoz Needed…
The NFIB report on small business outlooks is out:
August’s Optimism Index rose 0.4 points to 96.1 making it the second highest reading since October, 2007. The four “hard” measures (job creation plans, job openings, capital spending plans and inventory investment plans) were collectively unchanged, and the other 6 components added to the Index a bit to produce a modest gain.
Toss is the continuing terrorism concerns, and the Ukraine tensions and the markets are in a sideways to down mode: Dow futures are down about 8 and gold & silver show only lackluster interest.
British financial markets are looking to next week’s vote on Scotland becoming its own country with some concern.
More after this…
Apple Mania
New product rollouts from Apple have all the elements of a rock & roll concert, old-time Gospel revival meeting and plenty of tech. Pc Mag’s look at the phones and wrist-thingy is of interest over here if you’d not using an Android device…
Also on the tech front, we notice that the EC is still trying to tell Google how to run their own business
Ebola Watch
This is one of the most boring news days in a long time – much of what’s making the rounds this morning is recycled and leftovers.
But do keep an eye on Ebola because while it’s not making daily headlines here, the problem is still “growing exponentially” according to this report.