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Japan issues rare alert as North Korea fires missile without warning over main island | CNN

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Japan issues rare alert as North Korea fires missile without warning over main island | CNN


Seoul, South Korea
CNN
 — 

Japan urged residents to take shelter early Tuesday morning after North Korea fired a ballistic missile with out warning over the nation for the primary time in 5 years, in a significant and probably harmful escalation of current weapons exams by the Kim Jong Un regime.

The launch, which prompted quick backlash from Tokyo and Seoul, comes amid a spate of missile exams, with 5 launches up to now 10 days, and follows renewed army drills between america and its regional allies.

The intermediate-range missile was launched from Mupyong-ri close to North Korea’s central border with China at round 7:23 a.m. native time, in accordance with South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Workers (JCS). It flew about 4,600 kilometers (2,858 miles) for 20 minutes at an estimated most altitude of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) over Japan’s Tohoku area on the primary island of Honshu earlier than falling into the Pacific Ocean, some 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) from the nation’s shore, Japanese officers mentioned.

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Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida strongly condemned the launch and referred to as North Korea’s current ballistic missile launches “outrageous” in feedback to reporters at his official residence.

Tuesday’s launch is the nation’s twenty third such missile take a look at this 12 months, together with each ballistic and cruise missiles.

There have been no stories of injury to plane or vessels close to the missile trajectory, in accordance with Japanese authorities, however the unannounced missile triggered a uncommon J-alert, a system designed to tell the general public of emergencies and threats in Japan.

In such emergencies, alerts are despatched out through sirens, via group radio stations and to particular person smartphone customers. On Tuesday, alerts have been despatched out at round 7:30 a.m. native time to folks in Aomori prefecture, Hokkaido and Tokyo’s Izu and Ogasawara islands, in accordance with Japanese officers.

A tweet posted by Japan’s Prime Minister’s workplace urged residents to take shelter in buildings and to “not strategy something suspicious that’s discovered and to right away contact the police or fireplace division.”

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Different governments have been fast to decry the launch, with South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol branding it a “reckless” provocation, including that North Korea will face a decisive response from the South Korean army and its allies.

The White Home additionally “strongly condemned” the take a look at, with Nationwide Safety Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson calling it a “destabilizing” motion that exhibits North Korea’s “blatant disregard for United Nations Safety Council resolutions and worldwide security norms.”

Kim Seung-kyum, chief of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Workers (JCS), and Paul LaCamera, america Forces Korea commander, held a gathering after the launch and reaffirmed the mixed protection posture will likely be additional strengthened in opposition to any threats and provocations from North Korea, the JCS mentioned.

The US Indo-Pacific Command additionally launched a press release saying American commitments to the protection of Japan and South Korea “stay ironclad.”

Ankit Panda, a senior fellow within the Nuclear Coverage Program on the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace, mentioned common missile testing was was a part of North Korea’s plan to take care of its nuclear forces.

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“It’s fairly attainable that america, South Korea and Japan will take away a message from this missile take a look at that North Korea is continuous to say itself to point out that it has the power to ship nuclear weapons to targets together with the US territory of Guam,” he mentioned, including that “danger discount” to cease a disaster from escalating needs to be the present precedence.

“If such a disaster have been to play out, it could play out beneath a considerably extra superior North Korean nuclear functionality, which I believe would considerably restrict the choices that america and South Korea would have, probably to retaliate or handle escalation with North Korea,” he mentioned.

Tuesday’s launch may herald an intensification of provocations by North Korean chief Kim Jong Un, consultants instructed CNN.

“Pyongyang remains to be in the midst of a provocation and testing cycle and is probably going ready till after China’s mid-October Communist Get together Congress to conduct an much more vital take a look at,” mentioned Leif-Eric Easley, affiliate professor of worldwide research at Ewha Womans College in Seoul.

“The Kim regime is growing weapons akin to tactical nuclear warheads and submarine-launched ballistic missiles as a part of a long-term technique to outrun South Korea in an arms race and drive wedges amongst US allies.”

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4 earlier missile launches occurred within the house of every week in late September and early October, across the similar time US Vice President Kamala Harris made an official go to to Japan and South Korea, and as US, Japanese and South Korean navies held joint workout routines.

North Korea’s exams additionally come as worldwide consideration stays firmly centered on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and as each Moscow and Beijing seem reluctant to facet with the West to additional censure Pyongyang.

In Could, Russia and China vetoed a US-drafted United Nations Safety Council decision to strengthen sanctions on North Korea for its weapons testing, in a vote the US mentioned was prone to gas Pyongyang’s program to develop nuclear-capable missile techniques.

Washington and the Worldwide Atomic Power Company have each warned this 12 months that North Korea could also be getting ready for a nuclear take a look at, which might be its first since 2017.

Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program on the Middlebury Institute, drew a connection between the missile exams and a possible nuclear take a look at.

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“North Korea goes to maintain conducting missile exams till the present spherical of modernization is finished. I don’t assume a nuclear (take a look at) explosion is way behind,” he instructed CNN.

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Investors only have themselves to blame as Jay Powell steals Christmas

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Investors only have themselves to blame as Jay Powell steals Christmas

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For markets, US Federal Reserve chief Jay Powell is the Grinch who stole Christmas. But the festive shakeout in bonds, currencies and stocks now under way in the wake of the US central bank’s latest pronouncements is a mini-crisis of investors’ own making.

Fed meetings, and the minutiae of its public statements, are always marquee events for investors, setting the tone across all major asset classes. Wednesday’s meeting, the last of 2024, always came with the potential for greater punch, given the timing — right on the cusp of Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House. 

The decision on rates itself — a quarter-point chop off the benchmark — was in line with expectations. But it went downhill from there, as the central bank’s apparent cooling on further cuts next year — an allusion to the potentially inflationary impact of Trump’s economic policies — has gone down like a mouldy mince pie.

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US stocks nosedived, wiping out almost all of the gains in the S&P 500 benchmark index since Trump’s re-election day. The following morning brought a similar sea of red across Asian and European stocks too. The dollar popped higher, sending the euro and yen tumbling awkwardly hard, and US government bonds weakened, sending the yield on 10-year Treasuries forcefully above 4.5 per cent.

The Fed chair is facing some flak here. His comment in the post-meeting press conference that the year-end projection for inflation has “kind of fallen apart” is not the sort of self-assertion that investors seek in a Fed chair, and the pick-up in some inflation measures comfortably predates the reinauguration of Trump.

But markets are going through the wringer in no small part because the consensus among investors about the next steps for markets had become so intense — curdling hard around the themes of American exceptionalism in stocks and the vanquishing of inflation keeping bonds well supported. The path to an easy run in markets in 2025 had become exceptionally narrow and extremely crowded with like-minded views, and it has taken only a gentle push from the Fed to tip that out of balance.

The annual spectacle of year-ahead market outlooks from the big banks and asset managers demonstrated a near-unanimous set of views. Deutsche Bank is towards the top of the pack with its assessment that the benchmark S&P 500 index of heavyweight US stocks will ascend to 7,000 by the end of next year. After the overnight shock, that projection is 20 per cent above where we are now. It is punchy, but not wildly out of line. Core fundamental differences of opinion are hard to find. “The degree of uniformity in year-ahead projections has broken all previous records,” notes TS Lombard’s Dario Perkins.

The trouble with that was two-fold. First, it meant much, if not all, of the narrative was already baked in. Second, crowding around core themes tends to exaggerate the scale of market reactions when stuff goes wrong. Enter Powell stage left.

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“Everyone’s portfolio is pointed towards US exceptionalism,” said Mike Riddell, a portfolio manager on Fidelity’s Strategic Bond Fund, speaking with some foresight the week before the Fed decision. “The consensus can be right, and we don’t see much to derail it. But if you see anything to move the narrative, you can get really violent market moves.”

We have been here before, in a range of different markets, but that does not prevent investors from making the same mistake over and over again. This time last year, Powell caught the market off guard in the opposite direction, dropping a hint of interest rate cuts that investors went on to exaggerate hugely out of proportion.

Crowded bets among investors also stung in early August, when a downbeat US labour market report blasted in to several popular and correlated market bets. In late September, deeply unloved Chinese stocks rocketed higher after Beijing unleashed stimulus measures to try and turn the hobbled economy and markets around. Investors had given China such a wide berth that stocks leapt 40 per cent in just a few days as funds piled in to a narrow entrance.

The latest ructions are a useful reminder that despite the disarming simplicity of the American exceptionalism theme, rakes are scattered all over markets for investors next year.

The assumption that the US economy will sail through the first year of Trump 2.0 is brave. Ignoring the (actually pretty obvious) banana skins, particularly around inflation, is “the ultimate ‘trust me’ trade” says Greg Peters, co-chief investment officer for PGIM Fixed Income. “It seems off to me.”

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Now, investors should not assume that the Christmas holiday season will put all this angst to bed. As the final days of 2018 showed, portfolios can and do shake around wildly even when a lot of core markets are shut, on half-days, or on the go-slow. If anything, thinned-out trading volumes at this time of year can make matters worse. 

Some fund managers will be feeling sore about this year-end beating. But Powell has done us all a favour in reminding us that next year will not be for the faint of heart, and the wisdom of crowds is not always your friend.

katie.martin@ft.com

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Wisconsin school shooting victims named as teacher Erin West and student Rubi Vergara

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Wisconsin school shooting victims named as teacher Erin West and student Rubi Vergara

Tributes have been paid to the two victims who died in the shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday, who have been named as 42-year-old teacher Erin M. West and 14-year-old student Rubi P. Vergara.

The Dane County Medical Examiner’s office confirmed their identities in a press release Wednesday night, while in a separate statement, the school said, “our hearts are heavy with these losses.”

The suspected shooter, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, a freshman at the school who was also known as Samantha, died on the way to hospital on Monday from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

“ALCS is a better school for the work of Erin West. She brought her love of Jesus and love of people to our staff and school family all wrapped in a hug and topped with a smile,” the school’s statement said.

Erin West.Empire Photography

The school said West worked as a substitute teacher for three years before taking a full-time staff role as an in-house substitute teacher and coordinator, “a role tailor made for her abundant skills and breadth of knowledge.”

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“She served our teachers and students with grace, humor, wisdom, and — most importantly — with the love of Jesus. Her loss is a painful and deep one and she will be greatly missed not just among our staff, but our entire ALCS family,” the statement added.

Rubi Vergara, a 9th grade student, had been at the school since kindergarten and was described as popular and a keen volunteer.

“Her gentle, loving, and kind heart was reflected in her smile. Rubi was a blessing to her class and our school. She was not only a good friend, but a great big sister,” the school said.

“Often seen with a book in hand, she had a gift for art and music. Yet, it was Rubi’s love for Jesus that shined brightest and she shared His love with others by volunteering faithfully. She will be missed deeply by her teachers and fellow students,” the statement added.

An online obituary uploaded to a local funeral home website said Vergara loved art, singing and playing keyboard in her family’s worship band. “She shared a special bond with her beloved pets, Ginger (cat) and Coco (dog),” the obituary said.

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Wisconsin school shooting victims named as teacher Erin West and student Rubi Vergara
Rubi Patricia Vergara.Jenn Vergara

The funeral home said a service for Vergara would be held on Saturday at 11 a.m. CST (12 a.m. ET) and would be livestreamed online.

The police investigation into the shooting continues. Authorities said Wednesday night that the two unidentified students who received life-threatening injuries remain in a local hospital, while the four people who were treated in hospital for minor injuries sustained in the shooting have been discharged.

Police said that the shooter opened fire in a second-floor classroom “during a study hall for mixed graders.”

Two guns were found at the school, but only one was used in the shooting, police said.

Police said they were working to establish a motive and said they were aware of the suspect’s alleged social media activity and “documents and photos circulating the internet,” that have yet to be verified.

Detectives want to speak to any who may have interacted with Rupnow in the days or weeks before the shooting — they can contact police anonymously through Madison Area Crime Stoppers at p3tips.com or by calling 608-266-6014. 

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Perplexity’s value triples to $9bn in latest funding round for AI search engine

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Perplexity’s value triples to bn in latest funding round for AI search engine

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Perplexity, an artificial intelligence-driven search engine, has closed its fourth funding round this year, tripling its valuation to $9bn as it seeks to compete with offerings from Google and OpenAI.

The $500mn round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, with involvement from Nvidia, New Enterprise Associates, B Capital and T Rowe Price, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deal. Previous investors have included SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as well as several prominent names from the AI industry such as OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun.

The San Francisco-based group has grown rapidly this year, with its product receiving hundreds of millions of queries a month. It has 15mn monthly active users with most of that traffic coming from the US.

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The new funding will help Perplexity compete with west coast rivals in an increasingly fierce fight for engineers. “The talent war for AI is like no other time before,” according to Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive of Databricks, the AI and data analytics company that announced a $10bn fundraising round on Tuesday.

Perplexity is seeking to capitalise and improve on the search advertising system pioneered by Google, in which marketers bid to have a sponsored link placed against search queries. It is in talks with major brands to pilot advertising on its platform.  

In a sign of growing competition in the space, AI companies have recently targeted the search market by linking up chatbots to the internet. This week, OpenAI rolled out web searching for its popular ChatGPT product, while Anthropic’s Claude can perform searches through a feature called “computer use”.

Google and Microsoft, which are leaders in the $300bn digital advertising world, have also recently incorporated large language models, which power AI chatbots and make results more conversational, into their search offerings.

The latest round has pushed Perplexity’s valuation higher by nine-fold since the start of the year, in another sign of how hot start-ups developing new AI tools can draw in hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in investment. 

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After OpenAI’s $6.6bn fundraising in October — one of the largest in Silicon Valley — one person close to the company said Perplexity was inundated with unsolicited interest from new investors.

Run by former Google intern Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity raised $250mn this summer, on top of previous funding rounds in January and April.

Perplexity makes money through subscriptions. It says its annualised revenues — a projection of full-year revenues based on extrapolating the most recent month’s sales — have grown from $5mn in January to $35mn in August.

The spate of deals for lossmaking AI start-ups has stoked concern among some investors that rising valuations in the sector show all the hallmarks of a bubble, however. But even those who argue most AI valuations are increasingly detached from reality are willing to stake bets on companies they believe could be winners.

Perplexity and T Rowe Price declined to comment. IVP, B Capital, NEA and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The closing of the round was first reported by Bloomberg.

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