Canada’s main stock index posted its strongest four-day gain in three years Wednesday as it was propelled by a large increase in the price of crude oil and the Bank of Canada’s latest rate announcement.
Federal and provincial ministers will arrive in Sault Ste. Marie Thursday afternoon to announce financing assistance for new investments at Algoma Steel Inc. as it emerges from three years of bankruptcy protection. Ongoing steel tariffs make this a difficult time to restructure operations.
A Surrey woman who was largely banned from the investment industry because of her involvement in a Ponzi scheme has been sent to jail for 30 days for failing to appear at a court hearing.
The Bank of Canada acknowledged Wednesday the struggles of the oilpatch are weighing on the broader economy, adding that investment in the sector is “projected to weaken further.”
Asked whether the video streaming giant is interested in setting up shop in the city, Mayor John Tory suggested to The Canadian Press it’s a strong possibility.
Prior to legalization of recreational cannabis Oct. 17, the unweighted average price per gram was $6.83. It has since risen to $8.02 per gram, according to data collected through Statistics Canada’s crowdsourcing app.
A fault in a Soyuz rocket booster has resulted in an aborted crew mission to the International Space Station, but fortunately no loss of life. The astronauts in the capsule, Nick Hague (U.S.) and Alexey Ovchinin (Russia) successfully detached upon recognizing the fault and made a safe, if bumpy, landing nearly 250 miles east of the launch site in Kazakhstan. This high-profile failure could bolster demand for U.S.-built crewed spacecraft.
The launch proceeded normally for the first minute and a half, but at that point, when the first and second stages were meant to detach, there was an unspecified fault, possibly a failure of the first stage and its fuel tanks to detach. The astronauts recognized this issue and immediately initiated the emergency escape system.
Hague and Ovchinin in the capsule before the fault occurred.
The Soyuz capsule detached from the rocket and began a “ballistic descent” (read: falling), arrested by a parachute before landing approximately 34 minutes after the fault. Right now that’s about as much detail on the actual event as has been released by Roscosmos and NASA. Press conferences have been mainly about being thankful that the crew is okay, assuring people that they’ll get to the bottom of this and kicking the can down the road on everything else.
Although it will likely take weeks before we know exactly what happened, the repercussions for this failure are immediate. The crew on the ISS will not be reinforced, and as there are only 3 up there right now with a single Soyuz capsule with which to return to Earth, there’s a chance they’ll have to leave the ISS empty for a short time.
The current crew was scheduled to return in December, but NASA has said that the Soyuz is safe to take until January 4, so there’s a bit of leeway. That’s not to say they can necessarily put together another launch before then, but if the residents there need to stay a bit longer to safely park the station, as it were, they have a bit of extra time to do so.
The Soyuz booster and capsule have been an extremely reliable system for shuttling crew to and from the ISS, and no Soyuz fault has ever led to loss of life, although there have been a few issues recently with DOA satellites and of course the recent hole found in one just in August.
This was perhaps the closest a Soyuz has come to a life-threatening failure, and as such any Soyuz-based launches will be grounded until further notice. To be clear, this was a failure with the Soyuz-FG rocket, which is slated for replacement, not with the capsule or newer rocket of the same name.
SpaceX and Boeing have been competing to create and certify their own crew capsules, which were scheduled for testing some time next year — but while the Soyuz issues may nominally increase the demand for these U.S.-built alternatives, the testing process can’t be rushed.
That said, grounding the Soyuz (if only for crewed flights) and conducting a full-scale fault investigation is no small matter, and if we’re not flying astronauts up to the ISS in one of them, we’re not doing it at all. So there is at least an incentive to perform testing of the new crew capsules in a timely manner and keep to as short a timeframe as is reasonable.
You can watch the launch as it played out here:
Canada’s main stock index hit a six-month low Thursday while U.S. stock markets suffered another selloff day as investors are pricing in political and trade uncertainties they’ve long overlooked.
Legacy open-backed headphone maker Grado is taking their classic design into the future with the small Brooklyn company’s first pair of wireless headphones.
The GW100s have a familiar look, but integrate Bluetooth tech and volume controls. They go for $249.
Grado headphones are a favorite of mine; they have a very unique open sound that really resonates and are perfect for home listening. Previous iterations haven’t really thrived as much on the road or in noisy offices because they tend to let in a lot of outside noise and leak a lot of your tunes. The company says that they’ve redesigned the housings and internals of the GW100s to reduce noise leakage by 60 percent — no famed wooden enclosures on this design either.
Part of what’s great about Grado headphones is their history; we toured the company’s tiny Brooklyn HQ a few years back and took a look at their operations… really cool stuff.
It’s tough for a company to make do on just brand legacy alone, and even though audio tech generally has a much longer shelf life than other products, there’s always a time to adapt, especially now as more hardware makers purge headphone jacks from their devices.
In the past few years, the company branched out into some more mobile-friendly products, but the magic wasn’t all there. The wireless GW100s keep the company’s same drivers, though it’ll be interesting to hear what they sound like as the company tunes them to be more amenable to “on-the-go” listening. Speaking of which, they also look like they have a sturdier design than some of the company’s more spartan headbands, which were strangely kind of part of the appeal, but are definitely welcome for something more likely to be chucked in a backpack.
The headphones charge via micro-USB and offer a 15-hour battery life, the company says. They also pack an included 3.5mm cable if you want to use them with your old gear. More details on precise audio tuning are listed on its product page.
The federal government says it is imposing new surtaxes on some foreign steel to head off the threat of dumping.
