Leslie is currently making its way across the Atlantic, and has now strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane, though there are no hazards affecting land.
Per an advisory shared at 4 a.m. EST on Saturday morning by the National Hurricane Center (NHC), Leslie is currently moving toward the west-northwest at a speed of 7 m.p.h. and is set to increase speed in a northwest direction during the night. This is expected to continue through Tuesday.
The storm’s maximum wind speeds have increased slightly since Friday to 80 m.p.h., and the NHC has stated that though the storm may strengthen some through Saturday, it is expected to weaken on Sunday.
The storm formed in the Atlantic on Wednesday, but strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane on Friday.
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There are no coastal watches or warnings in effect.
Leslie, the 12th storm formed in the Atlantic in 2024, is not far behind Hurricane Kirk during an unexpectedly busy hurricane season, on the heels of the devastating effects of Hurricane Helene.
Kirk, which currently churns as a Category 3 hurricane, is causing storm swells which are affecting the Leeward Islands, Bermuda, and the Greater Antilles. Per the NHC, “these swells are expected to spread westward to the east coast of the United States, Atlantic Canada, and the Bahamas Saturday night and Sunday, and to the Azores on Monday.”
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The NHC is also tracking a disturbance over the southwestern Gulf of Mexico, which it states is highly likely to develop into a tropical depression or tropical storm, according to an advisory shared on Saturday morning. The NHC puts the chances of formation throughout the next two days at 70 percent, and over the next week at 90 percent.
This disturbance could affect the Yucatán Peninsula, Florida, the Florida Keys, and the northwestern Bahamas.
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A Chinese-built megaport in Peru could be used by Beijing’s navy, a top US general has said, highlighting the security risks to the US from “Belt and Road” projects in Latin America.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to inaugurate the $1.3bn Chancay port on the Pacific coast when he visits Peru for a summit in mid-November, amid growing concerns among US security officials that the facility’s size, depth and strategic location make it suitable to host Chinese warships.
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China’s Cosco Shipping, which has been building the port with a local junior partner, will be the sole operator when it opens after Peru dropped a lawsuit challenging its exclusive status.
“It could be used as a dual-use facility, it’s a deepwater port,” said General Laura Richardson, outgoing chief of US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean. “[The navy] could use it, absolutely . . . this is a playbook that we’ve seen play out in other places, not just in Latin America.”
Twenty-two Latin American and Caribbean countries have signed up to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s hallmark project to build infrastructure abroad, as China expands its footprint in a region once labelled as the “backyard” of the US.
China is now the biggest trading partner for South America and a major investor in critical minerals, transport and energy projects.
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“If you look at all the countries which have these projects, they just happen to be around all these strategic . . . locations or sea lines of communication for global commerce,” Richardson told the Financial Times. “You have to ask yourself: ‘why all this investment in these kinds of things?’”
A four-star general who flew Black Hawk helicopters and served in Afghanistan, Richardson has frequently warned against Chinese and Russian security threats in the region during her three-year stint at Miami-based Southern Command, which ends on November 7.
In April, Richardson visited Ushuaia, Argentina’s southernmost city, where China had proposed building a port to supply the Antarctic. Following what Argentine media reported as strong lobbying from Washington, Buenos Aires opted instead for a US-led facility and also put on ice Chinese plans for a multi-use port 200km up the coast at Río Grande.
Richardson said she had been “absolutely worried” about the Chinese proposal in Ushuaia because of its strategic location close to the Strait of Magellan and the Drake Passage.
Beijing insists that commitment to mutual benefit is a cornerstone of its overseas projects, an approach it contrasts with what it calls Washington’s pursuit of hegemony and geopolitical advantage in Latin America. China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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The general said she remained concerned about Chinese and Russian activity in Cuba, which has included building spy stations to eavesdrop on the US, and Russian warships visiting Havana. “It’s in the red zone for our homeland . . . We have a lot of nefarious and malign activity and we have no place for it in the Caribbean and Latin America.”
She has also tried to alert Latin American governments to the security risks of adopting 5G infrastructure from Chinese companies such as Huawei, which could open “back doors” into countries’ sensitive data and facilitate hacking or the theft of military or commercial secrets.
Huawei has said there is “no comprehensible evidence or plausible scenarios” in which its technology would pose a security risk.
“Digital authoritarianism — that’s absolutely what China is doing,” she said. “You’ve got a Communist government selling these 5G solutions. They don’t respect the rights of their own people and we somehow think they will do that for [us]”.
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The general accused Beijing of “holding countries at risk” in the region when they were desperate for technology, deepwater ports or energy investment. “This is how they get their hooks into the countries,” she said.
In August 2022, India and the US protested when the Yuan Wang 5, a Chinese naval vessel with antennas used for tracking and surveillance, docked at Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port. The Beijing-funded port was taken over by a Chinese company after Colombo defaulted on debt payments.
China denies the Yuan Wang 5 is a spy ship but agreed it would not conduct research while it was at Hambantota.
Richardson said the US and allies needed to counter Beijing’s growing clout by offering Latin American governments commercially attractive alternatives. She said large-scale economic assistance, akin to the 1948 US Marshall Plan, which provided cash to rebuild postwar Europe, was needed in Latin America.
“The [Chinese] come in with big bags of cash and the BRI and they look like they’re saving the day because countries don’t have a choice,” she said.
“Strategic competition matters. Democracy is under attack and we have to be investing and competing on critical infrastructure projects for like-minded democracies.”
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Plans by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to build an AI data centre in the US that runs on nuclear power were thwarted in part because a rare species of bee was discovered on land earmarked for the project, according to people familiar with the matter.
Zuckerberg had planned to strike a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator to provide emissions-free electricity for a new data centre supporting his artificial intelligence ambitions.
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However, the potential deal faced multiple complications including environmental and regulatory challenges, these people said.
The discovery of the rare bee species on a location next to the plant where the data centre was to be built would have complicated the project, Zuckerberg told a Meta all-hands meeting last week, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
The blow comes as rivals Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all struck deals recently with nuclear power plant operators to fulfil rising energy demands from data centres as they race to train and maintain power-hungry AI models. One AI query consumes up to 10 times the energy of a standard Google search.
Meta is continuing to explore various deals for carbon-free energy, including nuclear, one of the people said. Meta declined to comment.
Nuclear is increasingly viewed as a way to get stable, round-the-clock power during the AI wars between Big Tech groups.
However, it also has high upfront costs and takes a long time to build. The industry in the west has historically relied on Russia for nuclear fuel.
Critics also caution about the risks of the build-up of toxic radioactive waste, which has to be stored safely or it could severely harm both humans and the environment.
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In September, Microsoft announced it would revive the mothballed nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania.
Amazon paid $650mn in March to put a data centre next to the Susquehanna Steam Electric nuclear plant, also in Pennsylvania.
Google, meanwhile, said last month that it had ordered six to seven small modular nuclear reactors from US start-up Kairos Power, becoming the first tech company to commission new nuclear power plants.
Zuckerberg is under pressure to prove to investors that his all-in bet on AI will bear fruit, as the company’s capital expenditures continue to rise given its investments in running servers and data centres to develop the cutting-edge technology.
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Zuckerberg told staffers at the all-hands that, had the deal gone ahead, Meta would have been the first Big Tech group to wield nuclear-powered AI, and would have had the largest nuclear plant available to power data centres, two people said.
One person familiar with the matter said that Zuckerberg has been frustrated with the lack of nuclear options in the US, while China has been embracing nuclear power. China appears to be building nuclear reactors at a fast clip, whereas only a handful of reactors have been brought online over the past two decades in the US.
Meta said it had already hit “net zero” emissions in its operations since 2020.
It’s impossible to count the number of headlines written over the last few months declaring the 25% tax-free pension lump sum was in danger of being scrapped in last week’s Budget to boost clicks and comments.
Anyone with a working brain and the slightest bit of political nous could see there was no way the chancellor would do something so politically suicidal, especially after the Winter Fuel Allowance fiasco. Shame on those claiming it was ever likely.
There was also a glut of poorly-researched pieces on how the lump sum allowance might come down to £100,000.
The headlines were nothing more than clickbait and our journalists and so-called experts should know better
It took me less than a minute to ask whether such a reduction would require secondary or primary legislation in a recent CPD webinar, and the answer was primary. This means, even if the chancellor had taken this step, it would not have taken effect immediately, so there was no need for investors to crystallise quickly.
How many articles about this featured this fact? None that I saw.
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The headlines were nothing more than clickbait and our journalists and so-called experts should know better.
There were many stories on the raising of capital gains tax (CGT) to income tax rates, but how many of them recalled we used to have that model but with an inflation deduction? Not many. Any adviser writing about it should have seen that angle. I don’t know anyone who thinks taxing investors on the effect of inflation is reasonable.
It turned out the chancellor simply brought shares and other assets into line with property investments and didn’t punish all those landlords with that 45% income tax I kept reading about.
Do better research and think more deeply about these issues before you start scaring my clients for clickbait
The new government (and the last one) wants landlords to sell because more supply reduces prices or keeps them steady while wages rise. It would not have matched this plan to have introduced tax at 40% and 45% on gains. Any expert in the property market should know that but how many wrote about it?
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And what of those investors who have pulled out their pension commencement lump sum to hold it in an unwrapped investment, now subject to 6% or 14% more CGT?
Do I think any journalist will accept responsibility for whipping up the furore? Will any be investigated because an investor acted on what they thought was good advice?
No – and nor should they. But I do implore all the experts, commentators and journalists to do better research and think more deeply about these issues before you start scaring my clients for clickbait.
Greg Neall is chartered financial planner at Wake Up Your Wealth
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