Crude oil prices showed a modest decline on Friday as fears that Hurricane Frances would disrupt US offshore oil production eased, ana-lysts said.
Worries over supply threats in Iraq and Russia lingered, but failed to have a significant impact on markets.
New York's reference contract, light sweet crude for October delivery, dipped seven cents to US$43.99 a barrel at the close on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
In London, the price of benchmark Brent North Sea crude oil for delivery in October fell US$0.34 cents to US$41.23 a barrel.
"Now it seems clear that Frances is not going toward the oil installations in the Gulf of Mexico, but into Florida, where there aren't any," Barclays Capital analyst Kevin Norrish said.
"The fear was always that it would hit the Mexican Gulf and cause crude oil production to get shut in or disrupted, but if it heads up toward Florida, there should be no problem. People were fairly concerned yesterday, but it is not a factor right now," he added.
Phil Flynn at Alaron Trading said New York trading was uneventful as participants geared for the three-day Labor Day weekend.
"The market has no place to go," Flynn said. "It played out a lot of its fears and anxieties yesterday. Today, a lot of people were afraid to get back into the market because of a shortened session and the volatility of yesterday's session."
Still, the market faced enough jitters to prevent a big drop in prices.
Anglo-Dutch oil major Royal Dutch Shell began evacuating 175 nonessential workers from some of its platforms in the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday as a "precautionary measure," Shell spokesman Simon Buerk said.
In Iraq, meanwhile, a huge fire blazed out of control on a vital northern pipeline to Turkey for a second day, halting exports, Iraqi oil officials and police said.
Saboteurs exploded a bomb on the strategic pipeline at 6:30pm Wednesday by the town of Riyadh 50km south of Kirkuk, Iraqi officials said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day