The Gold Bull is Dead

The Gold Bull is Dead; that depends from angle you are looking at it

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

- George Eliot

Gold and precious metals in general had a spectacular run from 2003-2011, and it was around that time we published our first article on Gold-eagle. At that period, we were pounding the table on Gold, Silver and the entire precious metal’s sector. Is this the end? Is this monstrous bull dead?  We have stated repeatedly, that every major bull market has to experience one back-breaking correction… Usually the correction ends with a 50% pullback from the highs, which would translate to a low of roughly $960.00. Apparently, Jim Rogers holds a similar view.

Gold is in a correction, and the correction has gone on for four years,” Rogers said. “Although I am not buying gold, I am expecting an opportunity to buy gold sometime in the next year or two. For instance, if gold goes under $1,000, I hope I’m smart enough to buy a lot more gold.

The Top Books of 2016

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The Italian writer Italo Calvino defined a classic as “a book that’s never finished saying what it has to say.” This year, The Times’s daily critics reviewed nearly 250 titles. What follows are their lists of the fiction and nonfiction books that most moved, excited and enlightened them in 2016 — books that, in their own ways, are perhaps not finished saying what they have to say.

The New York Times has three daily book critics: Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and Jennifer Senior. Because they review different titles, it is impossible for them to compile a single unanimous Top 10 list. They have favorites, however, and are happy to have a chance to list them here. There is also a list from Janet Maslin, who has stepped down from full-time reviewing but remains a frequent contributor of reviews to The Times.

The critics have presented their lists in rough order of preference.

E-Cigarette Use Falls Among Teens

Vaping and marijuana use more popular among teens than regular cigarettes, according to NIH

A Betamorph E-Cigs employee exhaling vapor from an electric cigarette at the company's store in Albuquerque, N.M. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS

E-cigarette use among teens dropped in 2016, reversing an upward trend that had prompted the U.S. Surgeon General to recommend increased regulation and taxation.

Among high-school seniors, 12% this year said they had used e-cigarettes in the past month compared with 16% in 2015, according to the National Institutes of Health’s annual Monitoring the Future survey.

E-cigarettes and marijuana are both more popular among teens than regular cigarettes, whose use among teens has been declining for more than two decades, according to the survey. E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that heat nicotine-laced liquid into a vapor.

Among high-school seniors, 23% said they had used marijuana in the past month, and 11% said they had smoked conventional cigarettes. Some 13% of high-school seniors said they had used tobacco with a hookah in the past year, down from 23% in 2014, the peak since the survey began measuring hookah use in 2010.

Lenovo K6 Note Price Leaked Before Launch, Starts At Rs 14,999

The Lenovo K6 Note, which was initially unveiled at IFA 2016, is all set to launch in India this week. Recent company tweets suggest that the upcoming Lenovo device will arrive in India as soon as December 14th. However, Indian e-commerce website OnlyMobiles has jumped the gun and revealed the price ahead of the official launch.

The Lenovo K6 Note flaunts a 5.5-inch Full HD display with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution. It comes in all-metal unibody design, boasting Dolby Audio surround sound technology and stereo speakers at the back.

Under the hood, it is powered by a 1.4GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor coupled with Adreno 505 GPU for graphics. The phone comes in two variants — 3GB and 4GB RAM. The internal memory of 32GB is further expandable up to 128GB by means of a microSD card support.

Terminally ill boy dies in Santa's arms

(CNN) - Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist Sam Venable knew he'd found a sad story, but he didn't know just how many hearts it would break.

Venable's column about a terminally ill 5-year-old boy dying in Santa's arms has spread everywhere since its publication Sunday in the Tennessee newspaper. Among other things, it nails the emotional richness of the holiday season.

"I've gotten a big response to this," Venable told CNN. "People have told me that they were crying when they read it, and I tell them that I was crying when I wrote it."

It all started several weeks ago when Eric Schmitt-Matzen, the Santa in Venable's column, got a call after work.