10 Dead, 50 Injured After Briefcase Bomb In St. Petersburg Metro; Second Device Found & Disabled - Live Feed

SUMMARY:

• An explosion occurred on a St. Petersburg Metro Train -  between Sennaya Square and the Institute of Technology


• At least 10 dead


• At least 50 injured


• Device was an IED with shrapnel - left in a briefcase


• Entire Transit system shutdown


• Putin considering possible terrorist links


• A second explosive device has been found and disabled


• Russian news reports say that a security camera has caught a person who could be responsible for a blast on St. Petersburg subway.

Live Feed:

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Update 5: Explosive device was left in briefcase in metro carriage - Interfax. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast.

Update 4: A second device has been found -  Russian anti-terrorism committee says it has found and deactivated a bomb at another St. Petersburg subway station.

The National Anti-Terrorist Committee has confirmed that a makeshift bomb has been found at the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station in St. Petersburg and disposed of.

"At the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station in St. Petersburg a makeshift explosive device was found and rendered harmless on Monday," National Antiterrorist Committee spokesman Andrey Przhezdomsky told the Rossiya-24 television news channel. "It was done promptly and professionally."

"Special services and law enforcement agencies keep taking crucial measures to identify and avert terrorist threats," the National Anti-Terrorist Committee said.

Update 3: The Mail is reporting at least 50 injured including children. Bloomberg reports the device was an IED with shrapnel.

The entire transit system has been shut down as bomb squads and rescuers are responding to the emergency.

Russian president Vladimir Putin says authorities are considering all possible causes of St Petersburg metro explosion including terrorism.

Russian president Vladimir Putin says authorities are considering all possible causes of St Petersburg metro explosion including terrorism

— Sky News Newsdesk (@SkyNewsBreak) April 3, 2017

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Update 2: Russian news services reporting at least 10 dead... (via TASS)

... at least ten people were killed, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

Preliminary reports indicate that some 10 people may have been killed and 20 injured in the blast, news agencies said citing sources close to the investigation.

The Tass news agency and Reuters said that 10 have been killed.

Interfax also said about 10 had died, with about 20 injured.

Selfie nation strikes once again...

Update 1: More details of a possible second explosion at the "Sennaya Ploschad [square]" Station note at least 10 people were injured.

Fire brigades are investigating reports of smoke at the Sennaya Ploshchad metro station in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, a regional Emergencies Ministry official told Sputnik on Monday.

"Preliminarily, there is strong smoke. Smoke protection service experts have been dispatched. The source of the smoke is being investigated," the source said.

Seven stations closed on city subway network - "Victory Park", "Electrosila", "Moskovskiye Vorota", "Frunze", "Institute of Technology", "Sennaya Ploshchad", "Gostiny Dvor".

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As we detailed earlier, reports are coming of an explosion at the Teknologicheskiy Institut metro station in St.Petersburg, Russia that has left several injured...

The metro management said they received reports of an explosion inside the car, possibly of an improvised explosive device.

Rosbalt reports that (via Google Translate)

At the train station "Technological Institute", an explosion occurred. This was reported by eyewitnesses.

According to them, many people have suffered as a result of the incident. On the published photo shows that the car door is badly damaged. Station platform clouded by smoke.

Details are not yet known. Official comments yet failed to get.

The situation does not look good...

There are many ambulances present already...

The station has been evacuated...

Is The US Restaurant Recession Becoming Structural?

Submitted by Wolf Richter of WolfStreet.com

“Flat sales” are now a “welcome change.” The New Normal.

National restaurant data and anecdotal evidence has been piling up. “T Vogel,” a commenter on WOLF STREET, put it this way:

My wife and I make almost 30k more than the median family income in my town (northern CA) with no kids. Our rent just went up by 1k a month – landlord selling – starter houses are selling at 500k.

We are not spending a dime more than needed. I plan to skip our weekly night eating out now.

They’re not the only ones to skip restaurants. Costs are going up, not just of restaurant meals, but of life in general. Incomes are lagging behind. And consumers are adjusting…. That’s what a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll of more than 4,200 U.S. adults confirmed today.

One-third of the respondents said they were eating in restaurants less often than three months ago. The poll was conducted in the second half of January. Of them, 62% cited cost as the primary reason.

Restaurant prices have been rising. The price index for “food away from home,” a subcategory in the Consumer Price Index, increased between 2% and 3% every year since 2012. In January, it rose 2.4% year-over-year. Those price increases are cumulative, and they add up after a while.

It’s not just that eating out is getting more expensive; it’s that stretched households are pushed by price increases elsewhere to divert some of their limited means from eating out to other expenditures.

Yet grocery stores aren’t reporting blockbuster numbers either, Bob Goldin, partner at food industry strategy firm Pentallect, told Reuters. “There’s more splintering of the food dollar, and the pie isn’t growing,” he said. “Where you spend has changed more than the amount you spend.”

The national averages, as seen from the restaurant’s point of view, bear that out.

In its most recent Restaurant Performance Index, the National Restaurant Association lamented “soft same-store sales and customer traffic readings” in December, which kept the Current Situation Index (tracking same-store sales, traffic, labor and capital expenditures) in contraction mode for the third month in a row:

• 42% of operators said their same-store sales declined year-over-year.


• 47% of operators said their customer traffic declined year-over-year.

This sort of data has been coming out for a while. It got to the point where TDn2K titled its most recent Restaurant Industry Snapshot: “Flat Sales, Welcome Change for Restaurant Industry in January.”

And more specifically:

While same-store sales growth was flat (zero percent) in January, it represented a welcome break from the ten consecutive months of negative sales growth experienced by the industry through the end of last year.

These flat sales were a function of slightly higher per-person average spending and fewer people going to restaurants: same store traffic was down 2.5% monthly and 4.1% on a rolling three-month basis. As the report put it: “Although still negative, this was the best month for the industry since last May.”

On a two-year basis, same-store sales were down 0.8% from January of 2015.

There were some winners in January, with growing same-store sales: Upscale casual, family dining, and quick service. Casual dining “was able to achieve flat results in January,” hallelujah, thus breaking a streak of 13 months in a row of falling same-store sales.

And there were some losers with same-store sales declines, according to the TDn2K report: fine dining and fast casual.

You get the idea: It’s been so tough out there for restaurants that any sort of flat spot or even a smaller down-tick in the averages is welcome news for the industry. And it looks like it’s becoming a structural feature of the US economy, though not nearly as bad as the downward spiral of brick-and-mortar retail.

This of course contradicts the theory or hopes that millennials – who are said to prefer splurging money on “experiences,” such as eating out, rather than on products, such as clothes – would pull the restaurant business out of its funk.

That said, you wouldn’t necessary know this by walking around San Francisco. Yelp lists nearly 8,000 eating establishments in the City, many of them recent creations, including 500 cafés and 3,000 delis. A lot of the places are packed. Some can be impossible to get into on a Friday or Saturday night without a reservation days or weeks in advance. Others are nearly impossible to get into no matter when or what.

But then other restaurants are nearly empty. There has been a slew of recent restaurant closures, amid talk of a big shakeout, including something called the “Mid-Market Massacre” in an area around Market St., where restaurant after restaurant closes, done in by exorbitant rents, not enough traffic, too much competition, a finicky public that might have lost interest, and insufficient sales. So yes, it’s tough out there, even in San Francisco, in what must be one of the toughest businesses on earth.