Miscellaneous News

AssassinsMace said:

Expelled from Norway not because he was accused of spying or bad behavior but because he might use what he learned about windmills for military purposes in another country other than China.

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Equation said:

This is sad. My condolences to all of the victims families. From the video looks to be either the pilot lost control due to natural factor or a mechanical problem.

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She then tweeted a non-apology:

Sorry. ¿Sabes qué? Es que es tanto el exceso del ridículo y el absurdo, que sólo se digiere con humor. Sino son muy, pero muy tóxicos.

— Cristina Kirchner (@CFKArgentina)

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Translation: "Sorry. You know what? It's just that the ridiculousness and absurdity is so high, that it can only be understood through humor. If not, it's very, very toxic."

The problem with this — beyond that it's incredibly insulting to the Chinese — is that it's bad for Argentina's economy.

Fernandez needs China. Badly. Since last year, Fernandez has been working with Chinese President Xi Jinping on a currency swap to get cash to her country and replenish Argentina's notoriously low reserves.

And it's not the time for Fernandez to sound flippant either. Last month the news broke that an Argentine prosecutor investigating the decades-old terrorist bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires was found dead.

The man, Alberto Nisman, was

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in what was meant to look like a suicide. No one believed that story, in part because he was about to present the findings of his investigation to the Argentine legislature. He learned the Fernandez government had covered up the bombing, which was perpetrated by agents of Iran, to secure energy-for-food deals with Iran. Argentina is energy poor.

As yet Nisman's allegations will not be presented to a court. Two judges who have been asked to hear the case have declined. Meanwhile on Tuesday a draft of an arrest warrant for Fernandez and other members of her government was found in Nisman's garbage.

So now is not the time for jokes of any kind, really.

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Jeff Head said:

So, in her initial comment, she replaced the "r"s with "l"s in the words "arroz" and "petróleo":
It was an offensive and deliberate misspelling. It would be like is an English speaker replacing the "l"s in "hello" with "r"s to say "Herro," in making fun of Chinese speakers.

Cany you imagine...the President of a country doing this? Appalling. Sophmoric. Like she never got out of High School or something. Roughly translated, her tweet would have read,

"More than 1,000 attendees ... Did they only come for the "lice" and petloleum?".

Appalling at any time. Inconsiderate and insulting. And just plain unbelievable when she and her country are asking the Chinese for help.

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Jeff Head said:

So, in her initial comment, she replaced the "r"s with "l"s in the words "arroz" and "petróleo":
It was an offensive and deliberate misspelling. It would be like is an English speaker replacing the "l"s in "hello" with "r"s to say "Herro," in making fun of Chinese speakers.

Cany you imagine...the President of a country doing this? Appalling. Sophmoric. Like she never got out of High School or something. Roughly translated, her tweet would have read,

"More than 1,000 attendees ... Did they only come for the "lice" and petloleum?".

Appalling at any time. Inconsiderate and insulting. And just plain unbelievable when she and her country are asking the Chinese for help.

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airsuperiority said:

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Ran outta my quotas for free articles. Can anyone quote the content?

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China’s cyber regulator says all mainland internet users must register real personal details
Amid fears for free speech, just how the use of real names will be enforced remains unclear

PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 04 February, 2015, 9:58am
UPDATED : Thursday, 05 February, 2015, 4:43pm

The mainland's 649 million internet users will be required to register their real identities under new rules imposed by the cyber regulator yesterday as the nation continues to tighten its grip on free speech.

The new regulation, expected to come into effect next month, will require internet users to submit identity details to website administrators for all online accounts, including blogs, instant messaging platforms, Twitter-like microblogs and forums.

People can still choose an alias and profile pictures, but they must register their real names with web administrators, Xu Feng , chief of the mainland's top internet watchdog, told mainland media yesterday.

But aliases or pictures considered inappropriate, misrepre-sentative or a threat to national security will be banned. This will put an end to people using the names of foreign leaders such as "Putin" or "Obama" as their online identities.

The regulator did not elaborate on how the measure would be implemented or whether it would be retrospective.

China has the world's largest internet population, recently reaching 649 million, the China Internet Network Information Centre said this week. Of that number, 557 million or 85 per cent access the internet via a mobile phone.

Xu said the new measures would help eliminate untrustworthy, incorrect or misleading information.

The regulation states that user names must not contain information that breaches the nation's laws and constitution, threatens national security, leaks state secrets, damages the public interest and religious policies or incites ethnic disputes. User names that incited social instability, defamed others or were related to pornography, gambling, violence or terrorism, would also be banned.

The mainland launched a review of real-name registration for instant messaging services late last year, Xu said. More than 80 per cent of users of Wechat, the mainland's most popular messaging service, had since registered their real identity information, The Beijing News reported.

The latest move concerned some activists.

"It is unclear how they will implement the policy, possibly by using registered mobile phone numbers or identity cards," human rights blogger Mo Zhixu said.

"But [under the policy] activists may find it difficult to make critical comments on the internet. It is more likely to lead to self-censorship on the internet."

Meanwhile, the Supreme People's Court handed down an interpretation guideline yesterday allowing online chat records, blogs, microblogs, mobile messages and any other digital information to be included as evidence during civil trials, China News Service reported.

Digital records have been included as evidence for criminal cases for some years.

"Allowing digital records to be included as court evidence could help identify the truth," Beijing lawyer Liu Zilong said.

"But there still needs to be certification measures in place to verify the legitimacy of the information."

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MADRID (MarketWatch) — Imagine it! You’re walking along and nearly trip over a 17-pound (7.85 kilograms) gold nugget. File that under a most improbable gold bonanza.

But that’s exactly how it played out for one lucky sun-of-a-gun farmer in China.

Berek Sawut, a Kazak

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told Chinese news agency Xinhua that he found the giant nugget “practically lying on bare ground.” The area is in China’s far western Xinjiang Uygur region.

That gold nugget, assuming it’s at least 80% pure, would be worth 1.6 million yuan ($255,313 U.S. dollars), says Xinhua, which also points out that a 1.84 kilogram nugget was discovered in the region in 2010. Gold

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for April delivery was trading at $1,261 an ounce on Thursday.

The odds of such a thing happening, of course, are not as rare as, say, finding 1,400 rare U.S. gold coins practically in your backyard. And yes, that actually happened to

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a year ago.

It can’t be confirmed if this is indeed it, but this supposed image of that China nugget was floating around earlier on Twitter.


Oddly enough, on Feb. 5, 1869, the world’s biggest alluvial gold nugget (i.e., gold deposited by water) was found in Moliagul, Victoria, Australia. Dubbed the ‘Welcome Stranger,’ the nugget had a gross weight of 109.59 kilograms, and had to be broken into three pieces because there were no scales large enough to weigh it, according to Wikipedia.

Last month thieves

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museum in downtown San Francisco early Tuesday and made off with gold nuggets and ore worth more than $12,000.

But that’s not a strategy we’d recommend in trying to get your own chunk of gold.

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