World News Thread & Breaking News!!

[TerraN_EmpirE]

China’s new premier rejects U.S. hacking claims
The Associated Press
Posted : Sunday Mar 17, 2013 9:46:22 EDT
BEIJING — New Chinese Premier Li Keqiang dismissed hacking accusations against China as “groundless” on Sunday and said his government was committed to strong ties with Washington.

Referring to allegations that China’s military was behind massive hacking attacks on U.S. entities, Li reiterated Beijing’s statements that China is a major target of global hackers and opposes all such criminal activity.

“I think we should not make groundless accusations against each other but spend more time doing practical things that will contribute to cybersecurity,” Li said in his first news conference in his new role.

Li is the highest-ranking official to comment on the hacking claims made by U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant that provided a detailed picture of alleged cyberspying carried out by a People’s Liberation Army unit based in Shanghai.

Li said that despite their differences, conflict between the world’s largest and second-largest economies is not inevitable as long as the countries respect each other’s major concerns and manage their differences.

China’s new leaders “attach great importance” to relations that meet the “fundamental interests of people in both countries and serves the global trend of peace and development,” Li told reporters at the traditional premier’s news conference that follows the close of the annual legislative session.

China-U.S. ties have weathered a series of crises over the past year over dissidents, Chinese trade practices, opposition to Chinese investment in the U.S. and — most recently — hacking accusations. While basically stable, political ties are seen as lagging behind the economic relationship, with two-way trade hitting almost $500 billion last year, and China’s new president, Xi Jinping, isn’t expected to meet President Obama until an economic summit in Russia in September.

Following Xi’s elevation, Li was appointed premier last week, with running China’s economy his main responsibility.

and one more for the road minus the Rope please

 

[SteelBird]

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Nigerian Police officials have concluded their investigation and it revealed that the baby girl was actually buried alive by her own father.

This mishap happened in Asaba, Delta state, Nigeria on Saturday.

Mr. Macaulay Onitcha is the father of the above baby. The 25-year-old laborer claimed he committed the ungodly act because he was hunhappy with his wife after she allegedly refused to sleep with him.

The 4-month-old baby girl named Edna Macaulay was buried in a shallow grave dug by her own father on Saturday at Edurudu Street Kokori.

Fortunately for little Edna, a good Samaritan who witnessed the burial rescued the girl.

Mr. Saturday Ekama allegedly suffered machete cuts at the hands of Macaulay Onitcha while rescuing the child as her father was covering the grave. Ekama reported the incident to police.

According to an official statement from Delta State police spokesman Mr. Muk:

When the child was exhumed alive, she had a neck injury. Currently she is undergoing treatment at Saint Francis Hospital, Okapra Inland. The suspect is currently assisting the State Criminal Investigation Department, SCID, Asaba in their investigations.”

I have heard a lot of news about fathers killing their own children but this father bury his new born baby alive!

 

[TerraN_EmpirE]

Well Not Breaking news.... very very very very very very very very very very very old

Well Not Breaking news.... very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very................ old news

22 March 2013 Last updated at 06:05 ET
Dinosaur-killing space rock 'was a comet'
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website, The Woodlands, Texas
The space rock that hit Earth 65m years ago and is widely implicated in the end of the dinosaurs was probably a speeding comet, US scientists say.
Researchers in New Hampshire suggest the 180km-wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico was carved out by a smaller object than previously thought.
Many scientists consider a large and relatively slow moving asteroid to have been the likely culprit.
Details were outlined at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
But other researchers were more cautious about the results.
"The overall aim of our project is to better characterise the impactor that produced the crater in the Yucatan peninsula [in Mexico]," Jason Moore, from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, told BBC News.
The space rock gave rise to a global layer of sediments enriched in the chemical element iridium, in concentrations much higher than naturally occurs; it must have come from outer space.
Extra-terrestrial chemistry
However, in the first part of their work, the team suggests that frequently quoted iridium values are incorrect. Using a comparison with another extraterrestrial element deposited in the impact - osmium - they were able to deduce that the collision deposited less debris than has previously been supposed.
The recalculated iridium value suggests a smaller body hit the Earth. So for the second part of their work, the researchers took the new figure and attempted to reconcile it with the known physical properties of the Chicxulub impact.
For this smaller space rock to have produced a 180km-wide crater, it must have been travelling relatively quickly. The team found that a long-period comet fitted the bill much better than other possible candidates.
"You'd need an asteroid of about 5km diameter to contribute that much iridium and osmium. But an asteroid that size would not make a 200km-diameter crater," said Dr Moore.
"So we said: how do we get something that has enough energy to generate that size of crater, but has much less rocky material? That brings us to comets."
Dr Moore's colleague Prof Mukul Sharma, also from Dartmouth College, told BBC News: "You would need some special pleading for an asteroid moving very rapidly - although it is possible. But of the comets and asteroids we have looked at in the skies, the comets are the ones that are moving very rapidly."
Long-period comets are balls of dust, rock and ice that are on highly eccentric trajectories around the Sun. They may take hundreds, thousands or in some cases even millions of years to complete one orbit.
The extinction event 65 million years ago is now widely associated with the space impact at Chicxulub. It killed off about 70% of all species on Earth in just a short period of time, most notably the non-avian dinosaurs.
The enormous collision would have triggered fires, earthquakes and huge tsunamis. The dust and gas thrown up into the atmosphere would have depressed global temperatures for several years.
Lost in space
Dr Gareth Collins, who researches impact cratering at Imperial College London, described the research by the Dartmouth team as "nice work" and "thought-provoking".
But he told BBC News: "I don't think it is possible to accurately determine the impactor size from geochemistry.
"Geochemistry tells you - quite accurately - only the mass of meteoritic material that is distributed globally, not the total mass of the impactor. To estimate the latter, one needs to know what fraction of the impactor was distributed globally, as opposed to being ejected to space or landing close to the crater."
He added: "The authors suggest that 75% of the impactor mass is distributed globally, and hence arrive at quite a small-sized impactor, but in reality this fraction could be lower than 20%."
That could keep the door open for a bigger, more slowly moving asteroid.
The authors accept this point, but cite recent studies suggesting mass loss for the Chicxulub impact was between 11% and 25%.
In recent years, several space objects have taken astronomers by surprise, serving as a reminder that our cosmic neighbourhood remains a busy place.
On 15 February this year, 2012 DA14 - an asteroid as large as an Olympic swimming pool - raced past the Earth at a distance of just 27,700km (17,200mi). It had only been discovered the previous year.
And on the same day, a 17m space rock exploded over Russia's Ural mountains with an energy of about 440 kilotonnes of TNT. About 1,000 people were injured as the shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings.
Some 95% of the near-Earth objects larger than 1km have been discovered. However, only about 10% of the 13,000 - 20,000 asteroids above the size of 140m are being tracked.
There are probably many more comets than near-Earth asteroids, but Nasa points out they spend almost all of their lifetimes at great distances from the Sun and Earth, so that they contribute only about 10% to the census of larger objects that have struck the Earth.

23 March 2013 Last updated at 05:44 ET
Israel PM apologies for Gaza flotilla deaths
Israel's prime minister has apologised to Turkey for "any errors that could have led to loss of life" during the 2010 commando raid on an aid flotilla that tried to breach the Gaza blockade.
Benjamin Netanyahu also agreed with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to compensate the families of the nine activists who were killed.
Mr Netanyahu had previously only expressed regret for the deaths.
The deal was brokered by US President Barack Obama during a visit to Israel.
Mr Erdogan's office said he had accepted the apology, "in the name of the Turkish people".
A senior official in Mr Netanyahu's office said he and Mr Erdogan had agreed to the return of ambassadors and the dropping of Turkish legal proceedings against four senior Israeli officers in absentia.
'Operational errors'
Nine people were killed on board the Turkish aid ship, Mavi Marmara, when it was boarded by Israeli commandos while trying to transport aid supplies to Gaza in May 2010 in spite of an Israeli naval blockade.
The Israeli government admitted mistakes were made in intelligence-gathering and planning, but insisted its commandos used lethal force because activists had attacked them.
The activists said the troops had opened fire as soon as they boarded the vessel, which was in international waters at the time.
The incident provoked an international outcry and led to a major deterioration in relations between Turkey and Israel.
Before departing for Jordan on Friday afternoon, Mr Obama revealed that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Erdogan had just spoken by telephone.
"The United States deeply values our close partnerships with both Turkey and Israel, and we attach great importance to the restoration of positive relations between them in order to advance regional peace and security," the president said in a statement released by the White House.
A statement issued by Mr Netanyahu's office said that in the telephone conversation with Mr Erdogan he had expressed regret over the deterioration in bilateral ties and noted his "commitment to working out the disagreements in order to advance peace and regional stability".
"The prime minister made it clear that the tragic results regarding the Mavi Marmara were unintentional and that Israel expresses regret over injuries and loss of life," it added.
"In light of the Israeli investigation into the incident, which pointed out several operational errors, Prime Minister Netanyahu apologised to the Turkish people for any errors that could have led to loss of life and agreed to complete the agreement on compensation."
The two leaders had also agreed to continue to work on improving the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian Territories, the statement said.
'Serious error'
A statement from Mr Erdogan's office said the two prime ministers had agreed on making arrangements for compensation for families of the dead activists.
"Erdogan told Benjamin Netanyahu that he valued centuries-long strong friendship and co-operation between the Turkish and Jewish nations," it added.
The BBC's Kevin Connolly in Jerusalem says Mr Netanyahu's change of heart is a clear indication of the diplomatic clout that the US still wields with its two key allies in a turbulent region.
The prime minister's call to his Turkish counterpart was apparently made from a trailer at Tel Aviv airport while Air Force One sat on the ground waiting to depart.
The unglamorous setting and the last-minute nature of the call suggests the deal may not have been easy to broker, our correspondent adds.
Israeli officials said the apology had become possible after Mr Erdogan qualified earlier comments about Zionism in an interview with a Danish newspaper. Mr Netanyahu expressed "appreciation" for the comments, his office said.
Former Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman called the decision to apologise a "serious error", Israeli news site Walla reported.

23 March 2013 Last updated at 09:31 ET
Cyprus says 'significant progress' in debt crisis talks

Cyprus has made "significant progress" in talks with the EU and IMF aimed at securing a bailout, Cypriot Finance Minister Michael Sarris has said.
Mr Sarris was also quoted as saying Cyprus was considering a 25% levy on deposits of more than 100,000 euros (£85,000) in its biggest bank.
Cyprus has to raise 5.8bn euros (£4.9bn; $7.5bn) before Monday to secure a 10bn-euro loan.
Parliament has approved restructuring the island's banks, among other moves.
But it rejected a levy earlier this week, before EU pressure brought the proposal back to the table. The rejected proposal included a levy on smaller deposits.
Mr Sarris was speaking after talks with the "troika" of the EU, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
"Significant progress has been made toward an agreement at least with the troika which will report to the Eurogroup," he said.
"Two or three issues need further work."
He said experts were now discussing these issues, and the talks would resume later on Saturday afternoon with the aim of finalising the package.
Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades and party leaders were considering a trip to Brussels depending on the outcome of the meeting.
The European Central Bank has given Cyprus until Monday to raise the bailout money.
If Cyprus fails, the ECB said it would cut off funds to the banks, meaning they would collapse, possibly pushing the country out of the eurozone.
Cyprus now needs to find out what money-raising measures the EU will accept before putting them to a vote, says the BBC's Chris Morris in Nicosia.
He says Germany is essentially writing the rules for the eurozone, and the message coming from Brussels and Berlin is that the money has to come from the banking sector and investors who have benefited from high interest rates over recent years.
Germany has voiced opposition to another measure approved by the Cypriot parliament on Friday - nationalising some pensions to pay into a solidarity fund along with other assets.
Germany has also made it clear that it will no longer accept an economy within the eurozone that is dominated by its status as an economic tax haven, our correspondent adds.
Leading Cypriot bankers have urged parliament to accept a levy, with small savers exempted.
Russian money
On Tuesday, parliament overwhelmingly rejected a levy that would have made small savers pay 6.75%, while larger investors would have paid 9.9%.
The proposal had provoked widespread anger among both ordinary savers and large-scale foreign investors, many of them Russian.
The government fears a levy would prompt foreign investors to withdraw their money, destroying one of the island's biggest industries.
Mr Sarris travelled to Moscow this week to seek Russian support for alternative funding methods, but Russia said it would only act after the EU reached a deal with Cyprus.
Among nine bills approved on Friday, Cyprus MPs voted to restructure the banking sector, starting with the second-largest and most troubled lender, Laiki (Popular) Bank.
Under the restructuring, troubled lenders will be split into so-called good and bad banks, protecting smaller deposits but allowing levies on bigger ones.
There is now speculation that the biggest lender, the Bank of Cyprus, will also be restructured.
Parliament also voted for capital controls to prevent large withdrawals from Cyprus.
Banks in Cyprus have been closed since Monday and many businesses are only taking payment in cash.
Anthanasios Orphanides, former governor of the Cyprus Central Bank, told the BBC that Cyprus was a victim of German domestic political pressures ahead of a general election there later this year.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her party needed to avoid being accused of using "German taxpayers' money to pay off Russian oligarchs".

22 March 2013 Last updated at 22:17 ET
Abu Sayyaf release Australian hostage Warren Rodwell
An Australian man kidnapped 15 months ago by an al-Qaeda-linked group in the Philippines has been released.
An emaciated-looking Warren Rodwell was freed on Saturday near Pagadian city in the southern Philippines, police said.
He was kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf militants in 2011, and had last been shown alive in a video posted on social media websites in December.
Abu Sayyaf is considered the smallest and most radical of the extremist movements in the southern Philippines.
Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr welcomed the news, saying the release had been the result of a joint effort by authorities in both countries.
"The Philippines government had the lead role in this case and deserve congratulations for their tireless efforts on Mr Rodwell's behalf," said Mr Carr.
He added that Mr Rodwell was being moved to a safe location and that the focus now was on his recovery.
'No payments'
Mr Rodwell - who runs a shop with his wife in the Philippines' seaside town of Ipil, close to Zamboanga in south-western Mindanao - was abducted in December 2011.
A number of foreigners have been kidnapped for ransom in the southern Philippines. The Australian government has a longstanding policy of refusing to pay ransom for its citizens.
Areas within the region are used as bases by Islamist militants and rebel groups.
Abu Sayyaf militants remain a security threat in the impoverished region, where minority Muslims have been fighting for self-rule for decades.
The main Muslim separatist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, last year signed a peace accord with the government in exchange for broad autonomy.
But Abu Sayyaf were among the rebel groups who refused to sign up to the peace deal.

Kidnapped Australian Is Freed in Southern Philippines
By FLOYD WHALEY NYT
MANILA — An emaciated 54-year-old Australian man held for 15 months by a kidnap-for-ransom group in the southern Philippines was released Saturday, officials said.

“He was fine, but he looked very thin,” said Col. Rodrigo Gregorio, a military spokesman in the southern Philippines.

The man, Warren Richard Rodwell, was abducted in December 2011 and was released around 1:30 a.m. Saturday in the coastal town of Pagadian. He was evacuated by helicopter to a nearby military base.

“This is great news for Mr. Rodwell and his family,” Foreign Minister Bob Carr of Australia said in a statement on Saturday. “The Rodwell family has shown enormous courage throughout this ordeal.”

Mr. Rodwell, a former soldier who worked as a teacher and travel writer, moved to the southern Philippines in 2011 to join his Filipino wife in her native town of Ipil in the restive region.

In December 2011, gunmen riding motorcycles burst into his home, abducted him and took him by speedboat to nearby islands where kidnap-for-ransom gangs operate. The abductors identified themselves as members of the Islamic militant organization Abu Sayyaf, which in previous years was linked to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Rodwell was featured in several proof-of-life videos released by his abductors, including one in which a $2 million ransom was demanded. The Philippine and Australian governments have policies of not paying ransom to kidnappers, though Abu Sayyaf has repeatedly obtained large ransom payments in return for releasing hostages.

“I have no idea if ransom was paid,” Colonel Gregorio said by telephone on Saturday afternoon.

Mr. Carr told the Australian network ABC on Saturday that no ransom had been paid by his government, but he declined to say that none had been paid by other parties.

“The Australian government never pays ransoms,” he said. “To do so would leave Australians exposed in all parts of the world to kidnappers who’d be motivated by a desire to get money and to get it fast from the Australian government.”

“But I won’t comment on arrangements that may have been made by Mr. Rodwell’s family and Abu Sayyaf, the kidnappers, made through the Philippines antikidnapping unit and their police force,” he said.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia thanked the Philippine government during a news conference on Saturday afternoon.

“I do want to pay tribute to the government of the Philippines and their agencies and personnel who worked so hard to secure Mr. Rodwell’s release, including particularly those who combat kidnapping in the Philippines for the Philippines government. They have done some remarkable work,” she said.

A spokesman for President Benigno S. Aquino III said that the Philippine government was working to reunite Mr. Rodwell with his family as quickly as possible. “Our primary concern was to ascertain that Mr. Rodwell would receive immediate medical attention,” said a deputy presidential spokeswoman, Abigail Valte. “Presently, his medical condition is being assessed, and as soon as the doctors give clearance, we hope that he will be reunited with his family.”

Mr. Rodwell is one of several foreigners who have been kidnapped in the southern Philippines, some of whom remain missing. Abu Sayyaf, the group that military officials say abducted him, is a loosely knit organization of Islamic extremists who have been responsible for some of the most violent acts in the area in the last decade, including kidnappings, beheadings and bombings.

In a recent report, the regional corporate risk mitigation firm Pacific Strategies and Assessments, based in Manila, said that Abu Sayyaf had lost some support from regional and international militant organizations because of its low level of “Islamic awareness.”

“By most accounts, the Abu Sayyaf has abandoned its Islamist terror credentials and public facade of ideology in favor of its traditional and more lucrative criminal activities, such as kidnapping and extortion,” the firm’s report stated.

Since 2002, the United States has maintained about 500 Special Forces troops on a rotational basis in the southern Philippines to help the country’s military fight Islamic extremism. In 2012, the Philippines brokered a peace deal with the largest Muslim separatist group in the region, but Abu Sayyaf was not included in the agreement and the group continues to carry out attacks.

Many governments discourage their citizens from visiting the southern Philippines, and Australia uses some of the strongest language in its warnings.

“We continue to see reports indicating that militants based in the southern Philippines are planning to kidnap Westerners,” states the Australian government’s current travel advisory on the Philippines. “If you are in central or western Mindanao, you are strongly advised to leave immediately.”

Myanmar Troops Sent to City Torn by Sectarian Rioting
By THOMAS FULLER NYT
BANGKOK — As a picture of chaos and anarchy emerged from a city in central Myanmar on Friday, President Thein Sein declared a state of emergency in the area and ordered the military to assist in quelling rioting that residents say has left at least 20 people dead.

Deployment of troops in the city — residents reported seeing soldiers entering on Friday — carries heavy political implications in Myanmar after five decades of military rule until Mr. Thein Sein inaugurated his civilian government in 2011.

The religious violence in the city of Meiktila has underlined what local residents say is a vacuum of authority in a country that only two years ago was a police state.

Rioting and arson attacks spread on Friday to villages outside Meiktila, as mobs of Buddhists, some led by monks, continued a three-day rampage through Muslim areas. Witnesses reached by phone said security forces did little to stop the violence.

“Mobs were destroying buildings and killing people in cold blood,” said U Nyan Lynn, a former political prisoner who witnessed what he described as massacres. “Nobody stopped them — I saw hundreds of riot police there.”

News services, which had reporters in the city, said that Buddhist homes had also been set on fire and that while thousands of Muslims had fled to a stadium for safety, at least some Buddhists were also taking shelter outside their homes, in shrines.

Images from Meiktila showed entire neighborhoods burned to the ground, some with only blackened trees left standing. Lifeless legs poked from beneath rubble. And charred corpses spoke to the use of fire as a main tool of the rioting mobs.

“I can’t handle what I saw there,” said Daw Nilar Thein, a human rights activist. She described the violence as anarchic and unspeakable.

One video posted to Facebook by Radio Free Asia on Friday showed Muslim women and men cowering and shielding their heads from flying objects as they fled their attackers. Onlookers are overheard shouting, “Oooh! Look how many of them. Kill them! Kill them!”

The three days of violence have been too chaotic to establish a precise death toll — and officials reached by telephone refused to answer questions about casualties. But estimates among witnesses rose as high as 50, with one news photographer counting 15 corpses in the streets on Friday morning alone.

Some witnesses also wondered whether the violence had been organized. State news agencies in Myanmar said the fighting began on Wednesday after a dispute in a Muslim-owned gold shop. The Associated Press said the customers were Buddhist. But the severity of the violence suggests that deeply held hatred in the city, buried during five decades of military rule, is surfacing with the country’s newfound democratic freedoms.

Just as in western Myanmar, where more than 150 people have been killed in clashes between Buddhists and Muslims over the past year, those behind the violence in Meiktila tried to stop images of the destruction from getting out. On Friday, a group of Buddhist monks threatened news photographers, including one who works for The Associated Press, with a sword and homemade weapons. With a monk holding a blade to his neck, U Khin Maung Win, the A.P. photographer, handed over his camera’s memory card.

“We are trying to leave the town,” Mr. Khin Maung Win said by telephone. “They are now after journalists, too.”

The notion of Buddhists, especially monks, rampaging through Muslim neighborhoods with weapons is jarring to the outside world. But it follows the same pattern of violence seen in western Myanmar over the past year, where radical monks have helped to stir up hatred against Muslim ethnic group members who call themselves Rohingya.

Compared to the Rohingya strife, the violence in Meiktila is considered by many Burmese to be more threatening to the democratization process because it is in the country’s heartland.

After two years of civilian rule, Myanmar harbors both the optimism of opening its economy to the world and the pitfalls of ethnic and religious strife.

A visit to Myanmar on Friday by Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, underlined the country’s chances for greater prosperity after the disastrous socialist rule of previous military governments.

Mr. Schmidt told an audience in Yangon, the commercial capital, that the country was cementing its new freedoms by connecting itself to the world. “The Internet will make it impossible to go back,” he said, news agencies reported.

But the freeing of the Internet, which was heavily censored during military rule, has also helped spread hatred and intolerance in the country, especially against Muslims. Although predominantly Buddhist, Myanmar is a patchwork of ethnicities and languages, especially in cities, where it is not uncommon for a Buddhist pagoda, mosque, church and Hindu temple to be within blocks of one another.

While some signs Friday night pointed to a calming of the situation, many Muslims and Buddhists in the affected area remained wary and separated.

Muslims have been put in Meiktila’s sports stadium, where, according to one report, food and water are scarce. Photographs show frightened-looking people rushing to the stadium, clutching belongings and carrying their children and the elderly.

There have been a number of voices of restraint in Myanmar as the violence escalated. U Min Ko Naing, a prominent former political prisoner, pleaded with a crowd in Meiktila in the video posted on Friday.

“We need the full security of our lives and property,” he said. “Our children and women must not live in fear.”

A leading monk in the country, Ashin Nyanissara, also called for restraint, saying in an interview with the Democratic Voice of Burma on Thursday that “all religions should live peacefully with loving kindness and tolerance.”

Wai Moe contributed from Yangon, Myanmar.

 

[TerraN_EmpirE]

March 28, 2013
Damascus Students Killed in Mortar Strike
By ANNE BARNARD
DAMASCUS, Syria — Mortar shells hit a Damascus University outdoor cafe in the heart of the Syrian capital on Thursday, state television reported, killing at least 12 students in an attack that the government attributed to insurgents, who have struck with increasing audacity at President Bashar al-Assad’s epicenter of power in recent weeks.

The main rebel fighting group denied responsibility, asserting that it would never target a school filled with students, and suggested that Mr. Assad’s agents had carried out the attack to inflame passions against the two-year-old rebellion in Syria.

The attack at the outdoor cafe, near the civil engineering faculty building, was one of the deadliest to afflict an affluent enclave of Damascus that had been largely insulated from much of the fighting. An orange-and-yellow awning that had shielded cafe tables was drooped and riddled with holes. Pools of blood congealed on the concrete patio, littered with upended plastic chairs and packs of Gauloises and Winston cigarettes.

Mr. Assad’s government has actively sought to incubate an aura of normalcy in the center of Damascus despite the mayhem that has flared in other parts of the capital, but that effort has increasingly faltered. In recent weeks, central Umayyad Square and the nearby Tishreen presidential palace have been targeted in insurgent mortar attacks, although there had been few casualties.

Last week, a bombing at a Damascus mosque near Mr. Assad’s Baath Party headquarters killed more than 40 people including the top Sunni Muslim cleric in the country. The insurgency and the government blamed each other for that bombing.

Students interviewed after the attack on the outdoor cafe said it had been carried out as the civil engineering school was conducting an important exam. Normally, they said, at least 400 students would have been taking the exam, but increasing fears of war-related violence had led to heavy absenteeism, and the number of test takers was more like 50.

The Associated Press, quoting an unidentified Syrian official, said at least 20 people were wounded in the university attack.

State media blamed the attack on what it called terrorists, the government’s generic term for armed rebels who have been fighting to topple Mr. Assad, calling it a “barbaric massacre.”

Loaey Mikdad, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, the main rebel fighting group, denied responsibility. “This is just inhumane and we would not do it,” Mr. Mikdad said in a telephone interview.

It is certainly not the first time during the conflict that university students have been killed or wounded on campus. Two months ago more than 80 people were killed at Aleppo University — also during exams — when multiple explosions possibly caused by airstrikes or bombs struck near a dormitory complex. The Assad government and insurgents accused each other of responsibility in that attack.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war, which began as a peaceful political uprising against the Assad government in March 2011.

Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad in Damascus, Hania Mourtada in Beirut, Lebanon, Hala Droubi in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Rick Gladstone in New York.

They have What?! 0_o

March 27, 2013
A Tiger, a Truck Stop and a Pitched Legal Battle
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
GROSSE TETE, La. — The American truck stop is a promise of certain reliables: a shower, a warm meal, some small talk at the counter, a 24/7 source of diesel, beef jerky and cigarettes.

The truck stop here just west of Baton Rouge offers all those things, but as most southern Louisianians know, it has another less standard feature: a 550-pound Bengal-Siberian tiger.

Tony is only the latest in a line of tigers to live here. Thirteen cubs were born at the truck stop, and several adult tigers brought in, including a white tiger named Salena who died of pancreatic cancer in the early 2000s and is now stuffed and sitting in the Tiger Cafe atop the salad bar.

Tony, who is 12 years old, spends his days draped languidly on top of his cinder-block den or pacing around the grass in his 40-foot-by-80-foot caged enclosure on one side of the parking lot, seemingly as unriveted by the truckers as they are by him.

He also appears unmoved by his role at the center of a costly and complicated legal dispute, pitting claims of property rights against animal rights and prompting regular news reports about his impending removal. The legal fight has gone on for years. Tony remains.

“It’s become more of a liability than an asset,” said Michael Sandlin, 50, who has run the truck stop for the past 25 years. “But it’s not the money. It’s the principle.”

The Tiger Truck Stop has long been a thorn in the paw of animal rights organizations and many animal lovers generally. Web sites have been created urging Tony’s removal, letters have been written, public officials lobbied. Robert Barham, the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, described “cases of mail from every state and a host of foreign countries.” Still, he said, state veterinarians sent to inspect Tony invariably returned with reports of good health.

Matthew Liebman, a lawyer for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, based in California, acknowledged that Tony’s situation was not the worst he had ever seen, though he and others worry about the tiger’s constant exposure to exhaust and diesel fumes.

“The bottom line for us is that tigers don’t belong in truck stops,” Mr. Liebman said. “I think it reflects a pretty commodified, objectifying view of animals that we don’t support — that they are objects of entertainment, that they are gimmicks to sell gasoline.”

In 2006, the state passed a law that put limits on “big exotic cat” possession, but allowed anyone who owned such a cat at the time to be grandfathered in. Mr. Sandlin, who had kept tigers here for nearly two decades, was granted a permit for Tony. But in a 2011 trial, lawyers for the animal defense fund showed that a parish law that was on the books in 2006 prohibited keeping exotic animals and argued that he should not have been exempted from the new law. The judge agreed and ordered Mr. Sandlin’s state permit revoked.

Mr. Sandlin, who still has a federal permit, has appealed the decision, and has also filed a separate lawsuit arguing that the state law itself is unconstitutional because it is applied unevenly and leaves too much discretion to enforcement officials.

Still, he has been looking for a retirement home for Tony. This search generated its own outcry when he said he was leaning toward a wildlife park in Oklahoma owned by a man who calls himself Joe Exotic, but whose real name is Joe Schreibvogel.

Mr. Schreibvogel’s park has attracted a good deal of controversy itself and is being investigated by federal officials for 23 tiger cub deaths. But Mr. Sandlin said he believed that it provided good care, and did not trust others to know what was good for Tony.

“He’s used to the noise from the Interstate and the trucks,” Mr. Sandlin said. “He’s used to people coming up here and looking at him.”

“To tear him away from this,” he said, breaking off, then added, “I think it would be very cruel because that’s what he’s used to.”

Mr. Sandlin and his opponents see the world rather differently. The phrase “animal rights activist,” particularly if it means someone who would ban the private ownership of exotic animals, is to Mr. Sandlin a disparagement on its face. (A T-shirt for sale in the truck stop store reads “Animal Rights Activists Taste Like Chicken.”)

But he takes no offense when critics deride him as a purveyor of roadside entertainment. He considers himself an ally of the traveling circuses that occasionally stop here, and he allows the elephants to graze out back.

The idea of a tiger truck stop had been his father’s, but opening one here seemed particularly apt given that the mascot of nearby Louisiana State University is a tiger. (The university keeps its own tiger, Mike VI, in an enclosure next to the football stadium.)

So in 1988, Mr. Sandlin arrived from Houston with Toby and Rainbow, he a mostly Bengal mix, she a purebred Siberian. In 2000, after the sale of a tiger truck stop owned by Mr. Sandlin’s father in West Texas, Toby and Rainbow were joined by Tony and Salena.

In the ensuing years, the United States Department of Agriculture issued several citations to the truck stop, among other things for allowing cubs to run loose around the office. Mr. Sandlin paid a fine and sold all the tigers but Tony.

About 35 people work at the truck stop, including a sister of Michael Sandlin’s; a brother-in-law; a niece; a nephew; Mr. Sandlin’s mother, Virginia, who handles billing; and his domestic partner of 26 years, Scott Holbrook, who is the vice president of the truck stop as well as the video poker manager.

There is also a middle-aged man named Ray Jackson, who buses tables at the restaurant and who will sing on command. Seeing him outside the Tiger Cafe, Mr. Sandlin said the word and Mr. Jackson stopped immediately and sang “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross.”

“People get a kick out of that,” Mr. Sandlin said.

For now, there is the wait for a ruling. An immediate change is unlikely even then, but as a breed, the tiger truck stop’s days may be numbered.

“There are certainly some substandard roadside zoos,” Mr. Liebman said. “But this is the only truck stop tiger I know of.”

March 27, 2013
Attacks Used the Internet Against Itself to Clog Traffic
By JOHN MARKOFF and NICOLE PERLROTH
An escalating cyberattack involving an antispam group and a shadowy group of attackers has now affected millions of people across the Internet, raising the question: How can such attacks be stopped?

The short answer is: Not easily. The digital “fire hose” being wielded by the attackers to jam traffic on the Internet in recent weeks was made possible by both the best and worst aspects of the sprawling global computer network. The Internet is, by default, an open, loosely regulated platform for communication, but many of the servers that make its communication possible have been configured in such a way that they can be easily fooled.

The latest attacks, which appeared to have subsided by Wednesday, have demonstrated just how big a problem that can be.

On Tuesday, security engineers said that an anonymous group unhappy with Spamhaus, a volunteer organization that distributes a blacklist of spammers to e-mail providers, had retaliated with a cyberattack of vast proportions.

In what is called a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, the assailants harnessed a powerful botnet — a network of thousands of infected computers being controlled remotely — to send attack traffic first to Spamhaus’s Web site and later to the Internet servers used by CloudFlare, a Silicon Valley company that Spamhaus hired to deflect its onslaught.

This kind of attack works because the botnet exploits Internet routing software and fools Internet servers into responding to requests for information sent simultaneously by a large group of computers. The Internet servers that answer the requests are tricked into sending blocks of data to the victims, in this case Spamhaus and CloudFlare.

The attack was amplified because each of the servers in this case was asked to send a relatively large block of information. The data stream grew from 10 billion bits per second last week to as much as 300 billion bits per second this week, the largest such attack ever reported, causing what CloudFlare estimated to be hundreds of millions of people to experience delays and error messages across the Web.

On Wednesday, CloudFlare described the highly technical game of cat-and-mouse between itself and Spamhaus’s opponents that has played out over the course of the last nine days. After the attackers discovered that they could not disable CloudFlare, which had been hired by Spamhaus to absorb its attack traffic, they changed their strategy.

They took aim at the networks that CloudFlare connected to and began to attack the computer servers that serve as the network’s foundation. These are specialized “peering” points at which Internet networks exchange traffic. The attackers took aim at organizations like the London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Hong Kong Internet exchanges, which route regional Internet traffic and are also used by sites like Google, Facebook and Yahoo to pass traffic efficiently among one another.

Here, too, they were unable to stall the Internet completely, but they did slow it, particularly by focusing on the London exchange, known as LINX.

“From our perspective, the attacks had the largest effect on LINX,” said Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s chief executive, in a description posted on the company’s Web site on Wednesday. For a little over an hour on Saturday, he said, the traffic passing through the LINX infrastructure dropped significantly.

The attacks were episodic, stopping and starting and shifting targets over nine days through Tuesday morning. On Wednesday, Mr. Prince said that there some indications that the attackers were planning further actions, although he said he did not know if they would include DDoS attacks.

Veteran Internet engineers said the attack was made possible by a combination of defects, loopholes and sloppy configuration of Internet routing equipment. Indeed, a number of computer security specialists pointed out that the attacks would have been impossible if the world’s major Internet firms simply checked that outgoing data packets truly were being sent by their customers, rather than botnets. Unfortunately, a relatively small number of Internet companies actually perform this kind of check.

The depth of the problem is illustrated by the fact that the basic principles for stopping such attacks have been widely recognized since at least 2000. That was the year that the Network Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a voluntary group of Internet and telecommunications engineers, laid out a set of “best current practices” that Internet companies and organizations were encouraged to follow to defeat a threat known as “I.P. address spoofing,” which is the ability for an attacker to hide behind a faked address that is crucial for denial-of-service attacks.

But these basic Internet engineering “rules of the road,” laid out in a document known as BCP 38, are followed by a relatively small number of companies. “They have just not been willing to invest the effort it would take to make things so much better,” said Mark Seiden, a member of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the domain name system.

The Internet security community recently started “naming and shaming” operators of these open, misconfigured servers — called open resolvers — in an effort to shut them down. Organizations like the DNS Measurement Factory published a survey of top offenders by network, and more recently the Open Resolver Project published a full list of the 27 million open servers online.

Jeff Moss, a member of the president’s Homeland Security Advisory Council and chief security officer at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, said the campaign was slowly paying off, with thousands dropping off that list in the last few months.

“We are slowly trying to chip away at these open resolvers and let people know they really need to do the right thing,” he said.

Paradoxically, it is the very strength of the Internet — that it is composed of millions of independent computers — that also makes this type of vulnerability a continuing threat. If the attackers had started their attack from a single computer, it could be stifled, but botnets give the anonymous individuals who control them great potential power.

“Long term, it comes down to those machines being infected,” said Ulf Lindqvist, a director of research and development at the nonprofit research group SRI. “If this one was one source, you could knock that source. But when it’s coming from all over the place, and the targets have a hard time filtering what is legitimate traffic from what’s not, then it becomes extremely difficult to defend against.”

Internet engineers said they hoped that the attacks would have a silver lining. “Because the Internet is so open and so large, it takes one of these really nasty events for those configurations to be done properly,” said Dan Holden, a director of threat response at Arbor Networks, a computer security firm based in Burlington, Mass.

“This is an opportunity for us to educate network operators to reconfigure their networks,” said Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a San Francisco-based company that sells information about computer security threats to corporations and federal agencies. “We spend too much time discussing cyberwar and not enough time discussing what a peaceful Internet looks like — and that is one in which people implement BCP 38 and care about their neighbors.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 28, 2013


An earlier version of this article rendered incorrectly, in one reference, part of the name of the organization that oversees the Internet domain name system. As noted in another reference, it is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, not the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

March 27, 2013
Elite in China Face Austerity Under Xi’s Rule
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — Life for the almighty Chinese government official has come to this: car pools, domestically made wristwatches and self-serve lunch buffets.

In the four months since he was anointed China’s paramount leader and tastemaker-in-chief, President Xi Jinping has imposed a form of austerity on the nation’s famously free-spending civil servants, military brass and provincial party bosses. Warning that graft and gluttony threaten to bring down the ruling Communists, Mr. Xi has ordered an end to boozy, taxpayer-financed banquets and the bribery that often takes the form of a gift-wrapped Louis Vuitton bag.

While the power of the nation’s elite remains unchallenged, the symbols of that power are slipping from view. Gone, for now, are the freshly cut flowers and red-carpet ceremonies that used to greet visiting dignitaries. This month, military officers who arrived here for the annual National People’s Congress were instructed to share hotel rooms and bring their own toiletries.

“Car-pooling feels so good because it provides a way to bond and chat with each other while saving money and increasing efficiency,” one senior military official told the People’s Liberation Army newspaper.

Not everyone has been so embracing of the change. Last Tuesday, the country’s top disciplinary body dismissed six functionaries, including a neighborhood party chief who spent $63,000 to entertain 80 colleagues at a seaside resort, and a county official who marked the opening of new administrative offices by throwing a feast for 290 people.

The crackdown appears to be real, as far as it goes, which may not be very far. After a year of scandal that led to the toppling of a member of the Politburo, Bo Xilai, and numerous reports of widespread official corruption, Mr. Xi’s highly public campaign seems aimed at curtailing the most conspicuous displays of wealth by people in power. He has done little to tackle the concentrations of money and power in China’s state-directed economy that have allowed numerous members of the Chinese elite and their extended families to amass extravagant fortunes.

Some analysts note that even a modest first step toward reducing corruption, a proposed regulation that would require top officials to disclose their personal assets publicly, appears to be stalled, highlighting the elite’s resistance to real change.

Wu Qiang, a political science professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, expressed cynicism about the moderation campaign, saying it distracted attention from the kinds of political reform necessary to make government more accountable and transparent. “More than just restricting people’s eating habits, we need to restrain the party’s power, otherwise this is just political farce,” he said.

Even so, Mr. Xi has garnered attention and some praise for his eight-point guide for official conduct, which he issued in January. Mr. Xi warned that his administration would swat both “tigers and flies” in the anticorruption drive, which he said was vital for winning back public trust.

“If we don’t redress unhealthy tendencies and allow them to develop, it will be like putting up a wall between our party and the people, and we will lose our roots, our lifeblood and our strength,” Mr. Xi said.

Mr. Xi’s campaign even has a new catchphrase, based on his vision of gastronomic self-restraint: “Four dishes and a soup.”

So far, most victims of the frugality drive have been purveyors of the good life: high-end caterers, abalone wholesalers, five-star hotels and makers of Yellow Pavilion cigarettes, the $300-a-carton brand coveted by up-and-coming bureaucrats.

The ripple effects have reached all corners of the economy. First-class airline ticket sales have dropped by a tenth in recent months, and luxury goods dealers have reported a 20 percent to 30 percent decrease in sales. Moutai, the $600-a-bottle gut-searing grain alcohol that is an omnipresent intoxicant at official banquets, has also seen its growth slow recently.

The China Cuisine Association said that 60 percent of restaurants surveyed last month had experienced a drop in reservations, with government-sponsored banquets down by nearly a third compared with the same period last year.

Shen Danyang, a Ministry of Commerce spokesman who in normal times champions consumer spending, seemed to relish this particular slowdown. During a news conference last month, he noted that sales of shark fins had dropped more than 70 percent, and sales of edible swallow nests, the main ingredient of a $100-a-bowl delicacy, were down 40 percent.

To ensure compliance, government investigators have descended on restaurants to comb through receipts in search of large tabs suggesting abusive spending. “Even the big bosses are staying away from fancy restaurants and switching their expensive European wristwatches for Chinese brands until things calm down,” said one administrator from China’s southwestern Yunnan Province.

Those who sell cigarettes and alcohol say the drop in business has been painful. “I don’t know how much longer I can survive,” said Li Liuyuan, the owner of a liquor store close to a number of government offices in Beijing, who is going to give over half his business space to a fruit salesman.

Not surprisingly, the campaign is winning high marks from a citizenry long disgusted by the outlandish spending and other acts of arrogance. “It awakens the faith of the masses,” said Wang Yukai, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance.

In the meantime, restaurants like Xiang E Qing, a chain once popular with government employees, have been left to figure out a way to survive.

At the headquarters for China’s armed police, where two branches of the restaurant face each another across a courtyard packed with government-issued Audis, business was down by a third, restaurant executives said. The drop in revenue prompted the company to mothball one of the two restaurants, cut prices on some dishes and start offering half-size dishes to show the company’s dedication to Mr. Xi’s moderation credo.

To drive home the point, LED screens at the entrances to the restaurant’s 35 private dining rooms admonish patrons to “Order according to your needs.”

Waiters, whose salaries are partly based on commissions, have seen their salaries drop by a third, forcing many to quit. But many remaining employees say they support the new frugality. “I’d rather see our tax dollars being spent on the poor than paying for government banqueting,” Cui Fei, 24, said, standing in a nearly empty dining room one recent afternoon.

Those on the receiving end of socially obligated self-indulgence are also feeling some relief. One entrepreneur, who dines almost nightly with government officials and business associates and did not want to be identified as a result, said such invitations had dropped by half.

“The nightly drinking takes a serious toll,” the entrepreneur said, expressing no regret at forgoing the mandated Maotai toasts.

But old ways die hard.

In its investigation into continued abuses, the state-run Xinhua news agency denounced “double-dealing officials who chant frugality slogans but secretly hold extravagant banquets.”

Xinhua also discovered a new catchphrase popular among government officials: “Eat quietly, take gently and play secretly.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Shi Da contributed research.

Japan breaks China's stranglehold on rare metals with sea-mud bonanza

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Japanese scientists have found vast reserves of rare earth metals on the Pacific seabed that can be mined cheaply, a discovery that may break the Chinese monopoly on a crucial raw material needed in hi-tech industries and advanced weapons systems.
"We have found deposits that are just two to four metres from the seabed surface at higher concentrations than anybody ever thought existed, and it won't cost much at all to extract," said professor Yasuhiro Kato from Tokyo University, the leader of the team.
While America, Australia, and other countries have begun to crank up production of the seventeen rare earth elements, they have yet to find viable amounts of the heavier metals such as dysprosium, terbium, europium, and ytterbium that are most important.
China has a near total monopoly in the heavier end of the spectrum, though it is also the dominant supplier of the whole rare earth complex after driving rivals out of business in the 1990s. It still accounts for 97pc of global supply.
Beijing shocked the world when it suddenly began to restrict exports in 2009, prompting furious protests and legal complaints by both the US and the EU at the World Trade Organisation. China claimed that it was clamping down on smuggling and environmental abuse.
"Their real intention is to force foreign companies to locate plant in China. They're saying `if you want our rare earth metals, you must build your factory here, and we can then steal your technology," said professor Kato
Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo, displays a mud sample extracted from the depths of about 4,000 metres (13,123 ft) below the Pacific ocean surface where rare earth elements were found. – Reuters
The team of scientists from Japan's Agency for Marine-Earth Science and the University of Tokyo first discovered huge reserves in the mid-Pacific two years ago. These are now thought to be 1000 times all land-based deposits, some of it in French waters around Tahiti.
The latest discovery is in Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone in deep-sea mud around the island of Minami-Torishima at 5,700 meters below sea level. Although it is very deep, the deposits are in highly-concentrated nodules that can be extracted using pressurised air with minimal disturbance off the seafloor and no need for the leaching.

Professor Kato said exploration will continue for another two years before scaling up towards production. Over 50pc of the metal in the deposit is the heavier end of the spectrum, twice the level of China's key mines and without the radioactive by-product thorium that makes the metals so hard to mine.
Japan consumes half the world's rare earth metals in its cars, electronics, and environmental industries, and has accused China of withholding supplies as a pressure tool. The country has been scrambling to find other sources under its "Strategy for Ensuring Stable Supplies of Rare Metals", but a joint venture in Vietnam that once looked promising has so far yielded only lighter rare earths.
Professor Kato said a single ship drilling in the target zone at Minami-Torishima could supply Japan's needs for a year, breaking strategic dependence at minimal cost. "We don't need to mine it intensively. All we need is enough to force China to lower its prices."
Rare earth metals are the salt of life for the hi-tech revolution, used in iPads, plasma TVs, lasers, and catalytic converters for car engines. Dysprosium is crucial because it is the strongest magnet in the world but also remains stable at very high temperatures. Neodymium is used in hybrid cars, and terbium cuts power use for low-energy lightbulbs by 40pc.
The metals are also used in precision-guided weapons, missiles such as the Hellfire, military avionics, satellites, and night-vision equipment. America's M1A2 Abrams tank and the Aegis Spy-1 radar both rely on samarium.
Washington was caught badly off guard when China started restricting supplies. The US defence and energy departments have now made it an urgent priority to find other sources, but warn that it may take up to a decade to rebuild the supply-chain. The US Magnetic Materials Association said America had drifted into a "silent crisis".
Most rare earth metals are not that rare but they are hard to find in viable concentrations, and the metallurgy is complex.
The new discovery is the second time this month that Japan has announced a major find on the sea floor. It announced a break-through in extracting gas from methane hydrates under the ocean last week, a technology that is likely to prove costly but could meet Japan's gas needs for a century.

Japan's New Rare Earth Discovery: That's China's Monopoly Entirely Blown
Forbes

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Japan has just announced another vast discovery of rare earth bearing materials on the ocean floor. This does rather put an end to any possibility of China having a long term lock on the supply of these vital elements.

Japan is celebrating the find of an “astronomically” high level of rare earth deposits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, a discovery which will further undermine China’s failing attempts to control the global supply of the substances.

You might recall a couple of years back there was a similar Japanese claim. There it was that the plumes from underwater volcanoes were rich in rare earths. This makes good sense as rare earths are constituents of pegmatites, pegmatites come from volcanoes. Thus, given that these are underwater volcanoes, instead of the REs becoming part of the rock they’re floating off through the water as dust. Further, the floating through the water part does some of the separation of the REs from the other components (as surface water does some of the sorting of alluvial deposits as they weather out of the same types of rocks) so there were areas of sediment that were RE rich.

This finding is a little different. Almost certainly from the same general source: but now the RE rich material is in nodules just under the silt of the ocean floor. This makes it all rather easier to raise from 5,000 metres down.

There is another issue here. Rare earths are usually divided into two sets the lights and the heavies. The new land based mines (Molycorp, Lynas and so on) don’t have much of the heavies in them. So despite our having more REs to play with, China still pretty much has a lock on the heavy ones, the terbium, dysprosium and europium, that we would really like to have more of. This Japanese find is highly enriched in the heavies. Which rather neatly seems to solve that problem.

This isn’t something that’s going to go into production this year of course. I’d be amazed if it does so this decade in fact. But it does lift the possibility of China retaining a production monopoly.

For those who have forgoten Here is a refresure

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Rare Earth are Critical for complex Electronics but they are also Eviromentaly distructive too mine if done inproperly. A few years back the PRC had A unoffical Embargo of Japanese, American and European Exports of Rare Earths. The West viewed such a move as a attempt to strangle Electronic production out side of china. Even if the Action was not the Chinese Goverment. A lot of people particularly the Japanese took it as a Economic Attack ( and not the last if you consider the Chinese Riots and boycott of Japanese Buisnesses revolving around the Senkaku situation.) Since then a lot of work as been aimed to reduce, Recycle and find alternitive sources of Rare Earths.
Basicly The Embargo made the market feel that the PRC was a unstable Supplyer so they reacted. When Challenged Inovate.

 

[AssassinsMace]

More manipulation from the media. What happened to Vietnam? I heard they could produce rare earths and was going to replace China as a supplier. It's the processing that's expensive and health hazardous that makes rare earths rare. They don't tell you China can flood the market with rare earths after countries like Japan spend so much getting their own supplies thus making it a big waste of money spent by Japan.

 

[TerraN_EmpirE]

but at what price? This is the same county that has 300 pigs floating in a major citys river and two major citys suffering massive smog issues. Add to that that last year China dropped production by 20%. to be frank 97% of the market is a bit much and competion is all ways good. particularly when dealling in high tech.

 

[joshuatree]

I have no problems with other countries increasing the supply. It's only 97% from China because other nations don't want to deal with the toxic waste byproducts from rare earth production. It costs more when more pollution control and mitigation measures are in place. When other nations produce more of the REs themselves, less toxic pollution in China. Also means less cheap attacks that only China is a gross polluter. The Chinese populace is also starting to realize and take action on the effects of pollution. Every industrialized nation went through their phases, China simply went through the early stages in a very compressed time frame.

 

[AssassinsMace]

but at what price? This is the same county that has 300 pigs floating in a major citys river and two major citys suffering massive smog issues. Add to that that last year China dropped production by 20%. to be frank 97% of the market is a bit much and competion is all ways good. particularly when dealling in high tech.

Yeah and that's why China could care less if Japan or Vietnam or the US produces rare earths? The article acts as if Japan has outsmarted China by finding rare earth sources. Rare earths aren't rare. Are all the rare earth elements all in China and that's why the media says China holds a monopoly? Before, rare earths were one of those things the US along with other high tech tried to prevent China from obtaining. How does that work if the way the media paints it China holds a monopoly today? Again because rare earths are everywhere so big deal Japan found a source. Hence why the story is a big manipulation. It's the processing that's difficult and expensive. The West and Japan have no WTO grounds to complain simply on the pollution aspects alone. The Chinese have to risk their lives so they can have cheaply priced rare earth elements. That's why you don't hear that angle because it's a legitimate one in favor of China. That's why the article and that angle given to the public is pure propaganda. Like I've said before in this forum, this is an outright case of outsourcing. China is doing a favor for all those laborers from developed countries who complain about outsourcing who want their jobs back so they can get paid big hazard pay bucks processing rare earths. The irony is the US was trying to do the very same thing to China back when that Americans are complaining about now.

 

[B.I.B.]

Or maybe it's a complete fabrication. Remember the incident in the Himilayas where European tourists happen to catch Chinese soldiers sniping at escaping refugees? They were able to catch the soldier from a far distance firing his rifle and then turn the camera faster than a bullet and catch th.

It was a film crew making a doco or something who claimed to have witnessed the whole thing.There were quite a few cameras recording the event so it would be easy enough to have a camera focussed on the fleeing group and others on the chasing group and then join the clips together

 

[AssassinsMace]

Yeah if they were a doc crew it was because they were lying and setting it up. They also had footage of one of the refugees hiding in one of their tents while the Chinese were outside searching the camp but somehow they didn't search that tent. Also why just shoot one? There were a few others with the one that got "shot." And all they did was leave their friend behind walking away not running like nothing happened. If it were a doc crew, why haven't we seen this documentary? If it were real it would've gotten more publicity yet it didn't. For a media that's so quick to judge China, they didn't even squeeze everything for all it's worth.