cryptogon.com

Fairytale turns sour

The couple’s glittering religious wedding drew crowds of thousands to the Mediterranean principality on Saturday and the guest list included a host of heads of state, European royals and stars of the fashion and sports world.

But sources cited by Le Journal du Dimanche said the former Charlene Wittstock, 33, tried to take refuge in her country’s embassy in Paris when she went to the French capital in May to try on her wedding dress.

Instead palace officials confiscated her passport and persuaded her to take part in the weekend’s nuptials.

Later that month she also tried to escape during the Monaco formula one grand prix, they alleged.

“The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths. Just one square kilometer (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption,” said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo.

The discovery was made by a team led by Kato and including researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

They found the minerals in sea mud extracted from depths of 3,500 to 6,000 meters (11,500-20,000 ft) below the ocean surface at 78 locations. One-third of the sites yielded rich contents of rare earths and the metal yttrium, Kato said in a telephone interview.

The deposits are in international waters in an area stretching east and west of Hawaii, as well as east of Tahiti in French Polynesia, he said.

He estimated rare earths contained in the deposits amounted to 80 to 100 billion metric tons, compared to global reserves currently confirmed by the U.S. Geological Survey of just 110 million tonnes that have been found mainly in China, Russia and other former Soviet countries, and the United States.

But the two young men wound up in the same place a half-world away — as U.S. Marines stationed on the Japanese island of Okinawa.

And in a tragic coincidence, Liburd, 22, and Daniels McPherson, 21, both met their deaths on that Pacific island under mysterious circumstances about two months ago and within weeks of each other.

Liburd’s family was told he drowned on May 14, while swimming off a beach near his barracks.

Daniels McPherson’s father said the Marine Corps told him the former defensive end for the Curtis High School football team doused himself with gasoline on May 1 and set himself ablaze. He died 19 days later in a burn unit in San Antonio, Texas, where he had been transferred.

On a day that activists had dubbed “make or break” for the international coalition of boats seeking to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, the Canadian ship Tahrir burst out of Agios Nikolaos port in Crete at 6pm local time after supporters blocked the coastguard with manned kayaks.

“We have left port [and] are full steam ahead – coastguard boat about 5-10 [minutes] behind us,” announced passengers on the ship’s official Twitter feed as they raced towards international waters. But the faster coastguard boat caught up with the Tahrir and prevented it from going any further.

“Our boat has just been illegally boarded by armed members of the Greek coastguard and commandeered against our will,” Dylan Penner, a member of Tahrir steering committee, told the Guardian by phone from the ship’s deck. “This is conclusive evidence that Israel’s unlawful siege on Gaza has now been extended to Greece.”

The captain of a US ship, The Audacity of Hope, was arrested after a similar failed attempt to flee the port in Athens last week.

The export price may climb to $810 per metric ton by Dec. 31, according to a median forecast of six millers, exporters and traders today and yesterday, who commented after Pheu Thai won a majority in yesterday’s contest. “We are ready to implement all policies we have announced,” Yingluck Shinawatra, who will become Thailand’s first female prime minister, said yesterday.

Costlier rice from Thailand, which accounts for about 30 percent of worldwide shipments, may increase global food costs while making supplies from rival Vietnam more competitive. A Bloomberg survey last month, conducted during the campaign, suggested a gain to $750 per ton if Pheu Thai were to win.

“It isn’t only Thai prices that will go up, the rest of the world will have to follow,” Mamadou Ciss, chief executive officer of Hermes Investments Pte, said from Geneva. The price may jump $100 within two months and peak at $700, said Ciss, who correctly predicted in 2006 that prices would double.

Some schools on the peninsula are already using textbooks displayed on notebook computers, but when it comes to choice of tablets, how likely is it that the government will choose the iPad or any other tablet other than those manufactured by South Korean electronics giant Samsung, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab or some larger variant of it?

Officials overseeing the no-fly zone enforced by Nato over Libya said the Sudanese move north of border had not encountered resistance from troops loyal to Col Muammar Gaddafi.

Since the February uprising against his regime, the Libyan leader’s forces have been concentrated around Tripoli, the capital; Sirte, the eastern town that is Col Gaddafi’s birthplace and Sebha, the desert outpost where the dictator grew up.

That’s the word from authors of two new studies, presented Sunday at a meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego.

“Data from this and other prospective studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas as healthy alternatives may be ill-advised” Dr. Helen Hazuda, professor of medicine at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, said in a written statement. “They may be free of calories, but not of consequences.”

Consequences like weight gain.

For one study, researchers at the center followed 474 diet soda drinkers, 65 to 74 years of age, for almost 10 years. They found that diet soda drinkers’ waists grew 70 percent more than non-drinkers. Specifically, drinking two or more diet sodas a day busted belt sizes five times more than people who avoided the stuff entirely.

It was honestly music to my ears. After a year of researching the Patriot Act’s breadth and ability to access data held within protected EU boundaries, Microsoft finally and openly admitted it.

The question put forward:

“Can Microsoft guarantee that EU-stored data, held in EU based datacenters, will not leave the European Economic Area under any circumstances — even under a request by the Patriot Act?”

Frazer explained that, as Microsoft is a U.S.-headquartered company, it has to comply with local laws (the United States, as well as any other location where one of its subsidiary companies is based).

Though he said that “customers would be informed wherever possible”, he could not provide a guarantee that they would be informed — if a gagging order, injunction or U.S. National Security Letter permits it.

He said: “Microsoft cannot provide those guarantees. Neither can any other company“.

While it has been suspected for some time, this is the first time Microsoft, or any other company, has given this answer.