China Expands Export Quotas of Rare Earth Metals
May 20th, 2011Via: BBC:
China has expanded export quotas for rare earth metals, further tightening its grip on the minerals used in a number of high-tech electronics.
From Friday, iron alloys containing more than 10% of rare earths will fall under the export quota, the commerce ministry said in a statement.
Rare earths are a collection of 17 chemical elements in the periodic table.
World manufacturers rely heavily on China for these minerals.
Rare earth metals are used in high tech goods such as mobile phone handsets, hybrid car batteries, wind turbines and weapons guidance systems .
China had already cut exports by about 35% in the first half of 2011 driving up prices to record levels. It produces around 97% of rare earth metal supply.
Homes Saved from Flooding Mississippi River with DIY Levees
May 20th, 2011Must see pictures.
Via: Daily Mail:
We’ve all undertaken home improvements but these residents in flood-stricken Mississippi have had to embark on major construction projects just to protect their houses and livelihoods.
These homes in Vicksburg are all situated along the Yazoo River, a tributary of the overflowing Mississippi River, and their owners have surrounded themselves with tons of earth and sand.
With questions over whether the main levees that protect the area from floods would hold, these farmers took no chances and have so far saved their homes and crops from destruction.
Obama’s Speech a ‘Historic Shift’ on Israel and Palestine? No.
May 19th, 2011There’s so much fur flying and dummy spitting this morning, you’d think that something noteworthy actually happened.
Via: Christian Science Monitor:
If you’ve read the lead story in The New York Times on President Barack Obama’s Middle East speech this afternoon, you’re probably under the impression that the president has taken a bold new step to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The first paragraph of the story, filed from Washington, is quite dramatic. Obama, “seeking to harness the seismic political change unfolding in the Arab world… publicly called for the borders prevailing before the 1967 Israeli-Arab war to be the baseline for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the first time an American president has explicitly taken that position.”
The only problem is, it’s not much of a shift at all.The key word in that opening paragraph is that word “explicitly.” What it means in this context, is that he said something that multiple presidents have said before him, but with slightly weaker language. What did he say? “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”
That an eventual settlement would be based around borders from before the 1967 war, with land “swaps” of some kind to reflect the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has been a central assumption behind the peace process kicked off under President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s and pursued with subtle variations by presidents George W. Bush and Obama after him. Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters, amid a push to restart peace talks that failed, that a solution could be found that “reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders.”
Sound familiar?
What wasn’t in Obama’s speech was anything new on how you get from here (complete dysfunction – it’s a “process” by convention only at this point) to there (peace). He made no mention of the settlement freeze his administration had pushed for – and failed to get – in return for restored talks with the Palestinian leadership. He also sought to shoot down Palestinian efforts to win recognition for an independent state at the United Nations, something the Palestinian Authority has been gearing up for in September.
Judgment Day Is Fabulous for Business
May 19th, 2011Comedy gold.
Via: San Jose Mercury News:
Judgment Day is fabulous for business.
Just ask Family Radio, the evangelical nonprofit that has plastered billboards and driven vans across the Bay Area and the world proclaiming the end of the world will be Saturday. The Oakland-based nonprofit has raised more than $100 million over the past seven years, according to tax returns. It owns 66 radio stations across the globe and was worth more than $72 million in 2009.
As The End nears, donations have spiked, a board member says, enabling Family Radio to spend millions of dollars on more than 5,000 billboards.
But it is not about money, say President Harold Camping and board member Tom Evans. It’s about spreading the Gospel and saving as many people as possible.
What will the nonprofit do with the millions of dollars left in the bank Saturday?
“When Judgment Day comes, if someone is a billionaire, how will they take their money with them?” said Camping, 89, during a phone interview Tuesday. “If we have any money left, and we will because we have to pay bills up to the very end “… it will all be destroyed because the world will be in a day of judgment.
“The money is not important at all. It’s a vehicle to spread the judgment and a vehicle of the Lord.”
Bill Clinton Calls for Internet Ministry of Truth
May 19th, 2011Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed
Via: Politico:
Bill Clinton doesn’t like all the misinformation and rumors floating on the Internet. And he thinks the United Nations or the U.S. government should create an agency to do something about it.
“It would be a legitimate thing to do,” Clinton said in an interview airing Friday on CNBC.
Researchers Cancel SCADA Hacking Presentation After Department of Homeland Security’s ICS-CERT and Siemens Raise Concerns
May 19th, 2011Via: NSS Labs Press Release:
Dillon Beresford, security researcher at NSS Labs, who was scheduled to present at TakedownCon 2011 on SCADA vulnerabilities chose to withdraw his presentation at the 11th hour after collaborative discussions with ICS-CERT and Siemens regarding the serious consequences it may have to human lives and the world at large. The vulnerabilities and PoC exploit code were provided to ICS-CERT and Siemens, and has been verified.
TSA Backscatter Radiation Safety Tests Were Rigged
May 19th, 2011Via: Natural News:
The document is heavily redacted with red stamps over the words and figures. In every case the electric current used which correlates one to one with X-ray dose has been specifically redacted. Thus there is no way to repeat any of these measurements. While the report purports to present the results of objective testing, in fact the JHU APL personnel, who are unnamed anywhere in the document either as experimenters or as authors, were not provided with a machine by Rapiscan. Instead they were invited to the manufacturing site to observe a mock-up of components (spare parts) that were said to be similar to those that are parts of the Rapiscan system. The tests were performed by the manufacturer using the manufacturer’s questionable test procedures.
Research Credit: Pookie
Air Force Wants to Track You Forever With a Single Camera Click
May 19th, 2011Via: Wired:
Don’t bother with the iris scanner or the fingerprinting machine. Leave the satellite-enabled locators and tell-tale scents back on the base, military manhunters. If an Air Force plan works out as planned, all you’ll need to track your prey is a single camera, snapping a few seconds of footage from far, far away.
Huntsville, Alabama’s Photon-X, Inc. recently received an Air Force contract to develop such a camera. With one snap, the company claims, its sensor can build a three-dimensional image of a person’s face: the cornerstone of a distinctive “bio-signature” that can be used to track that person anywhere. With a few frames more, the device can capture that face’s unique facial muscle motions, and turn those movements into a “behaviormetric” profile that’s even more accurate.
Hedge Farm: The Doomsday Food Price Scenario Turning Hedge Fund Managers Into Survivalists
May 19th, 2011Via: New York Observer:
This is happening in part because investors see their play as a hedge against hyperinflation. While the rest of the world uses the current calculation of the Consumer Price Index as a proxy for the cost of goods, some farmland investors are using a different equation, one from 1980. These investors assert inflation should be calculated the way it was before the Boskin Commission’s 1996 reworking of the CPI formula-in which case, it would be much, much higher.
“The CPI supposedly today is something like 1.5 percent,” says the hedge fund manager. “We think the actual rate of inflation is something closer to 6 or 7 percent on an annual basis. It’s also not about what it’s been over the last 10 years; it’s about what it’s going to be over the next 10 years.”
U.S. Centers for Disease Control Advises: Prepare for Zombie Apocalypse
May 19th, 2011Has the site been hacked, or did they actually post this?
Via: CDC:
There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.
