Beijing is drawing up plans to prohibit or restrict exports of rare earth metals that are produced only in China and play a vital role in cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons.
A draft report by Chinas Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.
#1
Imagine that, a country making sure they have what THEY need first, then exporting the surplus. Making sure THEIR people have jobs before sending the work to another country.
Spin this all you want, but a little lot of this is what's needed here, to hell with the WTO and bullshit 'world economy'.
One week old, though I doubt the situation has changed much since. MMM alert.
Egyptian Muslim leaders are caught in a storm of controversy after a human rights group confronted them about a fatwa (Islamic edict) that stated the building of a church is "a sin against God."
Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, the highest official of religious law in Egypt, and the justice minister have issued an investigation of the jurists who issued the fatwa, according to Assyrian International News Agency.
The controversy began when the president of the Egyptian Union Human Rights Organization, Dr. Naguib Gabraeel, asked the Fatwa Council about a statement found in a textbook at Cairo University on inheritance and execution of wills.
Students, both Muslims and Christians, were taught "it is forbidden for a person to donate money for what would lead to sin, such as donating in his will money towards build[ing] a church, a nightclub, a gambling casino, towards promoting the alcohol industry or for building a barn for rearing pigs, cats or dogs."
Gabraeel asked the council what the sharia (Islamic law) position on the statement found in the textbook is. He asked if it is forbidden for a Muslim to donate money to build a church or a monk's quarters even if it is in the name of God and Christianity, which is recognized by the country's constitution. The Egyptian constitution claims to respect religious freedom. He also noted that wealthy Coptic Christian businessmen have donated towards the building of mosques.
The council replied by affirming the law found in the textbook and issuing a fatwa on it.
Included in the fatwa is an explanation on why it is a "sin" to build a church. According to the fatwa, Christians believe salvation is achieved through belief in Jesus as Lord while Muslims don't. Muslims believe that Issa [Jesus in Arabic] "is a slave of Allan and His Messenger, and that Allan is one."
The Islamic edict said God did not have a son and that Christianity deviated from absolute monotheism. Therefore, a Muslim is forbidden to donate funds towards a building that does not worship Allan alone.
The author of the textbook, Mohammed el-Maghrabbi, said it is sinful for even a Christian to devote money in his will towards building a church because it would be considered in Islam as separation from God. In other words, it is illegal for even non-Muslims to offer money in their will towards building a church or synagogue.
The fatwa has upset many people, especially Coptic Christians, for categorizing churches with nightclubs, casinos, alcohol, and places to raise animals considered unclean by Islam.
After receiving the shocking response by the council, Gabraeel and a delegation from his human rights group visited the Grand Sheikh Mohamed Sayed Tantawi of the famous Al-Azhar University, a chief Sunni Islamic learning center in the world.
Tantawi contradicted the council and said "sharia does not prevent Muslims from donating to the building of a church, as it is his free money." He also went on to say sharia law does not interfere with other faiths "because religion, faith and what a person believes in is a relationship between him and his God."
Immediately after Tantawi's statements were publicized, there was a backlash from the Muslim community and he courageously revoked his statements less than 24 hours after the visit by the human rights delegation. Tantawi claimed the delegation had misunderstood him, even though everything he said was recorded and sent to media outlets and uploaded on Coptic advocacy web sites.
Egyptian Christians see the controversy as explicitly revealing how religious authorities and the government truly feel about the building of churches. In Egypt, Christians are not allowed to construct or fix churches unless they receive a permit from governors. But usually authorities make excuses and circumvent giving a direct answer to requests for building permits. At the end, however, nearly all requests for permits in Egypt are denied.
In contrast, there are no such building permits necessary for the construction or fixing of mosques.
#1
This is gonna be good, Islam caught in a feedback loop.
Churches are evil,
Mosques are churches,
Thus Mosques are Fvil.
Moron central.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
09/09/2009 19:55 Comments ||
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#2
Standard issue sharia: no new construction or renovation of churches allowed. I suppose they made the occasional exception for Copts because there are so many of them.
Posted by: James ||
09/09/2009 21:27 Comments ||
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Hat tip Galrahn. Interesting that Nigeria feels the need for a navy that can project police and naval presence into the Gulf of Guinea, and that they're doing it by buying and crewing a lot of smaller warships. The ships are the easy part; the hard part is training the supporting the crews.
The Nigerian Navy is seeking the Federal Government's approval to add to its inventory about 49 different types of warships and 42 combat helicopters to enable it police the nation's territorial waterways, including the Gulf of Guinea effectively.
To enable the Federal Government meet up with this target, the Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Ishaya Ibrahim stated that the Federal Government, through the Ministry of Defence (MOD), set aside a percentage of the GDP for Maritime Security Equipment Development Fund.Ibrahim stressed that government should also establish Maritime Cabotage Bank to make available maritime-related investment funding.
This request is contained in a communiqué issued at the end of the Chief of Naval Staff Annual Conference (CONSAC) held in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State Capital.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Steve White ||
09/09/2009 00:00 ||
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#1
(URGENT BUSINESS ASSISTANCE STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL)
Good Day!
The Nigerian Navy is adding to its inventory about 49 different types of warships and 42 combat helicopters. I am writting you this letter to ask for your support and co-operation to carry out this transaction. We discovered some abandoned warships and helicopters lying about. Since this development,we have advertised for any close relation to these ships to come forward to claim them,but nobody came yet to apply for the claim.
To this effect,i and other official in my department have decided to look for a trusted foriegn partner who can stand in as the next of kin of the ships as we cannot do it only ourselves and claim them. We need a foreign partner to apply for the claim on our behalf because of the fact that the ships was a foreign and we don't want this ships to go into the treasury as unclaimed.
You have nothing to worry about and we have agreed that 30% of this ships will be for you,while 10%will be for any expenses incured on both sides wihile 60% will be for my colleagues and me. If you are willing to help us,please indicate by replying this letter....
Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said his government is in "very advanced" talks to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets from France's Dassault Aviation SA.
Lula, in an interview with Radio France Internationale, said he will discuss Dassault's warplanes with Defense Minister Nelson Jobim in the next few days. Dassault is competing against Boeing Co., which produces the F-18 Super Hornet, and Saab AB, which makes the Gripen plane, to win the order from Brazil.
The Rafale is considerably behind the F-18E in performance (I've read) but perhaps Brazil doesn't need the ultimate airplane. The Rafale can fly from the Sao Paolo which (I don't believe) the F-18 can do, so perhaps that's another issue driving this.
"The discussions are advancing well," Lula told the radio station during an interview in Brasilia today. "We are on the same path as the French. Our discussions are very advanced and I think we'll come to a good conclusion."
Brazil last October chose Dassault, Saab and Boeing as the three finalists to help the country build and modernize its military. Brazil's Senate last week approved a bank loan of 6.1 billion euros ($3.3 billion) that the government will use to build five submarines and 50 helicopters in partnership with France.
Giving the French an inside track ...
Brazil is seeking the transfer of the technology required to build portions of the aircraft, Lula said.
"There are other competitors but we're in very deep talks with the French," Lula said today. "The competitor willing to share technology will have a major advantage."
Brazil already makes some simpler combat and commercial aircraft. This would be a big deal and would advance them considerably.
Lula said he couldn't say whether a deal would be signed during French President Nicolas Sarkozy's visit to Brazil this week.
Posted by: Steve White ||
09/09/2009 00:00 ||
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...Little bit of background here: the original F-18A was designed to - in theory - operate off the old Essex class carriers, of which there were two or three still operating when the F-18 design was laid down. The Sao Paulo is only about three feet shorter than an Essex, so she would have no real problems landing and recovering a Hornet. Where the difficulties would arise would be in storing and maintaining the beasts. Sao Paulo would have to be almost completely rebuilt, most notably with a new flight deck and catapults, and even then her aircraft servicing facilities and magazine might not be sufficient to be able to operate a usable number of Hornets.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
09/09/2009 0:16 Comments ||
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#2
The most interesting thing about the deal is that the French are apparently going to buy an as-yet unbuilt Brazilian transport plane that's in competition with the A-400M.
(I'd have split the order between the Gripen and the Hornet, myself, but apparently they're getting some sort of package deal, the details of which I can't even guess at).
(Bloomberg) -- The dollar dropped to the lowest level this year against the euro as the prospects for economic recovery spurred a rally in global stocks, helping to push gold above $1,000 an ounce and oil to more than $71 a barrel.
The decline pushed the trade-weighted U.S. Dollar Index down by the most since July as the greenback became the cheapest funding currency in the London interbank lending market. The Brazilian real and South African rand rallied more than 25 percent this year as investors sought higher-yielding assets in emerging-market nations.
"You are seeing a reversal of flight to quality as investors start to put money into higher-yielding assets," said Warren Naphtal, who oversees $915 million in currency assets as chief investment officer in Weston, Massachusetts, at P/E Investments, an asset-management company. "The U.S. dollar is a good source for cheap funding."
The dollar depreciated 1.3 percent to $1.4514 per euro at 2:32 p.m. in New York, from $1.4332 yesterday, after reaching $1.4535, the weakest since Dec. 18. The U.S. currency dropped 1 percent to 92.16 yen, from 93.08. The euro advanced 0.3 percent to 133.75 yen, from 133.39.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/09/2009 00:00 ||
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The Euro recovery can be linked to the transfer of TARP money to bailing out the European financial institutions, freeing the EU governments from 'needing' to do it themselves with inflated Euros.
#3
ION CHINESE MILITARY FORUM > AMERICA'S MAJOR CITIES IN DECLINE/AMER'S MOST STRESSFUL CITIES; + FREEREPUBLIC/TOPIX > TEMPORARY HIRINGS SHOW ECONOMIC RECOVERY NOT IMMINENT.
Wehell, IIRC POTUS Bammer's Admin claims the various stimilus packages = so-called "PORKULUS" SAVED THE US ECONOMY???
(Bloomberg) -- U.S. companies are still reducing the ranks of temporary workers, showing that any rebound in overall employment won't happen soon, according to William Hester, an analyst at Hussman Econometrics.
The CHART OF THE DAY compares the number of temporary employees with nonfarm payrolls since 1990, according to data compiled by the Labor Department. Increases in the number of temporary jobs in 1991 and 2003 preceded similar recoveries in payrolls, as the chart illustrates.
"Temporary hiring is a reliable leading indicator," Hester wrote yesterday in a report that featured a similar chart. Last month's decline in these jobs was "one of the most discouraging data points" in the latest employment report, he added.
The number of temporary workers dropped by 65,000 in August to 1.74 million. The total has fallen each month since January 2008, a month after the current U.S. recession officially started. During the 20-month streak, temporary jobs have declined by 33 percent.
Further losses "would probably push back any recovery in nonfarm payrolls," Hester wrote. "Temporary hiring will almost surely bottom prior to overall employment."
Posted by: Fred ||
09/09/2009 00:00 ||
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It would be interesting to track employment rate (full and part time separately) rather than unemployment rate, and compare it with the rates during the Depression. Zero has a lot of room for further damage, I suspect.
#2
Since we have basically 'run off' several million jobs, what makes them think any of these people will be going back to work?
I'm holding out for one of those 'green jobs', myself. I hear you get 200K a year, don't have to do anything, and it comes with free public option health insurance.
fwiw, comparisons between now and decades ago suffer from the fact that the demographics are different (back in the 50s and early 60s, labor force participation for married women was pretty low) and the structural changes (manufacturing vs service vs finance) are substantial and the educational requirements are far different, etc.
Posted by: lord garth ||
09/09/2009 10:41 Comments ||
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#4
Now now, a negative proof is reactionary and racist.
Guy I've known for a long time has decided his funemployment benefits pay for his rent and food, so why work? Another probably shows up to job interviews completely hung over, on purpose.
#2
Absolutely moronic. And today China announced they are going to destroy 25 square miles of Mongolian habitat to install a solar power station.
We don't need to dump nuclear fuel. You build a reprocessing plant on the same site with the conventional reactors. You reprocess the fuel and re-use it. Once fuel comes in to the plant complex, it never leaves. What waste does result is about 5% of the volume and decays to save levels in 1% of the time of current "spent" fuel.
#4
I gather that much of the problem is because the industry insists on using the Palo Verde model, a behemoth of a plant that produces a massive amount of energy and waste, instead of newer, somewhat smaller designs that produce less energy, but very little waste.
China, for example, is planning to build hundreds of pebble bed reactors. Basically grapefruit sized balls of ceramic with the nuclear material in them, producing a fixed amount of heat, which directly heats inert gas that turns turbines.
They produce no plutonium, and when the balls are used up, they are dropped into a long term storage cave directly beneath the reactor, where they no longer produce enough heat to matter, and no dangerous chemicals. The building is removed, and concrete is poured into the cave. Ta-da. Radioactivity levels even 60 ft. below ground are near background.
#6
Not only is China buying the AP1000 plants, they are going to reprocess the fuel. India is going to start building re-processing reactors too. Japan has had them for years. Japans reactors burn plutonium. It is a different isotope of plutonium that the one that makes the best weapons, though.
See "Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste", Scientific American, December 2005. You can Google for it and find a PDF copy of the article on the web for download.
Also, you can use the fast neutron reactors to transmutate things like long-lived medical waste into isotopes that decay much more rapidly. But even producing plutonium is not a bad if you colocate the processing facility on the same site as the conventional reactors. The plutonium never leaves the site so you aren't transporting stuff around.
#7
And the Chinese are building them for %1500/kw while, if we can build them at all, costs us 3 times more. That's a serious competitive advantage that flows through their entire economy.
Even the Japanese are building nukes for less than $2000/kw while in the US environmentists, bureaucrats, and NIMBYs force extremely wasteful solutions that is straining the electrical grid to regional failure.
Posted by: ed ||
09/09/2009 16:12 Comments ||
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#8
$1500/kw
Posted by: ed ||
09/09/2009 16:13 Comments ||
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For the largest uranium consumer country, the United States, the situation is even more amazing. The internal uranium production declined from a peak of 17,000 tons per year around 1980 to a production of 1654 tons in 2007 and 1430 tons in 2008. Last year's amount does not even allow to operate 10% of their nuclear power plants. More interesting questions should come up when one considers that currently about 50% of the nuclear reactors in the USA are operated with excess military uranium stockpiles from Russia. As the bilateral contract between the USA and Russia ends in 2013 and as Russia has currently very ambitious plans to enlarge their own nuclear energy sector, it is unlikely that Russia will renew this contract in 2013.
Posted by: Oscar ||
09/09/2009 6:25 Comments ||
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#2
one major problem here is that the device uses lots of human (or I guess animal) hair
hair wears out so you would have to replace the human hair in each solar cell every year or so
yuk
Posted by: lord garth ||
09/09/2009 8:59 Comments ||
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#3
Snap! Obviously, the hydrinos in the melanin interact with the dark energy field that is a major factor in levitation techniques commonly used in that part of the world. It's great to see the young folk showing a deep understanding of how 21st century green science is best practiced.
#4
Oh god if things are not bad enough. Now tree huggers will be crying about how poor women and kid are exploited for their hair and, like owning a prius, women in the US will shave their head as a statement. But on the bright side it just might get the granola's to shave!
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
09/09/2009 10:57 Comments ||
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#5
brilliant!! way to go kid, Nepal needs this kind of innovation, as do many other very poor countries, Ie Mindanao,Honduras,sierra leone,etc, etc. cuts the big man (energy conglomerates) out of the picture, poor babies......
#6
Another problem is Muz-limbs consider cutting hair to be haram (see tales of Taliban blowing up barbershops). This eliminates them from another 21st century technology.
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
09/09/2009 11:25 Comments ||
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#7
good to keep those talibs in the stone age where they like it best.
#10
Let's see. The solar constant is about 120 W/m^2; that panel is maybe 1/4 of a square meter. He claims 18 W output, and the record efficiency is claimed to be 43%. Even if I'm generous and say the panel is 1/3 of a square meter, he's still claiming record efficiencies. I'm not sure what the mechanism is supposed to be for turning photons into moving electrons... he cites Hawking but I haven't seen that book.
Posted by: James ||
09/09/2009 21:45 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
(Bloomberg) -- The dollar dropped to the lowest level this year against the euro as the prospects for economic recovery spurred a rally in global stocks, helping to push gold above $1,000 an ounce and oil to more than $71 a barrel.
