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US espionage in Oslo angers Norway
According to Norway’s TV2 channel, the US Embassy has employed up to 20 Surveillance Detection Unit (SDU) agents, including police officers, to spy on Norwegians since 2000.
The SDU agents are reported to have been tasked with monitoring Norwegian citizens whom the US Embassy accuses of being ‘suspicious’. The monitoring took place from the sixth floor Handelsbygningen building which is several hundred meters west of the embassy.
According to TV2, the detailed and sensitive information about the so called ‘suspicious’ people would be handed to embassy staff who would then store it on the worldwide anti-terror Security Incident Management Analytics System database a.k.a. SIMAS.
The Norwegian foreign ministry held a meeting with the US Embassy Wednesday to discuss what had happened, the Telegraph reported.
The ministry spokeswoman, Marte Lerberg Kopstad, said in a statement that the ministry had asked for information on whether Norway had been aware of the espionage programmed and what it involved.
The US Department of State spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, confirmed the operation had taken place, but also alleged that Norwegian authorities were aware of the situation and were cooperating with the embassy.
“We cooperate with authorities in the host country to do everything we can to protect our embassies [from terrorist attacks], including Norway,” he says.
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U.S. Superbase on Guam
Image via Wikipedia
Source: Cryptogon
Via: Telegraph:
The US is building an £8 billion super military base on the Pacific island of Guam in an attempt to contain China’s military build-up.
The expansion will include a dock for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, a missile defence system, live-fire training sites and the expansion of the island’s airbase. It will be the largest investment in a military base in the western Pacific since the Second World War, and the biggest spend on naval infrastructure in decades.
Chinese Supercomputer Likely to Prompt Unease in U.S.
- ASIA TECHNOLOGY
- OCTOBER 28, 2010, 2:50 P.M. ET
A newly built supercomputer in China appears poised to take the world performance lead, another sign of the country’s growing technological prowess that is likely to set off alarms about U.S. competitiveness and national security.
The system was designed by China’s National University of Defense Technology and is housed at the National Supercomputing Center in the city of Tianjin. It is part of a new breed that exploits graphics chips more commonly used in playing videogames—supplied by Nvidia Corp.—as well as standard microprocessors from Intel Corp.
Supercomputers are massive machines that help tackle the toughest scientific problems, including simulating commercial products like new drugs as well as defense-related applications such as weapons design and breaking codes. The field has long been led by U.S. technology companies and national laboratories, which operate systems that have consistently topped lists of the fastest machines in the world.
![[cnvidia1028]](https://i0.wp.com/si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-KP828_cnvidi_D_20101028011727.jpg)
NVIDIAThe Tianhe-1A Supercomputer, located at National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China, is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
But Nvidia says the new system in Tianjin—which is being formally announced Thursday at an event in China—was able to reach 2.5 petaflops. That is a measure of calculating speed ordinarily translated into a thousand trillion operations per second. It is more than 40% higher than the mark set last June by a system called Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that previously stood at No. 1 on a twice-yearly ranking of the 500 fastest supercomputers.
“I don’t know of another system that is going to be anywhere near the performance and the power of this machine” in China, said Jack Dongarra, a supercomputer expert on the Oak Ridge research staff who is a professor at the University of Tennessee and recently inspected the system in Tianjin last week. “It is quite impressive.”
The development was not altogether unexpected. China placed 24 systems in the so-called Top 500 supercomputer ranking last June; a system called Nebulae, for example, took second place that also used chips from Nvidia and Intel.
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But Mr. Dongarra and other researchers said the machine should nevertheless serve as a wake-up call that China is threatening to take the lead in scientific computing—akin to a machine from Japan that took the No. 1 position early in the past decade and triggered increased U.S. investment in the field.
“It’s definitely a game-changer in the high performance market,” said Mark Seager, chief technology officer for computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “This is a phase transition, representative of the shift of economic competitiveness from the West to the East.”
Nearly all components of the high-profile Japanese system, called the Earth Simulator, were created in Japan. By contrast, most of the Tianjin system relies on chips from Intel and Nvidia, which are both based in Santa Clara, Calif. So U.S. customers could presumably construct a system with similar performance, noted Horst Simon, deputy lab director at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
But Mr. Dongarra noted that communications chips inside the machine were proprietary and designed in China, and the country is also working on its own microprocessors.
Moreover, while the Japanese system was a single machine, Tianjin is part of a multi-year strategy by China to develop a range of machines to create a dominant position in both military and commercial applications. “In that sense, I would say this is a much more important event than the Earth Simulator,” Mr. Simon said.
The new supercomputer will be operated as an “open access” system, available to other countries outside of China to use for large scale scientific computation, said Ujesh Desai, an Nvidia vice president of product marketing.
It reflects a major design shift to use graphics chips to help accelerate the number-crunching functions most often carried out by so-called x86 chips, which evolved from personal computers and have long dominated supercomputing. Advanced Micro Devices, which makes both graphics chips and x86 microprocessors, is another company besides Nvidia that is promoting the technology shift.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com
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Asian Markets Mixed After Surprise China Interest Rate Increase
Photo: AFP
Chinese investors monitor their stock prices at a security firm in Hefei, east China‘s Anhui province, 14 Oct. 2010
Stocks in Hong Kong and Japan fell and the U.S. dollar rose a day after China raised interest rates for the first time since December 2007. Economists interpret the move as a sign that authorities are taking a more aggressive stance against inflation and bank lending.
Chinese borrowers will now have to pay at least 0.25 percentage points more interest on their loans. China’s central bank increased the cost of borrowing late Tuesday, ahead of releasing inflation figures for September.
Higher inflation rate
Market analysts expect the inflation rate to be higher than the 3.5 percent recorded in August – already the fastest pace in nearly two years. They think China hopes higher rates will cool price increases.
Jan Lambregts, global head of financial markets research at Rabobank, says the central bank is also trying to slow lending.
“Chinese policy makers are very unhappy about bank lending and they want to curb that more…. It’s really a warning shot, to those banks – ‘curb your bank lending, we’re serious,'” Lambregts said.
Credit boom
For the first nine months of the year, bank lending reached $948 billion – just 19 percent shy of the government’s target for the year. The credit boom has sparked a surge in property prices nationwide.
Last week, the central bank asked six major banks to raise the ratio of deposits they hold as reserves, which reduces the amount available for lending.
With the increase, the one-year lending rate now stands at 5.56 percent, while the deposit rate climbs to 2.5 percent. China had not moved its interest rates in nearly three years.
On Wednesday, stock prices in Hong Kong declined just under 1 percent, led by property companies. Japan’s Nikkei index fell by 1.6 percent. But Shanghai managed to claw back losses earlier in the day. And in Seoul and Taipei, main stock indexes closed higher.
Investment money
A flow of investment money from developed economies seeking higher returns could complicate China’s efforts to slow its economy. The problem could worsen if the U.S. Federal Reserve increases the amount of money in circulation in the coming weeks to stimulate the American economy.
Strong foreign investment flows may boost China’s currency. A stronger yuan would make imported commodities cheaper, helping manage inflation. Lambregts says expectations of more rate increases could have an influence on the exchange rate.
“I think we should take a broader view, that in terms of hot money inflow, any prospect of further tightening on the monetary front only increases the feeling that you should be in China,” he added.
The yuan’s exchange rate is tightly managed by the central bank, although it has risen 2.5 percent against the dollar since June. But on Wednesday, the dollar recorded its biggest gain against the yuan since June, after the Chinese central bank sharply lowered the reference rate for yuan movements.
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Videos: From The Fluoride Wars
Alex Jones
From dan
Most Fluoride added to Americandrinking water comes from . It has many non-fluoride materials that we cannot identify. The government says it is safe but does not know exactly what is in the Chinese fluoride.
This second and last fluoride video is from Alex Jones.
The above videos are posted at my new video-only blog here
http://vidrebel.wordpress.com/
China to explore deep space
Image via Wikipedia
Sunday 3rd October, 2010
Big News Network.com (IANS) Saturday 2nd October, 2010
China will set up its own deep space communication network in three to five years which will help in the exploration of the solar system, a top scientist has said.
With the new system, which includes a network of large antennae and communication facilities to support interplanetary missions and astronomical observations by radio and radar, ‘there will be no problem for China to carry out an exploration of the solar system’, said Qian Weiping, chief designer of Chang’e-2 mission’s tracking and control system.
He said that Chang’e-2, China’s second lunar probe which was launched Friday, will test the X-spectrum telemetry, tracking and control system, a key technology in the deep space network, according to China Daily.
‘If the test succeeds, it means we have mastered the technology of using the X-spectrum to fulfil functions like orbit determination and the remote control of spacecraft in deep space,’ he said. ‘With this technology, we only need to build larger antennae to explore planets in deep space.’
As part of the network, two ground tracking stations with large antennae are currently under construction in the country – one in Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and the other in Jiamusi in Heilongjiang province, the scientist said.
Deep space usually means 1.5 million km from the earth, said Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration programme.
He said since the moon is 400,000 km away from the earth and there is no large celestial body between 400,000 km and 1.5 million km, the new lunar mission is considered as the starting point for the exploration of deep space.
According to Wu, the technology used in the lunar mission can be applied in exploring other planets including Mars and Venus.
‘So it would be possible for us to explore Mars and Venus in the foreseeable future, as the two planets are the closest to the earth,’ he said.
China Opens Missile PLant in Iran….was it worth pissing off China?
China inaugurated a missile plan in Iran last month, even as the United States and its allies were pressing Beijing to support a new round of tough economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program, Jane’s Defense Weekly reports.
It’s a military relationship that goes back two decades and, in light of Russia’s reluctance to provide the Iranians with advanced air-defense missile system to counter possible U.S. or Israeli air-strikes, is set to expand.
Robert Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, reported that the factory for assembling and producing Iran’s Nasr-1 — Victory 1 — anti-ship missile was opened March 7.
The Nasr is identical to China’s C-704 anti-ship missile, Hewson says. Iran’s burgeoning defense industry, much of it controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has been producing Chinese-designed anti-ship missiles such as the C-801 since the early 1990s.
The C-704, developed by China Aerospace Group, targets ships of 1,000-4,000 tons displacement and is the equivalent of the U.S. AGM-119 anti-ship missile. With a range of 106 miles and a 240-pound warhead, the C-704 has a kill probability of 95.7 percent.
The Iranians, possibly with Chinese assistance, have even developed improved versions such as the Noor, an upgraded version of China’s C-802, with a longer range than the original and over-the-horizon capabilities.
Indeed, Hewson observed that “Iran has gone further than China in fielding the C-802, taking what was previously a land- and ship-launched weapon and producing an air-launched version that can be carried by Mi-17 helicopters and fast-jet types.”
Over the years Iran has developed a range of anti-ship missile systems from the Chinese weapons that gives the Islamic Republic’s regular navy and the IRGC’s naval arm the capability to exert a considerable degree of control over waters in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea.
This is the area from which U.S. naval forces would strike if hostilities erupt.
On Saturday, the IRGC concluded its annual three-day Great Prophet exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point gateway to the Gulf and a key energy artery, in a show of defiance against the United States.
The Nasr is a medium-range weapon that can be launched from warships or shore batteries and its development and planned mass production has been trumpeted by Tehran at a time when Iran’s military forces are making preparations to counter possible attacks.
“In a methodical and deceptively modest manner China has helped Iran take charge of all its surrounding waters and this work between the two nations continues,” Hewson reported.
“Follow-on versions of the Nasr are being developed to include an air-launched variant.
“There are other cooperative tactical missile programs under way and China’s design bureaus have displayed several ‘export only’ weapons (such as the C-705 lightweight cruise missile) that would seem set to follow the established route into Iran,” Hewson added.
“With such a solid relationship established between the two countries it is not difficult to see why China has been reluctant to commit to the Western push for sanctions against Iran.”
China, ever hungry for energy sources to fuel its expanding economy, imports around 12 percent of its oil from Iran and seeks to secure Iranian natural gas through overland pipelines — another reason it has shown little enthusiasm for new U.N. sanctions on Iran.
Hewson said no Chinese envoys were seen at the opening of the Nasr factory conducted by Iran’s hard-line defense minister, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, but the event marked “another milestone in the continuing military/industrial bond between the two countries.”
Hewson observed that unlike Russia, China “has been very successful in offering Iran technology and capabilities that are actually wanted, as opposed to those that might be ‘nice to have.’
“A path has been found through the factions within Iranian officialdom (and its armed forces) to deliver products that build trust in Beijing. In return, China gains influence with Tehran that can be parlayed into access to Iran’s natural resources.”
While these Chinese-origin systems have provided Iran with invaluable missile technology, this has had little or no impact on the development of its ballistic missile capabilities.
“Iran’s strategic weapons can only (ultimately) involve it in a losing battle with the United States,’ Hewson concluded, “but its tactical weapons have already altered the regional balance of power in a much more practical way.”
http://www.officialwire.com/main.php?action=posted_news&rid=134573
Landslides kill at least 127 in China
- About 45,000 have been evacuated
- Heavy rains trigger landslides in the northwest
- About 1,300 people are missing
(CNN) — Massive landslides in northwest China have left 127 people dead, state media reported Sunday.
About 1,300 people are missing after the landslides, which were triggered by heavy rains, Xinhua news agency said.
Authorities report 76 people have been injured and about 45,000 have been evacuated, according to a statement from the provincial civil affairs department.
The landslides occurred early Sunday morning after heavy rains started pummeling the area Saturday, authorities said.
They caused the Bailong River to become obstructed and overflow, and sent water rushing water over its banks, state-run CCTV reported.
The water level in the county seat of Chengguan Township had receded by 40 cm (16 inches) Sunday, after floodwaters carrying mud and rocks submerged half the town, Mao Shengwu, head of the prefecture, told the news agency.
“Torrential rains began to fall at around 10 p.m. Saturday. Then there were mudslides and many people became trapped. Now sludge has become the biggest hindrance to rescue operations. It’s too thick to walk or drive through,” said an official identified by Xinhua only as Diemujiangteng, head of the county.
“Since excavators can’t reach the site, we can only use spades and our hands to rescue the buried,” He Youxin, an officer with the Gannan branch of the Gansu Headquarters of Chinese People’s Armed Police Force, told the news agency.
His rescue team has saved 23 people and recovered 15 bodies, he said. But, “It’s very hard to locate the people washed away by floods. It’s hard to say what their chances of survival are,” he said.
The news agency said the police rescued two children and three adults who were trapped atop a seven-story building, half of which had been washed away by the flood waters, according to a video clip shot by a police officer shown on Chinese Central Television.
More than 300 homes in Yueyuan Village in the county had been buried. But the number of deaths were not known, Mao told the news agency.
A total of 600 soldiers with the Lanzhou Military Area Command arrived at Zhouqu county in northwest China’s Gansu Province to perform relief work, Xinhua said. Three other detachments consisting of more than 1,700 soldiers with the command as well as a 180-member medical team are on their way to the affected areas. China’s armed police have also sent 2,100 members to help, the news agency reported.
By Sunday afternoon, the provincial civil affairs department had sent 3,900 tents, about 40,000 boxes of instant noodles and 31,300 boxes of bottled drinking water to the county. But the county still needs 441 tons (400 metric tonnes) of drinking water and 22 tons (20 tonnes) of instant food, said a spokesman with the prefecture’s government, according to Xinhua.
The county needs an estimated 11,023 tons (10,000 tonnes) of water and 551 tons (500 tonnes) of instant food in the next 25 days, Xinhua reported.
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| Find this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/08/08/china.landslides/index.html?hpt=T1 |
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