Moon Water: A Game-Changing Discovery

The discovery of widespread but small amounts water on the surface of the moon, announced yesterday, stands as one of the most surprising findings in planetary science.

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U.S. to push for new economic world order at G20

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States will urge world leaders this week to launch a new push in November to rebalance the world economy, but there are doubts national governments will bow to external advice. Read the full story

WASHINGTON: An angry, humiliated, and wounded A.Q.Khan has finally made public and official what has long been suspected: his nuclear proliferation activities that included exchanging and passing blue-prints and equipment to China, Iran, North Korea, and Libya was done at the behest of the Pakistani government and military, and he was forced to take the rap for it. ( Watch Video ) Read the full story

NEW DELHI: The Indian army has mobilised its troops to forwards posts in Jammu and Kashmir and along the northeastern border with China in an exercise named Operation Alert, a defence official said on Wednesday.

“About 50% troops on the Line of Actual Control have been mobilised to forward posts. The mobilisation would last for nearly a month,” a senior Indian army official said. Read the full story

‘We may have to attack Iran by Dec.’

Israel will be compelled to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities if Western powers do not impose serious sanctions against Teheran by the end of 2009, former deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh said on Wednesday. Read the full story

Dean Qiongxiu, 66, said she discovered the reptile clinging to the wall of her bedroom with its talons in the middle of the night.

“I woke up and heard a strange scratching sound. I turned on the light and saw this monster working its way along the wall using his claw,” said Mrs Duan of Suining, southwest China. Read the full story

(PhysOrg.com) — A tiny bit of genetic material with no previously known function may hold the key to stopping the spread of cancer, researchers at Yale School of Medicine and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China report in two papers in the September 7-11 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the papers, Alan Garen of the Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale and his colleague Xu Song explain how cancer may overcome an organism’s natural “stop sign” for cell division. Read the full story

The State Department said it would meet one-to-one with Pyongyang negotiators in an effort to persuade the reclusive Stalinist state to return to multilateral talks on dismantling its nuclear weapons programme.

Washington has also accepted a vague Iranian offer of talks on broad national security issues, even though Tehran refused to discuss its illicit atomic operations.

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(CNN) — The two U.S. journalists released from North Korea last month after five months in captivity said “the psychological wounds of imprisonment are slow to heal.”

In a column posted on the Los Angeles Times Web site Tuesday night, Laura Ling and Euna Lee also said they were seized by North Korean soldiers on Chinese soil. They raised suspicions about their guide and wondered if they had been “lured into a trap.”

“We didn’t spend more than a minute on North Korean soil before turning back, but it is a minute we deeply regret,” they said. Read the full story

Updates regarding North Korea weapons shipment seizure.

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLU614080

Australia probes N.Korea weapons for Iran seizure Read the full story

In the beginning…

The New York Sunday News on March 30, 1947. Read the full story

According to the 1933 obituaries in both Time Magazine and the New York Times, Li Ching-Yun was reported to have buried 23 wives and fostered 180 descendants by the time he died at the age of 256. Read the full story

Traces of cocaine taint up to 90 percent of paper money in the United States, a new study finds.

A group of scientists tested banknotes from more than 30 cities in five countries, including the United States, Canada, Brazil, China, and Japan, and found “alarming” evidence of cocaine use in many areas.

U.S. and Canadian currency had the highest levels, with an average contamination rate of between 85 and 90 percent, while Chinese and Japanese currency had the lowest, between 12 and 20 percent contamination.

The findings were presented yesterday at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C.

Study leader Yuegang Zuo of the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth said that the high percentage of contaminated U.S. currency observed in the current study represents nearly a 20 percent jump in comparison to a similar study he conducted two years ago.

“To my surprise, we’re finding more and more cocaine in banknotes,” Zuo said.

Scientists have known for years that paper money can become contaminated with cocaine during drug deals and directly through drug use, such as snorting cocaine through rolled bills. Contamination can also spread to banknotes not involved in the illicit drug culture, because bills are processed in banks’ currency-counting machines.

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BEIJING, China (CNN) — A massive mudslide unleashed by Typhoon Morakot spilled into a coastal China town, crushing a half dozen buildings and burying an unknown number of people, state-run media reported Tuesday.

The mudslide occurred at about 10:30 p.m. (2:30 p.m. GMT) Monday in Pengxi Township within Zhejiang province — one of eastern China’s regions hardest hit by Morakot, the Xinhua news agency reported, citing local authorities. The incident destroyed apartment buildings standing four stories tall at the foot of a mountain. Read the full story

BEIJING — Saying they were taking no chances, Chinese officials evacuated a million coastal residents on Sunday as a weakened Typhoon Morakot swept onto the mainland south of Shanghai after battering Taiwan the day before.

Wenzhou officials said the storm had destroyed more than 300 homes. Authorities said that the storm was whipping up waves as high at 26 feet in the east China Sea and in the strait between Taiwan and mainland China. Read the full story

URUMQI, China, Aug. 8 (UPI) — Three coal miners have been killed and two more were reported missing and presumed dead in a blast in far western China, officials said Saturday.

Rescuers had recovered three bodies 50 hours after the explosion at the Futong coal mine in the Uigher autonomous region and were pessimistic that the two remained missing were still alive, the state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua reported. Read the full story

Now this is interesting news coming out of China. Healthcare for only $0.15? Wow.

Chinese villages eye health care for 1 RMB

XINSHUI, China (CNN) — One of the most telling things about China’s health care is a quote I once read from a construction worker who earns about $150 a month: “If you get cancer in China, don’t bother going to the hospital. They might not cure you, but you will go broke.”

That pretty much sums up the current state of health care for millions of people in this country. Read the full story

Call it a “shrimp cocktail” for your fuel tank. Scientists in China are reporting development of a catalyst made from shrimp shells that could transform production of biodiesel fuel into a faster, less expensive, and more environmentally friendly process. Their study is scheduled for the Aug. 20 issue of ACS’ Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly journal. Read the full story