China may force foreign automakers to turn in key electric-car technology, in exchange for access to the world’s largest auto market.

According to the The Wall Street Journal, the 10-year plan, being made by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, is an attempt to make ‘the nation ‘the world’s leader

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BEIJING — China has suspended senior bilateral contact with Japan over the detention of a Chinese captain accused of ramming his boat against Japanese patrol vessels in disputed waters, state media said Sunday.

‘China has already suspended bilateral exchanges at and above the provincial or ministerial levels,’ the official Xinhua news agency quoted the foreign ministry as saying, without giving more details on the nature of the exchanges.

China has also halted contact with Japan on the issues of increasing civil flights and expanding aviation rights between the two countries, the report said, adding a bilateral meeting on coal had also been postponed.

The stringent measures come after a Japanese court authorised prosecutors to extend by 10 days the detention of Zhan Qixiong, arrested earlier this month after the collision with two Japanese coastguard vessels in the East China Sea.

The incident took place near the disputed Diaoyu islands — called Senkaku in Japan and also claimed by Taiwan — which lie in an area with rich fishing grounds that is also believed to contain oil and gas deposits.

It has sparked the worst diplomatic row in years between Beijing and Tokyo, with China already summoning Japan’s ambassador five times and scrapping scheduled talks over […]

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Love ’em or hate ’em, tea party gatherings are the grassroots real deal. Organic, earnest groundswells of populist sentiment and full-throated political expression that have upset the political establishment left and right. Effective too, as they beat mainstream candidates from Delaware to Nevada to Alaska.

But just beneath the surface are professional fund-raisers, foundations, and political action committees – some of which have been around for years – pushing an agenda that neatly matches the conservative/libertarian aims of most tea partyers.

You can tell its effectiveness by the rhetoric of the opposition from across the political spectrum.

Karl Rove (initially, at least) dissing tea party favorite Christine O’Donnell in her upset win in Delaware’s Republican senate primary. President Obama indirectly criticizing the insurgency’s well-funded lobbying in speeches to the Democratic faithful warning of the impact of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision easing restrictions on how corporations may influence federal elections.

Changes in campaign finance law and the aims of the tea party movement converge in a mutually-supportive way.

Specifically, the tea party – particularly as it fights government spending and taxation under Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress – is the sometimes-raucous face of traditional limited government lobbying. In return, the movement’s efforts get […]

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A chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.

The research, led by Emory University anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is in the current issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

‘We tend to associate drugs that cure diseases with modern medicine,’ Armelagos says. ‘But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this prehistoric population was using empirical evidence to develop therapeutic agents. I have no doubt that they knew what they were doing.’

Armelagos is a bioarcheologist and an expert on prehistoric and ancient diets. In 1980, he discovered what appeared to be traces of tetracycline in human bones from Nubia dated between A.D. 350 and 550, populations that left no written record. The ancient Nubian kingdom was located in present-day Sudan, south of ancient Egypt.

Armelagos and his fellow researchers later tied the source of the antibiotic to the Nubian beer. The grain used to make the fermented gruel contained the soil bacteria streptomyces, […]

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At the packed opening hearing of the massive litigation over the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier scheduled a key proceeding in the litigation — a trial to determine the proportion of fault among the corporate defendants — more than a year from now, in October 2011.

The initial gathering of hundreds of attorneys from across the country filled the largest room at federal court in New Orleans, plus two overflow courtrooms. It was supposed to be largely administrative, but in debating how to manage the hundreds of cases pegged to the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and subsequent oil leak, disputes were already taking shape over the interaction of maritime law with the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the preservation of evidence with the blowout preventer, and how quickly other evidence can be gathered.

While Barbier put off questions of when test trials will occur on indirect economic damage, wrongful death, personal injury and psychological injury cases, he scheduled an all-important maritime proceeding known as a limitation of liability trial.

‘The good thing about setting the limitation of liability for trial is that it will be our goal for concluding discovery on […]

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