China's export control lifted rare earth shares worldwide

US: Molycorp Inc’s share price climbed 6.45 percent to US$49.16 on Wednesday.

Australia: Lynas Corporation Limited, the Australia-based company, jumped 10.80 percent to 1.79 AUD per share.

Canada: Avalon Rare Metals Inc, based in Canada, went up by 41.23 percent to 6.44 CAD. Rare Element Resources Ltd, jumped by 41.27 percent to 14.65 CAD.

Market Vectors Rare Earth/Strategic Metals ETF, the first US-listed fund investing exclusively in producers of strategic metals including rare earths, went up 5.52 percent.

Companies in the index inlcude Australia’s Iiuka Resources Ltd. And Lynas Corp. , US – based Molycorp Inc, Canada’s Avalon Rare Metals Inc. and Hong Kong-listed China Rare Earth Holding Ltd.

China cut first round rare earths export quotas in 2011

China cut the export quotas for rare earth by 11 percent for the first round of 2011, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
The government allocated 14,446 metric tons of rare earth exports among 31 companies, compared with 16,304 metric tons in the same period last year, the ministry said in a statement on its website today.
Baotou Huamei Rare Earth Products Co Ltd, got 954 tons of export quota, the largest. It is followed by Baotou Rhodia Rare Earth Co Ltd, with 867 metric tons. Both are based in Baotou, a city in Inner Mongolia.
In a separate statement, the ministry said the government has not decided on the total export quota for 2011, which will be decided based on the total output of rare earths in China, domestic and foreign demand, as well as sustainability.

Man sentenced to prison for stealing rare earth, Xinhua reported

A man surnamed Zhu was sentenced for seven years in prison for stealing rare earth in south western China’s Jiangxi province, the official Xinhua News Agency reported today.

Mr Zhu worked at the europium oxide department of a rare earth company in Ganzhou city of Jiangxi. He stole a total of 18.28 kg of europium oxide, a mineral used in liquid crystal displays and color cathode-ray tubes in making comptuer monitors, for over 90 times from October 2007 to April 2008. The value of the mineral worth about 43,000 yuan, the report said.

link of the Chinese story: http://news.xinhuanet.com/society/2010-12/25/c_12917436.htm

Hitachi Metals and Molycorp to set up rare earth joint venture

Hitachi Metals and Molycorp to set up rare earth joint venture
Hitachi Metals, Ltd. and Morlycorp, Inc. agreed to set up a joint venture to produce rare earth alloys and magnets in the US, the two companies said on Dec 21st.
The venture plans to start in early April 2011, and it will be focused on the manufacture of neodymium-iron-boron alloys and magnets, which are vital to clean technology, automotive, computer, health care, communications and other technologies.
The decision came amid the concern in the industry about the exports control on these minerals in China, who controls about 97 percent of world’s rare earth supply. US and Japan are among the largest users of rare earth minerals.
“These joint ventures are an integral part of Molycorp’s ‘mine-to-magnets’ business plan, and they move our company and the United States one step closer to realizing the strategic goal of re-esablishing a complete rare earth manufacturing supply chain in the US,” said Mark Smith, Molycorp’s Chief Executive Officer.
Molycorp, based in Colorado, is the only rare earth oxide (REO) producer in the western hemisphere. It currently produces about 3,000 metric tons of commercial rare earth materials per year. It plans to expand its processing facility at Mountain Pass, California and produce 20,000 metric tons of REO per year by the end of 2012.
“We are well positioned to satisfy the growing demand from global customers for these rare earth magnets,” said Nobuhiko Shima, President of NEOMAX Company of Hitachi Metals, Ltd, the world’s top manufacturer of NdFeB magnets.

reading diary

just finished:


Haruki Murakami, What I talk about when I talk about running
Raymond Carver, really like him.


Reading：

艺术哲学
光耀生命

Plan to read this week:

Little Sister

Ibson

Henry James

Plan to read next week:

Silent Spring

Krugman: China needs to spur local demand
By Diao Ying (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-12 08:10
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Krugman: China needs to spur local demand

Paul Krugman was treated like a pop star on his first trip to China yesterday. His smiling visage was printed on a wall-size poster that had huge Chinese characters that read, 'the great prophet is coming!'

Some people paid 58,000 yuan for a ticket so that they could sit in the front row to hear him speak. Those who got cheaper tickets - the cheapest ones still cost 5,800 yuan each - sat a bit far away. The passageway was full of people, and there were many watching the live broadcast sitting in three rooms next door.

Yet, the 56-year-old Nobel Prize winning economist did not seem too excited at this adulation. "I feel exhausted," he said after he made the second speech at the Peking University yesterday.

Krugman's schedule on his first trip to China was very tight. He appeared for a TV interview shortly after he landed in Beijing, and had to give four lectures in two cities over the next two days.

It was not simply due to jetlag, but "because all of our crises have come to our head at exactly the same time", the economics professor of Princeton and a New York Times columnist said.

He was referring to the worsening global economy, the financial crisis, and the global climate problem.

Although the global economic downturn was stabilizing, the stability was at a very low level, and a recovery was still very far ahead, Krugman said.

Krugman compared the global economy to that of a patient who had just been moved out of emergency room, but was still sick and very much in hospital.

"I have no idea where the source of the next boom is coming from. I really don't know," he said. "I worry greatly that we'll have a prolonged recession."

He said the US government's stimulus package, although sizeable, was not large enough. The Obama administration needs to adopt really strong policies to support the economy, Krugman said.

"A second stimulus is becoming clearly urgent. They need a very, very strong stimulus," he said.

When asked about the trade imbalance between China and the US, he said the US had lived beyond its means for a long time, and China's large trade surplus cannot last.

"The Americans used to sell each other houses with money borrowed from China," he said. But he said China could not expect the same export-led growth it saw previously. "Going forward, China needs to generate more internal demand, and the US needs to run a smaller deficit," he said.

But when asked to make a prediction about the Chinese economy, he frankly said he did not know too much about the subject.

"China is a country that is more difficult to make sense of what is really happening than other places," he said.

However, in about 20 or 30 years, it was possible that China was going to overtake the US and become the largest world economy, he said.

Some college students were more curious about Krugman's experiences over the course of his life than his economic theories. They asked him whether he had had any doubts during his career as an economist.

"Everyone has moments of doubt, but I have seen enough success to be reasonably confident of myself," he said.

He said he chose economics over history although he had a strong interest in the latter, because "I wanted more structure, and economics offers more framework on why it happened."

Narrative stories connect with readers

Narrative stories connect with readers


Tom Hallman, Jr.
A few weeks ago, I received a telephone call from a woman I’d never met, inviting me to an interview with two strangers.

How she selected me — and what happened during the 90-minute meeting — is a lesson in what narrative writing is all about.

Last summer, a private plane crashed into a beach cottage in a small coastal town about an hour from Portland, Ore. Two men on board the plane died, as did three children in the home. A mother and two children in the home escaped but were badly burned.

It was a horrifying, haunting story, and the family never consented to any interviews. And now, out of the blue, a friend of theirs had called to say they wanted to meet me. Why, I asked?

The father, this woman told me, had read my stories over the years and felt he could trust me. A few months earlier, his wife had read the story I’d written about the barber who lost his leg in a motorcycle accident. She liked the way I’d written about the man. The story — and the theme — had stayed with her.

That’s the first lesson: Your body of work matters to readers. Through your narratives, you reveal yourself. Through those stories you make connections — unseen — with readers. Never forget that you aren’t writing for your peers or your editors. You write for the readers.

The second lesson is this: Give every story your best effort. I wrote about that barber story in a recent Quill column, and it was a story that my editor had shopped around but hadn’t found any takers. Maybe it wasn’t sexy enough.

That’s an attitude that will hurt you if you want to get very far in this business. Over the years, I’ve known reporters who wait for the multiple-part series, the 100-inch narrative or the project they can spend months reporting and writing. Writing doesn’t work that way. A better approach is to look at every story as a chance to practice the craft’s techniques: interviewing, story thinking, looking for a theme, structuring and polishing.

So, days after the call, I headed to a house to meet these parents. The parents walked in and settled into seats across the room. In a strange way — very strange — it reminded me of when I’d gone to California years earlier to try to do a story on the funeral of a man who had been in the Hells Angels for nearly 50 years.

Late that night, a group of Hells Angels arrived at my motel room. A Hells Angel I’d come to know had told them I wanted to cover the event. So they came to check me out in their own way.

They showed up unannounced and pounded on the door. I let them in, and we sat at a small table. I’ll never forget what they said: We don’t like the media. The only reason we’re even here is because someone says you’re OK. So what in the hell do you want?

Lesson three: You are not your paper. What I mean is that people don’t open up their hearts and souls to an institution. They talk to you.

In a narrative, the people choose to speak with you. People have to want to talk to you. Ask yourself this: Would you tell your story to someone like you?

Back in Portland, we sat there, all of us making polite small

talk until the father leaned forward and asked me, in less

blunt language, the same question as did the Hells Angels.

I told him I wasn’t really sure, that often what I think of as The Story turns out to be something much different. I explained how I work and what I look for. I told him that I believed the story, their story, had less to do with the plane crash and more about the aftermath.

I told the couple that I looked for a theme, something universal, something that would allow readers to have a story resonate with them. I explained that a story was about change: The character, or characters, change as does the reader. A story, I said, has to reveal something.

I told the couple that if they allow me to tell their story, I would probe deeply into their lives and feelings. I said I’d ask questions that seem dumb, and others that would make them relive painful moments.

I said I’d become part of their lives as I worked to discover what the story was, and how best to tell it. I explained how a narrative was different than a feature story, and I used examples from some of my past work, stories they had read over the years.

Lesson four: You have to understand the nature and demands of narrative. Don’t sugarcoat it just so you can get an interview. Be upfront about what it requires, and be able to explain a narrative arc and a theme and what a character means in a story.

“There are things,” she said, “that I have not even told my husband.”

And then we talked.