Thirteen people were injured when an apartment building caught fire early Wednesday in central China’s Hubei Province, the local government said. The fire broke out at around 2 a.m. in a three-story building in Jiangxia District of the provincial capi… read more
Those simple eight words mean the UK has a good negotiating position when it comes to sorting out our future relationship with the EU. Without them the UK would be in a very weak position.
There are those in the EU who talk darkly of a punishment deal, seeking to make the UK pay for daring to leave. There are those who want to send us a large bill with no legal backing to it and expect the UK to pay. There are those who think it a clever idea to volunteer continental farm products up for high WTO tariffs in order to make a political point. That is why the UK has to make it clear we will not accept any such deal.
None of this means the UK negotiators should walk out in a huff at the first available opportunity if the EU’s demands are silly. There is still a good prospect of reaching sensible conclusions. The UK intends to take back control of our borders, money and laws. It is happy to have extensive agreements on free trade, security sharing, academic collaborations, transport rights and the rest. We are leaving the EU’s legal structures, single currency and budget, not leaving Europe. It will require a combination of friendly patience, stressing the advantages of many collaborations, and unbending clarity that we are taking back control of our laws, our money and our borders.
It is clear that many on the continent do wish to keep tariff free access to our lucrative market. It is obvious they like sharing security and Intelligence with us. The only way to get a good outcome for both sides is for the UK government to repeat that it makes no sense for us to take a bad deal. Nor would that in practice help them. It’s a pity the other main parties contesting the General Election do not recognise this simple truth. If they understood negotiating they would also say with Mrs May , “No deal is better than a bad deal.”
Published and promoted by Fraser Mc Farland on behalf of John Redwood, both at 30 Rose Street Wokingham RG40 1XU
read morePRIME MINISTER: Yanggu gulanyin ngalawiri, dhunayi, Ngunawal dhawra. Wanggarralijinyin mariny bulan bugarabang. We are meeting on the lands of the Ngunnawal people. We acknowledge their elders past and present. Thank you very much for your kind introduction. It is wonderful … read more
A report released by the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA) on Wednesday said that as of the end of 2016, China had 223,925 journalists holding valid press cards. Among these journalists, a total of 84,130 were newspaper reporters and 6,007 work… read more
Rice, one of the world’s most important staple foods sustaining more than half of the global population, was first domesticated in China about 10,000 years ago, according to a new study.
“Such an age for the beginnings of rice cultivation and domestication would agree with the parallel beginnings of agriculture in other regions of the world during a period of profound environmental change when the Pleistocene was transitioning into the Holocene,” said Lu Houyuan, professor of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study.
The research, published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was done in collaboration with Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Relics and Archaeology and the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Questions surrounding the origin and domestication of rice have led to a lot of debate in the last decade.
Rice remains have previously been recovered from a Shangshan site in the lower Yangtze River and recognized as the earliest examples of rice cultivation.
However, the age of the rice was derived through radiocarbon dating of organic matter in pottery shards, which can be contaminated with older carbon sources, Lu said.
Researchers developed new ways of isolating the rice from carbon sources, such as clays and carbonate, and dated the samples directly using radiocarbon dating.
It turned out that rice retrieved from the early stage of the Shangshan site was about 9,400 years old.
Further studies showed that approximately 36 percent of the rice at Shangshan had more than nine fish-scale decorations, less than the approximately 67 percent counted from modern domesticated rice, but larger than the approximately 17 percent found in modern wild rice.
That means rice domestication may have begun at Shangshan at about 10,000 years ago during the beginning of the Holocene, when taking into account the distance between samples and the lowest bottom of cultural strata of the site as well as a slow rate of rice domestication, Lu said.
The time coincided with the domestication of wheat in the Near East and maize in northern South America, both of which are also believed to have occurred at about 10,000 years ago, when the global climate experienced dramatic changes from cold glacial to warm interglacial.
read more