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Monday, January 11, 2016

Winter wonderland: China's Jilin City coated in ice

The river banks of China's Jilin City have been transformed into a winter wonderland.
Ice has coated the landscape, bringing tourists flocking to the city.
The ice can be seen every year between December and mid-March, when the temperature of the region plummets well below freezing.
Ice forms when water droplets in the air are cooled below 0C. If the landscape is also below freezing, then the droplets will instantly freeze on impact. This forms a rough white deposit, known as "rime".
Normally rime is an unpredictable weather phenomenon, but in Jilin City, it's an annual event, because of the warmth provided by the local river.
The Songhua River, which flows through the city, is warmed by the Fengman hydropower station. It is one of the few rivers in Jilin Province which doesn't freeze over in winter, and can therefore supply plenty of moisture to the air to produce the ice display.
To celebrate the wintry spectacle, the Rime Ice and Snow Festival is held in January every year.

Korean loudspeakers: What are the North and South shouting about?

has in turn switched on its own giant speakers.
As the world continues to investigate whether the North's bomb claim is true and how it should respond, what are the two Koreas shouting at each other?

What's coming out of the speakers?

For the South, their purpose is propaganda - persuading North Korean soldiers to doubt their own regime or even defect. 
The propaganda programming, running on and off since the Korean War, has become more subtle in recent years.
It includes weather reports - making it a useful thing for Northern soldiers to listen to - news from both Koreas and abroad which won't otherwise be heard over the border, dramas, favourable discussion of democracy, capitalism and life in South Korea, and less favourable comments on corruption and mismanagement in the North.
The speakers also blast music in the form of Korea's much-loved K-pop, which is banned in the North. Songs from Korean girl band Apink, singer IU and boy band Big Bang - including their megahit Bang Bang Bang - are on the propagandists' playlists.
The North's broadcasts are harder to hear - possibly the result of poor speakers - and carry its characteristically strident condemnations of Seoul and its allies. 
They may not be as powerful, but it is thought they do help cancel out the sound of the South's speakers to some extent.

How many broadcasts a day?

A South Korean military spokesperson said there were two to six hours of broadcasts daily, day and night, at irregular hours.
While the exact distance the sound travels will depend on topography, weather conditions and so on, the South Korean military claim the broadcasts can be heard as much as 10 km (6.2 miles) across the border in the day, and up to 24 km (15 miles) across at night. 
That would easily reach North Korean troops, and would be audible by any civilians in the area.
In August, when the South briefly turned its speakers back on after an 11-year break, the military said there were 11 loudspeaker sites. But it has not confirmed if that is still the case. Their exact location along the border is also not officially disclosed.
One South Korean government official said the North appears to have expanded its own speaker operations, from two sites to "several".
"In fact, the anti-South loudspeaker broadcasts appear to be coming from every location where we are broadcasting," the unnamed official told the Yonhap news agency.

Why does North Korea hate them so much?

Pyongyang says it considers them an act of war and has threatened to blow up the speakers. Apart from the regime's usual sensitivity to insults and threats, its anger could be because they might be working.
The pop-cultural "Korean Wave" has not just broken on distant shores - North Koreans too are fans of movies and dramas smuggled across the border, says Kim Yong Hun, president of Daily NK, an online newspaper reporting on North Korea, with a network of sources inside the country.
"Its popularity trickles down to ordinary residents and is especially favoured by younger generations. Soldiers are not exempt from the obsession; songs and cultural programming transmitted by their brethren in the South holds massive power to influence how young soldiers view the North Korean system."
"Prolonged listening of these broadcasts day and night typically has a gradated and ultimately transformative effect," Kim Yong Hun says. "The North Korean government's enraged response is proof positive of the threat these broadcasts pose to its grip on power."

How long will it continue?

It is impossible to know.
In 2004, the broadcasts were stopped as part of a North-South deal. Seoul threatened to restart theirs in 2010 - going as far as reinstalling them along the border, before settling for radio broadcasts instead.
They finally did restart on 10 August 2015 - after a border landmine maimed two South Korean soldiers - only to end just weeks later, as part of another deal with the North to dial back tensions.
Some see the broadcasts as unnecessarily provocative. British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, on a recent visit to Japan, said that resuming the broadcasts was "simply rising to the bait".
But their defenders argue that the North is annoyed by them precisely because they do work, or at least that they are a useful bargaining chip to use in negotiations.

How else do messages cross the border?

The South also has a radio programme, called "The Voice of Freedom", which is transmitted into the North by radio. Dedicated listeners in Seoul can even tune in on FM107.3. Like the loudspeaker broadcasts, they are also sometimes halted. The North also attempts to jam the signal.
Other organisations, such as Unification Media Group, also broadcast radio into the North, though typically in a more neutral way than the military's efforts.
Still other groups, mostly made up of defectors, drop leaflets, DVDs, USB sticks and other material across the border, using balloons. Nearby residents say this could encourage the North to open fire, and while the government does not like the campaigns, it says it will not stop them.


Elon Musk Says He’s Very Close to a Major Gamechanger

Tesla is two years away from building fully autonomous cars, CEO Elon Musk told Fortune in an interview.
“I think we have all the pieces, and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments—and then we’re done,” said Musk.
Tesla’s high-end, all-electric vehicles have been getting new semi-autonomous features thanks to software upgrades delivered over the Internet. These abilities, like automatically staying in a highway lane at a safe distance from traffic ahead, are just a hint of what’s to come for Tesla and other automakers.

Bill Cosby Files Motion to Dismiss Sexual Assault Charges


Bill Cosby has filed a motion to dismiss all of the sexual assault charges against him, arguing that the Montgomery County District Attorney violated a 2005 agreement not to prosecute.
“The charges brought on December 30, 2015 violate an express agreement made by the Montgomery County District Attorney in 2005, in which the Commonwealth agreed that Mr. Cosby would never be prosecuted with respect to the allegations of sexual assault made by complainant Andrea Constand,” the motion reads, according to NBC Philadelphia.
“This agreement, made for the express purpose of inducing Mr. Cosby to testify fully in Ms. Constand’s civil litigation against him, led Mr. Cosby to give deposition testimony in 2005 and 2006 without invocation of his Constitutional rights against self-incrimination.”
The charges in question are the first criminal ones brought against Cosby, who has been accused of sexual assault by dozens of women. The Montgomery County District Attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.

Applebee’s Customer Found a Fingertip in Her Salad

A pregnant woman has filed a claim against Applebee’s stating that she found a piece of bloody fingertip in her salad while dining at one of the chain’s California locations. Cathleen Martin said that she, her husband, and their child were sharing a Chinese chicken salad when they discovered the severed fingertip. “It was so gross,” Martin told the San Luis Obispo Tribune. “I’m on pins and needles worrying about what my family might have been exposed to.”
Although the company stated that it can not legally require the fingertip’s owner to undergo any medical testing, the cook has agreed to a screening in order to “provide the peace of mind Mrs. Martin seeks.”
Alan Knapp, area director of the franchise, has expressed that the incident was “unacceptable,” and that his team members will be undergoing extensive retraining in order to ensure that nothing like this happens again.
Martin’s claim seeks unspecified damages for emotional distress, medical expenses for testing and lost income.

Apple Music passes 10m subscribers: Report

Apple Music has reportedly passed 10 million subscribers, according to the Financial Times.
The on-demand music streaming service from the iPhone maker launched just over six months ago, following the $3.2 billion acquisition of Beats Audio in May. 
"We've had a long relationship with music, and music has had a rich history of change, some of which we've played a part in," Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the launch.
"It's good news that Apple is making streaming work but it is also going to accelerate the decline of downloads," Mark Mulligan, music industry analyst with Midia Research told the Financial Times. Apple was rapidly gaining on Spotify, and at its current growth rate had "the potential to be the leading music subscription service sometime in 2017".
Rival Spotify has 20 million paid subscribers and 75 million users overall, according to its website. Spotify launched in 2008 when physical CD sales in the US alone in was at 428.4 million. By 2014 that figure had almost halved with streaming service adoption cited by Statista as one of the impacting factors.
Spotify's free service requires listeners to sit through occasional advertisements; on a mobile device, users are also forced to listen to their selected playlist on shuffle but can still skip through songs. The premium version, which is ad-free, is AU$11.99 per month in Australia.
Pandora Radio, which was founded over 10 years ago, claimed 79.4 million active users in June last year. The service is only available in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
At the beginning of August, Apple revealed it already had 11 million trial accounts. Those subscriptions, however, were on a three-month free trial with account holders given the option to stay with the service and pay, or cancel the $9.99 monthly subscription.
2 million out of the 11 million were subscribed to family accounts which allow up to six users for $14.95 a month.
Later that month, Apple said that only one in five Apple Music users in the USwho have tested Apple Music no longer use it, countering the results of a survey that found defection rates at more than twice that amount.
In a survey of 5,000 people in the US, music industry research company MusicWatch found that 48 percent of those who had tried out the new online music-streaming service had stopped using it. However, Apple said the number is much lower.
"79 percent of people who signed up for a trial are using the service," a spokesman for the company said at the time.
The Apple Music app is pre-installed with iOS 8.4 and is available in more than 100 countries.
Three months on from initial launch, the phone giant claimed it had 15 million users: 6.5 million paying customers and 8.5 million on a three-month trial.
After promising it would launch its music streaming app on rival Android, Apple debuted Apple Music beta for Android in November last year.

Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall announce engagement


They announced their engagement in the births, marriages and deaths section of the Times newspaper, which is owned by Mr Murdoch's News Corporation company.
It will be the fourth marriage for Mr Murdoch, 84, and the first for Miss Hall, 59, although she lived with singer Sir Mick Jagger for many years.
The new relationship reportedly began in the summer. A spokesman said: "They have loved these past months together." 
He added they were "thrilled to be getting married and excited about their future".
Australian-born Mr Murdoch, who now has US nationality, split up with his third wife Wendi Deng in 2013. 

World Cup final

American Miss Hall's 23-year relationship with Rolling Stones frontman Sir Mick, with whom she had four children, ended in 1999. 
Mr Murdoch and Miss Hall were first spotted together in public in October at the Rugby World Cup final in London between Australia and New Zealand.
The Times reports the couple were introduced in Australia by one of Mr Murdoch's sisters and his niece.
It says the couple got engaged while in Los Angeles at the weekend, where they attended the Golden Globe awards ceremony.
The notice in the paper reads: "Mr Rupert Murdoch, father of Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan, James, Grace and Chloe Murdoch, and Miss Jerry Hall, mother of Elizabeth, James, Georgia and Gabriel Jagger, are delighted to announce their engagement."