Trading in the shares of Aluminium Corporation of China (Chalco) were suspended yesterday in both Shanghai and Hong Kong, ahead of a signing ceremony in Beijing later today where a joint venture with Rio Tinto is expected to be formalised.

Commodities were booming as the growth story in the East continued to plough ahead – and the uranium price was no different. Uranium soared to $136 a pound from less than $10 between 2000 and 2007.

Then reality set in. The credit crunch caused an unwinding of the global economy and the uranium spot price plunged. It currently sits at $41.75. The price has collapsed by 69pc in a three-year bear market e_SEnD but speculation is mounting that China may be about to tip sentiment in the favour of bulls.

Talk has emerged of unprecedented levels of uranium buying from China. The canny Chinese have been buying stockpiles of a number of commodities while prices are low and it looks like they could have focused their sights on uranium.

While the wild Bactrian camel in China and Mongolia is much too timid and critically endangered to be milked, its domestic double-humped Bactrian cousin and the Dromedary camel (report, July 11) both provide milk that is much more than just palatable.

Camel milk is known to arrest, though not cure, diabetes, and, by drinking a litre of camel milk a day, some diabetics have been able to give up insulin.

I am in a minibus travelling at heart-stopping speed along a two-lane road heading out of Ulaanbaatar. It is Naadam, the annual July festival that is the highlight of Mongolian life for locals and visitors alike. This is the only time when a country known for its remarkable emptiness (just 2.6 million people in over 600,000 sq m) experiences crowds and chaos.
We are driving to where the main horse races take place. And we are travelling fast, with no regard for rules of the road or even, it would seem, basic common sense. Mongolians are evidently not used to having to stop or give way for anyone.

The compendium of ill thought out web addresses, largely from companies who naively slurred their innocent-sounding names into a single word without noticing the resulting double entendres, lists more than 150 “slurls”, or slur URLs.

One example of what can go wrong when choosing web addresses is Big Al’s bowling alley in Vancouver, which presumably did not notice when naming its site that “I love Big Al’s” with spaces removed could equally be read as “I love bi gals”.
Also included in the list is the Mole Station Nursery, a business in Australia selling gardening goods which adopted the web name “molestationnursery” before changing it to “molerivernursery”.

China is considering measures to force all its 400m internet users to register their real names before making comments on the country’s myriad chat-rooms and discussion forums, in a further sign of tightening controls on freedom of speech.

The move comes less than a week after China announced a hardening of its State Secrets law, requiring internet and mobile phone operators to inform on their customers and co-operate with police demands for information on users.

Известный экономист Нуриэль Рубини (Nouriel Roubini), предсказавший кризис до его наступления, утверждает, что причину глобальных потрясений стоит искать не в субстандартной ипотеке, а в «субстандартной» – ненадежной и неэффективной – финансовой системе. Британская The Daily Telegraph приводит выдержки из новой книги Нуриэля Рубини и Стивена Мима (Stephen Mihm).

Хакер, называющий себя Krillos, разместил в сети объявление о продаже 1,5 млн аккаунтов, украденных из социальной сети Facebook, сообщает The Daily Telegraph.

Цена пароля от каждой странички варьируется от 1 до 20 долларов, выяснили эксперты компании Symantec, занимающейся обеспечением информационной безопасности в сети. В настоящее время распродано около 700 тысяч аккаунтов. Это значит, что каждая трехсотая страничка многомиллионной сети сменила владельца.

If there was a competition to find the ugliest city on Earth, then the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator would be the leading contender for the title. The combination of grim, Soviet-style concrete high-rises, rambling slum-shanties and towering coal-fired power plants belching out smoke over the city reeks of the depression and decay that was a legacy of decades of communist rule.
But look more closely and it is clear that change is afoot in this mineral-rich former Soviet acolyte which is on the cusp of a mining boom that has led investors to describe Mongolia as the “Kuwait of Central Asia”. The augurs of new wealth are already visible on Ulan Bator’s dowdy streets – luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Armani have opened branches in the past year, catering to customers in Range Rovers and Porsche Cayennes. And in the city’s Grand Khaan Irish Pub the vanguard of the coming investment boom can be found quaffing pints and discussing deals – suited diplomats and investment bankers rubbing shoulders with rough-necked mining engineers and their suspiciously pretty local “girlfriends”.

Lawyers representing Stern Hu, the Rio Tinto executive on trial in China, said he had been treated fairly and was “relaxed” ahead of Monday’s verdict.
Mr Hu, an Australian, was arrested in July along with three Chinese nationals – Liu Caikui, Wang Yong and Ge Minqiang – and charged with receiving bribes and stealing commercial secrets during fraught iron ore pricing talks.

Лидер КНДР Ким Чен Ир владеет 4 миллиардами долларов в “экстренном фонде” в банках Европы, пишет The Daily Telegraph со ссылкой на информацию южнокорейской разведки. Секретные счета нужны на случай, если Киму придется покинуть свою страну.

Первоначально деньги размещались в Швейцарии, но после того, как международные правила борьбы с отмыванием денег были ужесточены, представители Кима перевели их в Люксембург. Причем, по данных спецслужб, они сперва обналичили их, а затем перевезли на территорию герцогства, где и положили на счета в банках.

China plans to cash in on the soaring copper price by using its substantial reserves to snap up global assets while prices are low.
Lu Youqing, vice-president of Aluminium Corp of China (Chinalco), said that the state-owned group was studying worldwide copper resources to identify the best investment opportunities.

More than 2,000 years after it was built to keep out their ancestors, Mongolians have succeeded in punching a hole through a large section of the Great Wall of China.

Next summer, Mike Ashton and his crew will drive nearly 10,000 miles in the Mongolian Charity Car Rally 2010, through 20 countries to Mongolia – and, once there, they plan to leave their car.
That’s because they’re competing in the Mongolia Charity Car Rally 2010, in which entrants donate their vehicle, equipment and cash to suitable charities in the remote country. The Rally starts on July 11.

Anna Murphy discovers that it’s Mongolia’s vast emptiness that gives its people a sense of community and belonging.
I have been to all sorts of remote places over the years but nowhere has prompted as much reaction as my most recent destination. “Mongolia?!” people would exclaim when I told them my travel plans. “Why?” they would ask, rolling their eyes. And then I’d tell them I was drawn by the immense nothingness – it’s a country more than six times the size of England yet with only about 600 miles of surfaced roads – and by the very fact that it is difficult to imagine a place more “other” or unknown.

I have been to all sorts of remote places over the years but nowhere has prompted as much reaction as my most recent destination. “Mongolia?!” people would exclaim when I told them my travel plans. “Why?” they would ask, rolling their eyes. And then I’d tell them I was drawn by the immense nothingness – it’s a country more than six times the size of England yet with only about 600 miles of surfaced roads – and by the very fact that it is difficult to imagine a place more “other” or unknown.
Even before my plane landed, this otherness was clear. We flew low over the country for an hour and all I saw was mile after mile of softly rolling golden steppe, the only occasional interruption coming in the shape of a round white ger, the traditional Mongolian tent in which the majority of the population still lives.

But the “bad boy” of Japan’s sumo world is in hot water with the sport’s elders who considered the gesture to be “intolerable” and not in keeping with the ancient sport’s gracious traditions.

Asashoryu, who holds the title of yokozuna, the highest rank in the sport, defeated fellow Mongolian and bitter rival Hakuho in the play-off bout to decide the winner of the tournament on September 27.

Rio Tinto will announce significant progress on its debt reduction this week after spot prices of commodities soared in the first half of the year.

The Adventurists is a Bristol-based “experience” company that chomps those charity-funded “challenges” to the Great Wall of China, chews them up a bit and then spits them out in an anarchic, anything goes kind of way.

Adrian Bridge explores his macho side as he learns to shoot arrows during a stay in a traditional Mongolian ger.
There’s a painful lesson that most people staying in a Mongolian ger learn early on: you have to mind your head.

На саммите G8, прошедшем на прошлой неделе, стало очевидно, что Китай, а также Индия, Россия и некоторые другие страны, сомневаются в том, что доллар может и должен остаться фактически глобальной валютой, пишет 12 июля в Sunday Telegraph управляющий директор Capital Economics и экономический консультант Deloitte Роджер Бутл (Roger Bootle).

Британские медики утратили данные о десятках тысяч пациентов, сообщает Daily Telegraph. Эта информация была представлена Национальной службой здравоохранения (NHS) Великобритании.