- China, Vietnam, Philippines collide amid escalating South China Sea tensions
CNN May 9, 2014
After using water cannons on Vietnamese ships in disputed waters, Beijing demanded Thursday that they withdraw.
Hong Kong (CNN) -- Tensions escalated in the South China Sea region this week after China, Vietnam and the Philippines were involved in a series of potentially explosive confrontations over disputed territory.
Vietnamese officials say Chinese military and civilian ships have been intimidating their vessels near the Paracel Islands -- which are controlled by Beijing but claimed by Hanoi -- since Sunday, even accusing the Chinese of repeatedly ramming into them and shooting water cannons.
But China blames Vietnam for forcefully disrupting drilling activities, and demand that it withdraw all vessels from the area, said Yi Xianliang, Deputy Director-General of the Department of Boundary and Ocean Affairs in a press briefing yesterday.
Meanwhile, a Chinese fishing boat and its 11 crew members were apprehended on Tuesday by Philippine authorities near the Spratly Islands, another disputed region in the South China Sea.
Philippine officials say the boat was carrying a large number of endangered species and they seized the boat "to uphold Philippine sovereign rights" in the disputed waters.
"It's possible that an armed clash could occur, but not a full-fledged war. The situation with Vietnam is serious -- more serious than the situation with the Philippines," said M. Taylor Fravel, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
"China has controlled the northern half of the Paracel Islands since the 1950s and the southern half since 1974. Unlike the Spratly Islands, China maintains that no dispute exists over the Paracels. So we can see that China believes that its claim there is quite strong," he added.
2.Protesters descend on Thai capital seeking government's ouster
CNN May 9, 2014

Thai anti-government protesters rally
Bangkok (CNN) -- Thousands of protesters have surrounded Bangkok's Government House seeking the removal of Thailand's embattled caretaker government, amid soaring political tensions in the wake of former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra's ouster.
The People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), which has been protesting against the government since November, is pushing to replace the country's caretaker administration with an unelected interim government.
Protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban took to the stage and told those gathered: "We will sleep here tonight, we will eat here. After lunch ... we will go to visit the Parliament House, because there is a meeting to select a new Speaker of the House today.
"If the Speaker is a slave of Thaksin, there will be one treatment; if not, there will be another treatment for them."
The PDRC has been seeking to rid Thai politics of the alleged influence of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Yingluck's telecommunications tycoon brother who was overthrown in a 2006 military coup and has since lived in self-imposed exile to avoid a corruption conviction.
Lt. Gen. Paradon Patthanathabut, security adviser to the prime minister told CNN that the PDRC had mobilized supporters from the countryside to join the protests in the capital. "It is still difficult to estimate the crowd at this moment. But roughly, we think between 30,000-60,000 people might join today's rally."
He said smaller groups of PDRC protesters were also gathering around Bangkok television stations.
"We are monitoring (the situation) closely," he said, adding that 60,000 security forces were on standby.
Despite the large crowds gathered, the scene at Government House was relaxed, with stalls being erected and free food and drink handed out. A minute's silence was held for those killed in the country's longstanding political conflict.
At another demonstration at the Royal Thai Police Club, police used tear gas and water cannon on protesters who attempted to enter the complex, said Paradon.
'Judicial coup'?
The march comes at the end of a week of political chaos in Thailand, which saw Yingluck removed from office by a top court Wednesday, in what her supporters see as a "judicial coup," and indicted by an anti-corruption body Thursday.
Her supporters are planning their own mass rally to protest the decisions Saturday.
Members of the National Anti-Corruption Committee unanimously decided to indict Yingluck for dereliction of duty over her government's controversial rice subsidy scheme, NACC member Wicha Mahakun told reporters in Bangkok Thursday. The Senate will now vote on whether to impeach her.
3. Ukraine crisis: Why did Putin intervene in referendum?
BBC 8 May, 2014
As Eastern Ukraine spiralled into violence in the last few weeks there has been lots of fury from Moscow, but few insights into President Vladimir Putin's strategy.
That all changed on Wednesday, when he met Swiss President Didier Burkhalter.
Straight after the meeting he told a surprised Kremlin press corps that he was calling on the armed pro-Russian activists in Eastern Ukraine to postpone their controversial referendum.
It was the first sign that he wanted to try to bring Ukraine back from the brink of civil war. Though he made it clear who he thought had taken it there.
"The responsibility for what is happening in Ukraine now," he declaimed, "lies with the people who carried out an anti-constitutional seizure of power, a coup d'etat, and with those who supported these actions and gave them financial, political information and other kinds of support and pushed the situation to the tragic events that took place in Odessa."
"I can understand the people in southeast Ukraine, who say that if others can do what they like in Kiev, take up arms and seize government buildings, police stations and military garrisons, then why shouldn't they be allowed to defend their interests and lawful rights?"
But what is his plan now? Why did he intervene in the referendum at this late stage?
Well firstly he told us that it was not Russia's job to solve the crisis.
"The idea that Russia holds the key to resolving the problem is a trick thought up by our Western partners and does not have any grounds in reality. No sooner do our colleagues in Europe or the US drive the situation into a dead end, they always say that Moscow holds the keys to a solution and put all the responsibility on us."
But he did say that he believed a "full-fledged and equal" dialogue between the government in Kiev and people representing the southeast is the best solution.
A bloody dead-end?
A senior source close to President Putin told me that Russia would even support the Ukrainian presidential election on 25 May if the talks started, and if Kiev stopped using violence in the southeast.
It may be a sign the President Putin thought the fighting in the Donetsk region was heading into a bloody dead-end that might be about spiral out of control.
Or it may be a sign that he feels that the next round of sanctions would hurt Russia too much, and he thinks the annexation of Crimea is sufficient punishment of Kiev and the EU and the US for now.
But it may just be a delaying tactic, a way of seeming to be doing something while knowing that the conflict will continue, further undermining the government in Kiev.
Certainly his closing remarks were not very optimistic.
4. Young Blood May Hold Key to Reversing Aging
The New York Times MAY 4, 2014
In the 1950s, Clive M. McCay of Cornell University and his colleagues tested the notion by delivering the blood of young rats into old ones. To do so, they joined rats in pairs by stitching together the skin on their flanks. After this procedure, called parabiosis, blood vessels grew and joined the rats’ circulatory systems. The blood from the young rat flowed into the old one, and vice versa.
Later, Dr. McCay and his colleagues performed necropsies and found that the cartilage of the old rats looked more youthful than it would have otherwise. But the scientists could not say how the transformations happened. There was not enough known at the time about how the body rejuvenates itself.
It later became clear that stem cells are essential for keeping tissues vital. When tissues are damaged, stem cells move in and produce new cells to replace the dying ones. As people get older, their stem cells gradually falter.
In the early 2000s, scientists realized that stem cells were not dying off in aging tissues.
“There were plenty of stem cells there,” recalled Thomas A. Rando, a professor of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine. “They just don’t get the right signals.”
Dr. Rando and his colleagues wondered what signals the old stem cells would receive if they were bathed in young blood. To find out, they revived Dr. McCay’s experiments.
The scientists joined old and young mice for five weeks and then examined them. The muscles of the old mice had healed about as quickly as those of the young mice, the scientists reported in 2005. In addition, the old mice had grown new liver cells at a youthful rate.
The young mice, on the other hand, had effectively grown prematurely old. Their muscles had healed more slowly, and their stem cells had not turned into new cells as quickly as they had before the procedure.
The experiment indicated that there were compounds in the blood of the young mice that could awaken old stem cells and rejuvenate aging tissue. Likewise, the blood of the old mice had compounds that dampened the resilience of the young mice.
Amy J. Wagers, a member of Dr. Rando’s team, continued to study the blood of young mice after she moved in 2004 to Harvard, where she is an associate professor. Last year, she and her colleagues demonstrated that it could rejuvenate the hearts of old mice.
To pinpoint the molecules responsible for the change, Dr. Wagers and her colleagues screened the animals’ blood and found that a protein called GDF11 was abundant in young mice and scarce in old ones. To see if GDF11 was crucial to the parabiosis effect, the scientists produced a supply of the protein and injected it into old mice. Even on its own, GDF11 rejuvenated their hearts.
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