"The Artist" is New York critics best film of 2011 (omg!)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Film Critics Circle on Tuesday named silent film "The Artist" the best movie of the year, and gave its top acting honors to Meryl Streep and Brad Pitt.

Michel Hazanavicius won best director for "The Artist," a black-and-white film about Hollywood's transition from silent films to talkies in the late 1920s and the toll it takes on one actor's life. In the romantic drama, a couple played by Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo find themselves on opposite sides of a career arc -- his descending as her star begins to shine.

The film began to generate buzz at festivals earlier this year and received strong reviews. With Tuesday's important, early win from the New York film critics, "The Artist" positions itself as a key competitor in the race for this year's Academy Awards, the film world's highest honors which are handed out in February.

Streep won the New York critics' best actress award for her portrayal of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady," while Pitt was cited for his performances in two films, sports drama "Moneyball" and drama "The Tree of Life."

It was Streep's fourth best actress win from the critics' group and Pitt's first.

Jessica Chastain was named best supporting actress for her performances in three films, "The Tree of Life," "The Help" and "Take Shelter."

Veteran actor Albert Brooks won best supporting actor for his turn as a small-time mobster in thriller, "Drive."

The best screenplay award went to "Moneyball"'s Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin.

"It's a nice lineup with some surprises," the group's chairman, critic John Anderson, said of the winners.

He noted that while most categories required many ballots, there was also no rancor. He called the group "hardly a unified mass," but told Reuters the choice of "The Artist" made sense.

"It's a film about film, so it would appeal to the critical sensibility. It's a movie that celebrates movies."

"But it's also well done," Anderson added. "And it's upbeat, joyful, and just hard to resist."

The group shunned some presumed Oscar contenders such as "The Descendants" and "Beginners," though Anderson noted the former film had some strong support.

The New York based film critics organization was founded in 1935 and comprises members from daily newspapers, weekly newspapers, magazines and some online general-interest publications.

Awards from critics groups and other industry panels often influence which films, performers and movie makers will compete for Oscars, which are given out by the Beverly Hills-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The New York critics group's pick for best non-fiction, or documentary, film went to "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," Werner Herzog's 3D movie about a cave in southern France.

The critics named Iran's "A Separation," about a couple struggling with the decision about whether or not to leave their home country, as the year's best foreign language film.

Best cinematography went to Emmanuel Lubezki for "The Tree of Life" and best first feature to "Margin Call."

A special award was also announced for filmmaker Raoul Ruiz, who died in August aged 70.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

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Gogo goes global: partnership with Inmarsat to give you the internet on international flights

Ahh, Gogo, what a fantastic addition you've been to domestic airline travel. Besides keeping rowdy kids entertained with internet access, it affords well-traveled tech bloggers the ability to do what we do at 30,000 feet. And now, Gogo's wondrous WiFi will do the same for international passengers thanks to Inmarsat's Global Xpress satellite internet service. The partnership adds speedy Ka-band satellite technology to Gogo's existing air-to-ground service starting in 2013. After launching the Inmarsat-5 satellite in midyear, up to 50Mb/s speeds will be at your flying fingertips in some (currently undefined) regions, with worldwide coverage coming in 2014. Full details of your inflight future await in the PR after the break.

Continue reading Gogo goes global: partnership with Inmarsat to give you the internet on international flights

Gogo goes global: partnership with Inmarsat to give you the internet on international flights originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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German police clear huge sit-in at nuke protest (AP)

BERLIN ? German police say they have cleared a sit-in of thousands of protesters attempting to block a shipment of nuclear waste and have detained 1,300 people.

Police said hundreds of officers started evicting protesters from the rail lines near Dannenberg in the north of the country early Sunday. Those who refused to leave were detained and are being brought before judges later.

Police put the number of protesters at 3,500 while protest organizers said 5,000 people had occupied the tracks that will be used to transport a nuclear waste shipment that has been reprocessed in France to a storage site near the town of Gorleben.

Police say two groups of about 250 activists each are currently hurling stones and fireworks at officers. They say several officers were injured and at least 10 people detained.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111127/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_nuclear_waste

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China's younger generation: lifestyle counts as much as work

China's younger generation is leading a shift away from a job-is-everything work ethic in favor 'naked resignation' ? leaving one job before finding another in order to pursue personal interests.

Early this year Song Hao, a stocky, bearded video editor in his late 20s, began to feel that the job he'd been doing for nearly four years was boring, leading nowhere, and certainly not worth the overtime he was made to do every evening.

Skip to next paragraph

"I wanted to take a break and use the time to do something I really liked, even if it didn't earn me any money," Mr. Song said one recent evening over a cappuccino in a Beijing cafe.

So he quit.

He had no other job lined up, or any immediate plans to find one. He did, though, have enough savings to keep him going for a few months and a burning desire to make a short movie with some friends. And that's what he did. Three months later he went back to work, at a different company.

Such a casual attitude to the workplace would have been unthinkable in China just five years ago. But in an emerging social trend, growing numbers of young people "are more concerned with their own feelings and their happiness and less worried about salary and status," says Hong Xiangyang, founder of the Sunward employment agency in Shanghai.

"These 'little emperors' live for themselves," Mr. Hong adds, using the familiar epithet for products of China's one-child policy. "They find it hard to bow to the demands of the group" and are less willing to put up with a job they don't like just because they are supposed to.

Hong first noticed the phenomenon early last year, he says, as more and more clients began coming to him in search of a job having already left the one they had been doing. So he started studying what has become known as "naked resignation" because people quit without being covered by the security of another job.

"I reckon about 80 percent of big-city dwellers between 22 and 35 have thought about naked resignation and 22 percent have done it," estimates Hong. "And half of them have been in the workforce for less than three years."

Song had worked at the same job for four years and had a project in mind when he quit. He regards himself as extremely responsible compared with younger colleagues.

"Today's young people think completely differently from their parents," adds Li Changan, professor of labor economics at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. "If they are not happy in their job, they'll quit as soon as they can."

Until 1994, Chinese college graduates were assigned a job by the government and expected to stay in it for the rest of their lives. Blue-collar kids, as often as not, took the jobs their mothers and fathers retired from.

Even the freedom to choose an employer, when it was introduced, did not encourage everyone to do so in a country accustomed to an "iron rice bowl" ? cradle-to-grave security ? from the state.

Today's entrants into the workforce, though, are much more demanding, and they can afford to be, says Tian Zhimin, who heads a boutique employment agency in Beijing. "As China's economy grows, enterprises need to hire more talent and more different kinds of talent," he says. "There are a lot of job opportunities."

That suits young women with an adventurous streak such as Sally Zhou, who says she wants "to try everything new" and believes that her generation, freed from the sorts of shortages that bedeviled her parents and grandparents, "should experience anything they want to."

Ms. Zhou walked out of a job at a Beijing public relations firm last July, she says, because she was moved from a department she liked to one she did not without being consulted. "I'm not a quitter," she says, "but I didn't like the way they didn't talk to me about the transfer."

So she went off to Inner Mongolia for a couple of months, picking up a temporary gig by chance as a tour guide, before returning to Beijing.

Zhou speaks English and German and says she is confident she will find another job soon. But she admits she is a little worried about the impact on her career of having quit impetuously.

Chen Lin, another 20-something woman with a habit of following her instincts, is becoming a serial "naked resigner." She quit a job as a receptionist at a five-star Beijing hotel after only two months because she was fed up with sudden shift changes. It took her only two weeks to find another job.

Nine months later she walked out of that job, too, complaining that her employer "thinks I should be proud to do overtime without pay."

Until recently, Chinese employees would have put up with that. But the youngest yuppies today regard such demands as unreasonable and are not prepared to work long hours for comparatively low salaries. "If they feel under heavy pressure at work, they leave," says Professor Li.

"As living standards in China improve, this will get more and more common," says Hong, who points to similarities between the current generation of young Chinese and the '60s generation in America. "Young people will listen more to their hearts."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/zOnnJP4koNU/China-s-younger-generation-lifestyle-counts-as-much-as-work

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Award-winning poet Ruth Stone dies at 96 (Reuters)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? Award-winning poet Ruth Stone, who drew imagery and inspiration from the natural sciences, has died at age 96 in Vermont, her daughter said on Thursday.

Stone, who won the National Book Award in 2002 for her collection of poems "In the Next Galaxy," died last week in Ripton, Vermont, surrounded by her three daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Phoebe Stone told Reuters.

"She died of natural causes, she was 96," said Stone, who is an author of children's books.

For 20 years Stone taught creative writing at several U.S. universities, including the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, the University of California at Davis and Brandeis. She finally settled at State University of New York at Binghamton.

She was named Vermont's poet laureate in 2007.

A native of Roanoke, Virginia, Stone raised her children alone after her husband committed suicide in 1959. She described her work as "love poems, all written to a dead man" who forced her to "reside in limbo" with her daughters.

Stone was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson: Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis)

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At least 26 bodies dumped in Guadalajara (Reuters)

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) ? Suspected drug gang hitmen murdered at least 26 people and dumped their bodies in the center of Mexico's second city of Guadalajara on Thursday as a showdown between rival drug gangs intensified.

The bodies were found in several vans abandoned around the western city's iconic Millennium Arches monument, together with a message from drug cartels.

An official with the attorney-general's office said the death toll could rise beyond the 26 confirmed so far.

It is the fourth mass public dumping of bodies in regional centers in just over two months, a rash of killings officials blame on a brutal turf war between rival drug cartels which is ricocheting from one side of the country to the other.

Murders in Guadalajara, capital of the state of Jalisco and home to mariachi music and tequila, have spiked in the last year as the Sinaloa cartel's hold on the city has weakened.

The death of key lieutenant Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel in a shootout with soldiers in Guadalajara in July 2010 opened the door to gangs including the Zetas and Milenio, from neighboring Michoacan state, trying to muscle in on the Sinaloans' turf.

Local media said the message found with the bodies, dumped less than 1 mile (kilometre) from the site where the Guadalajara International Book Fair will be held from Saturday, purported to be from the Zetas and was directed at Sinaloa boss and Mexico's most-wanted trafficker, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.

Officials blamed a group with ties to Guzman for two mass dumpings of more than 60 bodies, seen as a signal to the Zetas, in the eastern port city of Veracruz in September and October.

The discovery of the latest bodies, many of them bound and shot in the head, follows the dumping of 16 charred corpses in the Sinaloan capital Culiacan on Wednesday.

"Members of organized crime are confronting each other, fighting for their turf. It could be that an atrocity happens in one part of the country and the bill is paid in another state," Sinaloa state governor Mario Lopez told local radio.

Among the Culiacan dead were at least seven people, three of them police officers, who had been kidnapped from a small Sinaloan town on Monday, a local official said on Thursday.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed the army to crack down on powerful criminal gangs and some 45,000 people have died in the conflict since he took office.

Security forces flocked to Guadalajara, home to 4.5 million people and famed for its mustachioed musicians in wide-brimmed sombreros and top-flight soccer team, last month as the city hosted the Pan American Games, but have since left the city.

Organizers of the book fair expect about 600,000 visitors to the exhibition hall for the event they bill as the most important on the Spanish-language publishing calendar.

The U.S. consulate in Guadalajara warned on February 3 of "a marked escalation of criminal activity." It banned U.S. government officials from traveling after dark between the city and its main airport and urged U.S. visitors to follow suit.

Drug violence has already engulfed the northern business hub of Monterrey, a city of similar size to Guadalajara, prompting some companies to freeze investment.

(Writing by Patrick Rucker; editing by Anthony Boadle and Todd Eastham)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111124/wl_nm/us_mexico_deaths

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Boy, 14, jailed for buying drugs on resort island

BALI, Indonesia?? An Australian teen was sentenced to two months in detention Friday for buying drugs while vacationing with family on Indonesia's resort island of Bali.

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Presiding Judge Amzer Simanjuntak told the packed Denpasar district court that ? when taking into account time already served ? the 14-year-old would be freed in just over a week and immediately deported.

"It's better to give a jail sentence, but the shortest possible, which would enable him to be given back to his parents sooner," Simanjuntak said, according to a report in the Herald Sun newspaper.

The prosecutors had asked for a three-month sentence.

The boy, who cannot be identified by name because of his age, sat sobbing, his head bowed down, as his father patted him on the back consolingly while the judge spoke.

Remorse
Though he could have faced up to 12 years under Indonesia's tough narcotics laws, the panel of three judges said it decided to be lenient because he admitted to buying 0.13 ounces of marijuana from a man in front of a supermarket and repeatedly expressed remorse.

The teen, who has been in an immigration detention center since his Oct. 4 arrest, earlier promised to enter a drug rehabilitation program if he was allowed to return to his home in Morrisset Park, north of Sydney.

He said he had been struggling for some time with his addiction.

Australia ? which has seen dozens of its citizens jailed or placed on death row for drug possession in Indonesia ? had been closely watching the trial.

'Lessons to be learned'
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd welcomed the court verdict that he said meant the boy and his family would probably be back home by Christmas.

"I'm sure there are lessons to be learned by this young man as well," he told the Sun Herald.

Many argued the boy was too young to be jailed.

But critics noted that dozens of Indonesian children tied up in people-smuggling cases have been languishing for years in Australian detention centers.

The Associated Press, Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45433766/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/

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Graffiti as art in order-conscious Singapore (Reuters)

SINGAPORE (Reuters) ? In an industrial park near Singapore's harbor, a group of people spray-paint a wall with the bright colors and rebellious swirls of graffiti.

Under other circumstances, their action would lead to prompt arrest. But the "taggers" are artists taking part in a performance highlighting the urban art form.

Graffiti is seriously frowned upon in Singapore. Last year, a Swiss man was jailed and caned for vandalism after he spray-painted a subway train.

But the perception in the city-state that graffiti is nothing more than vandalism by wayward youth is changing, thanks in part to art festivals like the one at the industrial estate, part of the Voilah! French Festival Singapore.

"There is still a sense of graffiti as anti-social behavior, but when people see it in a gallery, it becomes an artistic endeavor," said Howard Rutkowski who helped organize the event and exhibited 72 pieces of graffiti art on canvas at a gallery in the estate.

Even among aficionados, though, the purpose of the art form is open to debate.

Two years ago, a group of graffiti artists found themselves barred from the only government-sanctioned arena where spray painting is allowed, a youth park in a shopping district.

The reason given was that they wanted to spray paint messages in support of children victimized by the Palestine-Israel conflict.

"Graffiti is not political, it is a form of expression, something to be explored in the city," said Yann Lazou, one of the Frenchmen painting the wall in the industrial park.

Graffiti art is proving popular.

One piece sold for 7,500 euros at the exhibition, snapped up by a European collector. Two pieces by Dubai-based graffiti artists Sya and Bow went for about S$2,000 ($1,540) each at a separate event.

But even as graffiti gains among collectors, its acceptance appears to be qualified.

"Graffiti on a cardboard or canvas as a form of painting is a piece of art. But graffiti painting cars or walls is irresponsible," said Singaporean art collector Elson Ng.

Singapore graffiti artist Shah Rizzal, who also took part in the event, hopes his country will some day grow to view his work favorably and embrace it on a larger scale and more openly.

"Perhaps graffiti will one day grow beyond the gallery and infiltrate the institutional space," he said.

But that may take some more time. Even for the event, the artists didn't paint on a real wall but on a special, temporary one erected for the performance.

(Additional reporting by Kevin Lim; Editing by Elaine Lies and Robert Birsel)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/arts/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111123/stage_nm/us_singapore_graffiti

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Video: OWS descends on DC angry with Obama, Congress (cbsnews)

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Astro Shows X Factor Viewers What He's Got

What do you want from Astro, people? He's from Brooklyn!

Following last week's controversial results show reaction - which was either staged by producers or simply a consequence of Astro's age/attitude - this young rapper spent his introductory video last night giving thanks to his supporters. He then kicked off his cover of "Show Me What You Got" with a reference to his hometown.

From there? What can we say: the guy has serious talent! Simon Cowell actually said he admires Astro and appreciates his "unpredictability," while L.A. Reid referred to him as a "gentleman" and Nicole Scherzinger also expressed pride in the performance. Will Astro return to the bottom two this week?

Gauge his latest for yourself:

Astro - Show Me What You Got

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/11/astro-shows-x-factor-viewers-what-hes-got/

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Soha Ali Khan joins the item number band wagon

Following the footsteps of her yet- to- be sister- in ?law Kareena Kapoor, Soha Ali Khan will also be seen doing an item song now. The cute actress has just shot for a peppy club track opposite Abhay Deol in Sudhir Mishra’s forthcoming project ?Tera Kya Hoga Johnny?. Slipping the details of her dance number, [...]

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Amazon Wireless drops all Verizon, AT&T and Sprint phones to a penny, will not be undersold

Don't be so quick to file this one under "duh!" -- Amazon's added a whole lotta sweetener to its usual smartphone-for-a-penny pot. If your frugal heart's been holding out hope for a discounted drop of the high-end mobile goods, now would be the time to pounce. The Seattle-based web retailer's wireless arm is throwing every phone from Sprint, Verizon and AT&T under the $0.01 umbrella for a limited time. Starting today and running until the 28th, you can snatch up a Galaxy S II Skyrocket, Droid RAZR, Rezound or Focus S (just to name a few) for one Lincoln-embossed, copper-plated piece. But there's a catch, and you knew it was coming. In order to take advantage of this Crazy Eddie-like steal, you'll have to sign up for a new line of service. So, bust out the credit card (and your credit report), the mobile bargains lie in wait at the source.

Continue reading Amazon Wireless drops all Verizon, AT&T and Sprint phones to a penny, will not be undersold

Amazon Wireless drops all Verizon, AT&T and Sprint phones to a penny, will not be undersold originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Granada vs. Mallorca match abandoned

Associated Press Sports

updated 7:09 p.m. ET Nov. 20, 2011

GRANADA, Spain (AP) -A Spanish league match between Granada and Mallorca on Sunday was abandoned in the 63rd minute after a linesman was hit in the face by an umbrella hurled from the stands at Los Carmenes stadium.

The referee immediately ordered his fellow officials and the teams off the pitch, with Granada winning 2-1. After some 20 minutes, he announced the match would be continued at a later date.

Granada coach Fabricio Gonzalez said "We are in a state of shock. Our fans have always helped us and this is a pity."

Granada returned to Spain's topflight this season after 35 years in lower divisions.

It is currently in the relegation zone after 11 games.

? 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Beckham looks for fantastic?finish

David Beckham will play for his first MLS championship on Sunday with the Los Angeles Galaxy, hoping to lift the Cup in vindication of his groundbreaking American experiment.

Harold Cunningham / Getty Images

Blatter?'sorry'

FIFA President Sepp Blatter apologizes, sort of, for offending people with his racism remarks but refuses to resign.

Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/45379752/ns/sports-soccer/

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How the Original Facebook Phone Failed [Facebook]

Facebook is working on a phone! But Facebook has been working on a phone. What's new? Well, it's a completely different project because their first top secret effort crashed and burned. It's a sordid history of employee jealousy, secret plans, power struggles and just plain failure. More »

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Mich. congressman: Distant relative's sex abuse claims 50 years ago are 'false and shameful' (Star Tribune)

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[OOC] Pairings

Forum rules
This forum is for OOC discussion about existing roleplays.

Please post all "Players Wanted" threads in the Roleplayers Wanted forum!

This topic is an Out Of Character part of the roleplay, ?Love and it's consequences?. Anything posted here will also show up there.

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Forum for completely Out of Character (OOC) discussion, based around whatever is happening In Character (IC). Discuss plans, storylines, and events; Recruit for your roleplaying game, or find a GM for your playergroup.

So for the pairings, each guy is going to pick the top two girls he'd like his chachter with. One of them will be his mate, the other will be his true love. So even if some is picked twice, they dont have to fight over her. (fun as that may be.) One person will have them as their mate, the other will have her as their true love. I pick the mate/true love part.

Horseygirl

Member for 2 years

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Counting China's wild pandas

By Adrienne Mong

YINGJING, SICHUAN?The panda was always one of my favorite animals.

Until I found myself slipping and sliding down a steep muddy mountain slope in southwestern Sichuan, looking for panda poop.

To be precise, someone else was searching.?

My colleagues and I were just attempting to keep up with him on what was easily one of the more physically grueling NBC News assignments we?d all been on in years.

Li Guiren, a fleet-footed 36-year old Sichuan native who works at the Chinese Forestry Department, was hiking through the mud, following coordinates on his bright yellow GPS device.? He?s one of 70 ?trackers? working in Sichuan to count pandas in the wild?which they do by collecting panda droppings.? (More on that in a moment.)

China kicked off its panda census last month.? It?s the fourth one since the 1970s, when they instituted the practice to keep tabs on the worldwide panda bear count every?10 years.

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The wild panda is only found in China, across parts of three provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, and Shaanxi, covering 5,400 square miles.? Or the size of Connecticut.

The bears like being high up, usually somewhere between 4,000 and 11,500 square feet above sea level in mountain forests with a damp climate.

The last census revealed only 1,596 wild pandas existed with 290 pandas in captivity around the world.

Adrienne Mong / NBC News

Li Guiren takes notes on the geography on a Sichuan mountain.

?About 70 to 80?percent [of all the pandas in the world] live in Sichuan,? said Huang Zhi of the Bifengxia Panda Breeding Center in Ya?an, Sichuan.? ?Sichuan also has the highest number of wild pandas.?

Trackers in the field
Sichuan is also where the two-year panda census project has launched.? Smaller teams in Gansu and Shaanxi will begin working in the field next year.

Early in the morning, a group of twenty men suited up in wet-weather clothes and thin boots.? They reviewed their cartographic materials and compared notes one last time before setting off.? Each one carried the same bright yellow GPS device Li was toting.

Li, who took part in the last panda census, said new technology has had a huge impact on their work.? ?We can get a lot more done more quickly,? he said, with the GPS device shaving the amount of time in the field down by about?30 percent.

Each tracker is assigned a near-vertical tract of land to explore.? On average, they cover 1.2 to 1.5 square miles a day, looking for panda droppings.? (A typical male panda roams in a territory about 3.3 square miles whereas a female confines herself to 1.8 square miles.) ?Li found a pile that looked like it had been produced within the past three days, which he bagged and brought back to base camp for analysis.

?We take a sample for DNA testing,? he said as he prepared the panda waste.? ?The DNA test demands fresh feces not more than four days old.? This is very fresh.?

But DNA testing isn?t foolproof so Li and his colleagues also measured the undigested bamboo scraps to help identify the pandas individually.? ?We measure the width of the teeth marks,? he explained. ?Each bear has an individual bite with differing teeth sizes.

Habitat challenges
While in the panda?s natural habitat, the research teams also take detailed notes of the conditions and its geology.?

?What people normally care about is the number of the pandas,? said Gu Xiaodong, a scientist with the Sichuan branch of the Wildlife Survey Conservation and Management in the Forestry Department.? ?We care more about the quality of their habitat.?

With the data the trackers are collecting, the scientists will be able to analyze changes to the habitat and "draw up more effective conservation policies," continued Gu.? ?For example, last time we found pandas in locations between the reserves we had established,? he said.? ?So we had to set up more reserves to protect these pandas.?

Adrienne Mong

Li Guiren and other researchers measure undigested bamboo in the panda droppings to help identify each animal.

Researchers also hope to have more detailed information about the impact of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which measured 7.9 (by the U.S. Geological Survey) and devastated the famed Wolong Giant Panda Reserve Center, one of the earliest research bases set up by the Chinese government in the early 1980s.?

But humans remain the biggest threat to the survival of wild pandas.

With more than 80 million people, Sichuan is one of China?s more densely populated provinces. ?In recent years, it has seen large inflows of government investment and is rapidly urbanizing.? Scientists have cited roads and high-speed railways as a major hazard encroaching on the panda?s natural habitat in the mountains.

But mining is also a problem.? The day we trudged up the mountain with Li and Gu, we passed a couple of mines?one of them lead, whose run-off cast an unhealthy gray tinge to the river.? Loud explosions went off even during our hike, unsettling us as much as the pandas.

?The place where we are doing research now, it?s always been a traffic-intensive area with a lot of human activity,? said Gu.? ?The pandas here probably choose to go higher.?

But they still sometimes descend into human territory, especially if it means getting something to eat other than bamboo plants.?While the giant panda's diet consists mostly of bamboo,?they do have the digestive system of carnivores.?

Gu confirmed that local farmers have regularly complained about pandas raiding their livestock.? ?One farmer has his goats eaten by pandas every year,? recalled Gu, who said the Forestry Department offers compensation in such instances.

Mating challenges
Mating habits are also a challenge, particularly for pandas in captivity.

Female pandas are only in heat for three days a year.? The window for conceiving is very narrow?from 12 to 24 hours during those 72 hours.

Adrienne Mong / NBC News

The panda's natural habitat is a rugged landscape, but it's also being encroached by China's westward development.

Pandas in the wild don?t generally have a problem reproducing, said Huang from the breeding center.? But those in captivity usually need a bit of help?whether through artificial insemination or even the famed panda porn method.

Despite the success in breeding the cuddly animals in captivity, there?s been none so far in re-introducing fully domesticated pandas into the wild.

Nonetheless, researchers say they think breeding programs and conservation efforts have worked to keep the panda from advancing any closer to extinction.

?We really hope once the census is done, we?ll find more pandas than we found in the last census,? said Li.? ?That will mean what we?ve been doing has made progress.?

And if the scientists are right, that will make at least one civilian very happy.

A man by the name of An Yanshi in Sichuan is collecting panda poop by the bucket-loads to make tea?with curative properties.

?Pandas have a very poor digestive system and only absorb about?30 percent of everything they eat,? An has been?quoted as saying.? ?That means their excrement is rich in fibres and nutrients.?

He plans to market the tea as the world?s most expensive?at $36,000 a poop.? A pop.? A pound.

Source: http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/21/8851483-counting-chinas-wild-pandas

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