Thai police fire tear gas in clash with hundreds of protesters

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of anti-government protesters who pushed through barriers and clashed with security forces on Saturday as thousands gathered seeking to overthrow Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra's government.

The royalist Pitak Siam group, led by retired military general Boonlert Kaewprasit, accuses Yingluck's government of corruption and being a puppet of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, Yingluck's brother.

It has attracted the support of yellow-shirted members of the People's Alliance for Democracy who helped destabilize and topple governments led or backed by Thaksin in 2006 and 2008.

Thaksin remains a deeply divisive figure in Thailand. He was ousted in a 2006 military-backed coup and fled the country in 2008 shortly before being found guilty of abuse of power.

"If I can't overthrow this government, I am prepared to die," Boonlert told supporters in Thai. In English, he said: "The world will see this corrupted and cruel government. The world can see the government under a puppet."

At least seven police were wounded and up to 132 protesters arrested in a clash near the U.N. Asia-Pacific headquarters, a stone's throw away from the main rally site.

Authorities have deployed 17,000 police at the rally site and the government has invoked the Internal Security Act allowing police to detain protesters and carry out security checks and set up roadblocks.

Police say they have seized various weapons, including knives and bullets, from among the 9,000 gathered at the site.

"We used tear gas because protesters were blocking police and did not comply with the security measures we put in place," police spokesman Piya Uthaya told a local TV station.

Thailand has seen frequent bloody street protests in recent years including a rally that lasted more than two months by supporters of the present government in 2010. Those protests sparked a military crackdown that left at least 91 people dead and more than 1,700 injured.

"At this stage, the government is more a threat to itself. If it overreacts using an army of policemen that's going to enrage demonstrators and things could get out of control," said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political analyst at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

"The use of tear gas is a bad omen and conjures images of the 2008 anti-government protesters who forced their way into government house and parliament."

The protest highlights tensions that have been simmering since Yingluck's Puea Thai party swept to victory in July 2011.

Protesters held signs with pictures of Yingluck including one bearing the caption "PM=Puppet Moron" as others waved yellow flags associated with the royal family.

"I'm telling Thaksin that if he wants to return to Thailand, he needs to bow before the king and serve his prison sentence," Boonlert told the demonstrators.

Thailand has seen a series of political protests since 2006 with pro-Thaksin and anti-Thaksin groups taking turns to challenge various administrations' right to rule.

(Editing by Nick Macfie)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/thai-police-fire-tear-gas-clash-hundreds-protesters-052421950.html

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Awareness, Insight & Optimization: How Entrepreneurs Can Use

Thousands of new businesses are started in the U.S. every month. Budding entrepreneurs with minds full of ambition and great ideas turn their understanding of a consumer or business problem within a market into a new product or service solution.

But there?s more to starting a business or launching a new product than a great idea and a market in need of a solution.

Many new businesses score well with the solution they?ve created including the logistics of suppliers, manufacturing, and distribution to bring that product or service to market. However, one of the greatest challenges of starting a new business centers on marketing:

?We have a great product, but how do we get people to buy it??

Over the years I?ve had a chance to talk with many entrepreneurs and business owners with great ideas and great minds for engineering, creativity, and accounting. Many do not possess the same acumen for marketing. Especially in specific areas like social media marketing.

At a coffee shop recently, I overheard a business consultant meeting with a woman who wanted to start a new business with a unique line of upscale tea. With a solid product and business plan, the only major questions seemed to be about things like a website, blog, and social media.

Publicity, SEO, and product sampling were mingled with other marketing and advertising concepts as if they were all the same thing. I could understand why she was uncertain, being provided with so many options and considerations.

When considering how to communicate to a market about a new product or service, there are several important questions that social media can help solve for a new business owner:

• Who is talking about the problem your product solves?
• Where are they talking about it and what language are they using?
• Who are the influencers actively able to affect awareness and product use?

To help answer those key questions, here are three ways entrepreneurs can use social media to gain insight, grow awareness, and optimize their online marketing.

Listen for Insight - Social media monitoring is an ongoing effort to assess online interest trends and for hits about a particular topic during a given moment in time. Our upscale tea entrepreneur could leverage a basic tool like Trackur, a mid-market tool like Vocus (a TopRank Online Marketing client), or a robust tool like Radian6 to uncover conversations from real customers as they discuss their favorite teas, where to find them, what they like, and what they don?t like. Social listening can help uncover other key insights that could fuel social media outreach, content, and engagement to drive relevant awareness of the upscale tea.

Social media research and listening are also useful for identifying topically relevant influencers. In any given online community, there are people who make recommendations that others really listen to and act on. In combination with community participation, the social listening tools above, and influence tracking services like Klout, Kred, Traackr or Followerwonk, our tea seller can find centers of influence in the upscale tea-drinking community.

Content is the Engine of Marketing ? Social content for marketing often starts with a blog where new business owners can talk about the story of their product and how it solves important problems in the marketplace. A blog can also serve as a communication channel with other blogs in the industry, the media, customers, and a community.

Our upscale tea entrepreneur could start a blog highlighting new teas and welcome conversations with customers and tea fans in general. The blog could serve as a living FAQ repository and as a hub to other social participation channels including Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Blogs are also excellent marketing resources to attract new customers actively looking for products and services through search. What better time to be easy to find than when customers are actively looking? Findable and sharable content makes the social web go ?round.

Monitor, Measure and Refine ? Social media analytics and optimization is a growing trend for successful businesses, and taps into marketing performance data and web analytics to reveal insights into the success of specific messages, media, and offers. Those data-driven insights can provide direction for optimizing social media marketing efforts for better performance, whether it?s different topics for blog posts, words used in tweets, or types of images shared on Pinterest. Google Analytics is an easy choice for entrepreneurs because of the free cost and robust features including some social media-tracking integration.

The sheer volume of information created and promoted on the social web can be overwhelming. With the right questions and tools, entrepreneurs or business marketers with companies of any size can leverage that data and the connections between people the information represents to better understand the digital marketplace, the voice of the customers, who can influence sales, and insights to optimize marketing performance.

If you?re an?entrepreneur, how have you leveraged social media to launch a new product or service? What was some of the best (and worst) advice you received?

A version of this post originally appeared on my Social Media Smarts column at ClickZ.

Source: http://www.toprankblog.com/2012/11/entrepreneurs-social-media-marketing/

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China must speed up financial reform to sustain GDP growth: Moody's

BEIJING (Reuters) - China must accelerate the pace of financial reform in coming months to sustain economic growth, ratings agency Moody's Investor Services said, forecasting the world's No. 2 economy will grow 7.5 percent each year from 2012 to 2014.

Expectations of steady expansion means China is unlikely to suffer any economic "hard landing," or abrupt slowdown, Moody's said, but warned that the days of easy growth for the world's fastest-growing major economy are over.

Difficult financial reforms that make space for a more market-driven system must be made to cut inefficiencies, it said. At the same time, China no longer enjoys the wide berth it had before to bolster growth in unforeseen downturns.

"Without more market-based price signals driving the efficient allocation of capital and improving the competitive delivery of services, China's trend growth rate will likely slow more rapidly than otherwise," Moody's said in a report.

Crucial areas of reform include increasing market-based competition, improving regulation to allow greater certainty and transparency on future rules and decisions, and making China's hulking state firms more efficient, Moody's said.

While these changes should uncover new engines of growth, the road will not be smooth sailing.

The 4 trillion yuan stimulus from Beijing four years ago that led to explosive growth in China's local government debt and rapid expansion of its banks means the country can no longer indulge in a credit binge if the economy swoons, Moody's said.

Banks were especially imperiled by China's previous credit extravagance, it said, noting China's total bank assets doubled in the past four years, leaving them exposed to industries now mired in excess production capacity.

Total assets in China's banking system are now worth 240 percent of the country's gross domestic product at 113.3 trillion yuan ($18.2 trillion), substantially higher than any other major emerging economy, Moody's said.

As a result, the agency judged Chinese bank asset quality to be "negative" for the next 12-18 months, even though it assessed the banking system to have a "stable" outlook in the period.

China's stabilizing economic growth has arrested the uptick in its banks' bad loan ratio, Moody's said, and there are no indications that asset quality will worsen materially in coming months.

DOUBTS OVER BAD DEBTS

China's four biggest state-owned banks which control about half of the country's total bank assets all have non-performing loan ratios of below 1.5 percent, drawing criticisms from analysts who say the numbers are too low and not to be trusted.

Christine Kuo, vice president of Moody's Financial Institutions Group, said while the agency too has its concerns about China's bad loan data, it cannot prove that the numbers are false.

"We have our concerns, but we have no evidence," Kuo said.

For state-owned enterprises, the economic slowdown will impact different sectors differently, said Kai Hu, vice president for corporate finance at Moody's.

Strategic sectors such as oil and natural gas production and the power grid will hang onto their monopolies, but consolidation measures recently announced by the government will be a blow to the dominance of state-owned enterprises (SOE) in other sectors.

Overcapacity remains a key obstacle, particularly in cyclical industries, Moody's said in its report, pointing out that capacity utilization in China had fallen to 60 percent in 2011 from 90 percent in 2000.

"We think the economic slowdown will be a challenge for SOE adaptability," Hu said.

Growing per capita income will increase cost pressure on companies, he added. Recent market reforms in energy prices will be a boon to suppliers of energy but add cost pressure to consumers.

($1 = 6.2302 Chinese yuan)

(Reporting by Koh Gui Qing; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-must-speed-financial-reform-sustain-gdp-growth-083243910--sector.html

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The Upper Cervical Chiropractic Philosophy, Science, And Art Works

WHEN A CHIROPRACTOR PRESCRIBES, SELLS,?ADVISES, OR GIVES ANY DRUGS OR EXTERNAL?TREATMENT, CONSISTENTLY, TO PATIENTS IN?HIS PRACTICE, TO ALLEVIATE OR CURE THEN DISEASES OF HIS PATIENTS?UNLESS GIVEN THE?LEGAL RIGHT TO DO SO BY A SEPARATE?PRACTICE ACT FOR A FEE DIRECTLY OR?INDIRECTLY RECEIVED, HE IS PRACTICING?MEDICINE WITHOUT A LICENSE. ?The dividing line?is SHARPLY drawn. ANY and all things OUTSIDE the?purview of the Chiropractic principle and practice;?anything given, applied or prescribed from?OUTSIDE-IN, BELOW-UPWARD, comes WITHIN the?principle and practice of medicine, OUR principle is?opposite, antipodal, the re-verse, for everything within the Upper Cervical Chiropractic philosophy,?science, and art works from the ABOVE-DOWN, and the INSIDE-OUT.?

21 November 2012 | Reference and Education

Source: http://www.apodimosstudents.com/reference-and-education/the-upper-cervical-chiropractic-philosophy-science-and-art-works/

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You Can Make Money Performing On The Internet Paid Surveys!

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Source: http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/You-Can-Make-Money-Performing-On-The-Internet-Paid-Surveys-/4274894

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Dec 21 2012 Astrology - planetary shift & divine awakening 11/21 by ...

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Source: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/fotway/2012/11/22/dec-21-2012-astrology--planetary-shift-divine-awakening

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Source: http://www.gooddealdivas.com/2012/11/natural-health-magazine-90-off-cover-price-2.html

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