Fake News Defence

I have read on blog something about rare earth metals and Canada and it didn’t sound right. I looked into it to determine whether it really was fake news.

Varianta în limba română pe FaṭăCarte Meta Zamolxis.

• a news summary about Canadian rare earths on a popular blog made me read a poorly translated AP news release on Profit.ro
• I summarized previous news on the topic
• there are better alternatives to that incompetent copy

I read Zoso’s blog despite what I have written in the past about it (not positive), or his words (should’ve been here?). That’s water under the bridge. He managed to post regularly for many years, whereas I, as it is obvious, have not.

Looking at his regular news summaries, one item stuck with me – it was about Canada (where I live) and rare earth metals (which I follow). And it came out the left field.

His summary is not necessarily wrong (as we should soon see) but to me it sounded that way: first and foremost, “rare earths exports” in Romanian sounds like “soil exports”, and that’s not what “rare earths” refers to (yet this is the “state of the art” term); nevertheless, that’s the correct term in both RO & EN. They are heavy metals that are found everywhere on earth but typically in very low concentrations, making their extraction prohibitively expensive. China, who has the lion’s share of higher concentration sites, has subsidized their extraction to the point where there isn’t much of this going on in the rest of the world, then started to restrict exports, which caused a complaint with WTO, who found it a violation of its rules in 2014-2015 (apn-wtouphlds). Following this ruling, China scrapped its export quotas (apn-zheases), while worries persisted (apn-rrerths), which is why Japan is moving ahead with its deep-sea exploitation (scial-jpnre, nat-jpnre).

Apart from neglecting the context, the P~.ro item is very poorly written. Not only that there’s an apostrophe where there’s no need for one (in front of “Canada”), but either the word “Canadei” or “tarii” is redundant, making the very first sentence in that article hard to comprehend even for a native speaker. When you lead with such glaring errors, it’s hard to take the rest seriously. As for “first time”, the natural resources minister (blmb-wlknsn) as well as the finance minister (bnn-frlnd) have long been signaling this, nevermind previous decisions.

Given the weird news item on Profit.ro, I looked again at the news as reported by my favourite BNN (bnnblmb-cdablckszh), which, unfortunately, is but a mirror of Bloomberg news (blm-trdcrckdn).

To conclude, while Zoso did his best to summarize a poorly written article on profit.ro, I’d recommend going straight to the source, if you can read English. That’s not possible with Agerpres, because, as I recall, you cannot link inside that website. There’s also “informat.ro”, a new project that comes with a phone app – see today’s virals (inftr-2106vir) and online (inftr-2106onln) summaries and decide for yourself.

Sources / More info: zr-sz200624, pr-vnzrmtrr, bnnblmb-cdablckszh, apn-zheases, apn-rrerths, blm-trdcrckdn, apn-wtouphlds, inftr-2106vir, inftr-2106onln, scial-jpnre, nat-jpnre, blmb-wlknsn, bnn-frlnd,

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