Singing in the Brain.

Falling off a cliff. News Items (Part 2).

1. A vast deposit of one of the most highly coveted metals on Earth could potentially be located in the region around Mount Everest, according to Chinese scientists. The researchers’ discovery of lithium near the world’s tallest mountain comes as global demand for the metal has been skyrocketing, sending prices to record levels and further fuelling geopolitical competition for strategic resources. The ore deposit may contain as much as 1.0125 million tonnes of lithium oxide, according to the group of scientists from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The spot price of lithium metal in the Chinese market soared to more than 2 million yuan (US$316,000) per tonne earlier this month – more than four times the price a year ago. (Source: scmp.com)

2. Yango Group needed only a few words to sum up the crisis facing China's ailing property developers: "falling off a cliff." That was the company's grim assessment of its prospects in a sluggish real estate sector, as the midsize developer warned that January contracted sales fell nearly 52% to 6.71 billion yuan ($1.06 billion), adding to the pain of a 15.7% year-on-year drop in 2021. "The overall market environment and the company's fundamentals in 2021 appear to be falling off a cliff," Yango, based in the coastal city of Fuzhou, revealed in a stark disclosure to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on Friday evening. It has been a similar story for scores of other debt-swamped developers battered by bond defaults and credit-rating downgrades, lawsuits, tumbling share prices and a weaker real estate market, as China moved to contain surging property prices. (Source: asia.nikkei.com)