China lashed out at the United States on Monday after the Obama administration sent six Uighur Chinese detainees from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay to the Pacific island nation of Palau.

China has repeatedly demanded that the Uighurs be returned but the U.S. government has said it could not do so because they would face persecution, and it has searched for months for a nation willing to accept them.

With a due sense of the gravity of its task, Argus issued a description of its index in a document labelled a white paper -- a term typically reserved for drafts laws issued by the British government. The physical oil market, where traders exchange barrels of oil or financial instruments derived from them, is transacted not on a trading floor or electronic exchange, but by phone, instant messaging and – although employers have clamped down on it — the long liquid lunch.

Back in October of 2008, when the subject of Obama’s Constitutional eligibility to be president of the United States was just a blip on the radar screen of public awareness, I wrote an article about how easy it was to find my then -92-year-old mother’s birth certificate.