Friday,  May 9, 2014 • Vol. 16--No. 295 • 29 of 35

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bedrock repository 70 feet underground in the new Sept. 11 Memorial Museum that opens May 21.
• The remains will be accessible only to families of the dead and to the forensic scientists who are still trying to match the bone slivers to DNA from the more than
1,000 victims who never came home and have never been identified.
• "Our commitment to return the remains to the families is as great today as it was in 2001," says Mark Desire, who oversees the four-member World Trade Center team in the city's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
• Of the 2,753 people reported missing at the World Trade Center,
1,115 victims, or 41 percent, have not been identified through a DNA match to items provided by families -- toothbrushes, combs, clothing or swabs from relatives.
• ___

Beating eBay: Alibaba's rise a multibillion-dollar roller coaster of successes and setbacks

• BEIJING (AP) -- Even before Alibaba went online, its founder talked about making the fledgling e-commerce company a global player.
• At Alibaba Group's first staff meeting in 1999, a video shot by an employee shows Jack Ma rallying a workforce of 17 of his friends. They met in a cement-floored apartment in Hangzhou, a city southwest of Shanghai, at a time when few Chinese were online. Ma was an English teacher with no training in business or computers.
• "Our competitors are not in China but in Silicon Valley," says Ma in the video, which is included in a documentary about the company, "Crocodile in the Yangtze," made by a former Alibaba vice president, Porter Erisman. "We can beat government agencies and big, famous companies because of our innovative spirit."
• Such Silicon Valley-style bluster was new to China, but Ma delivered. Over the next 15 years, he helped propel Alibaba through technical and financial challenges and a battle with eBay Inc. to become the world's biggest online bazaar. The company is now planning to list in the U.S. and analysts say its initial public offering this year may raise up to $20 billion.
• Last year, 231 million customers spent $248 billion with merchants on Alibaba's platforms, more than Amazon.com Inc. and eBay combined.
• ___



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