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VOL. CCLXIII NO. 61 * * * * * * * *

SATURDAY/SUNDAY, MARCH 15 - 16, 2014

HHHH $2 .00

WSJ.com

Crisis in Ukraine Divisions in Crimea............... A8 Economic fallout for Central

and Eastern Europe.............. A9 Russia rewrites history of

Soviet Union’s collapse........ C3

zon.com Inc. as the largest e-commerce company in the worldmeasured by the amount of busi-ness conducted on its websites.Its business model combines fea-tures of Amazon, eBay Inc. andGoogle Inc.

Its largest website, Taobaomarketplace, is home to morethan six million Chinese mer-chants selling their wares. It isfree to sell on Taobao, whichwas launched in 2003; Alibabacashes in by selling advertisingto merchants that want to standout.

In 2008, it started a secondconsumer website called Tmall,

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mimicked—and often improvedupon—Web innovations first de-veloped in the West. A next stepin their evolution could be tobring their services into newmarkets, posing unexpectedchallenges to entrenched U.S.companies.

For now, the sheer size of theChinese market has created anopportunity that should makefor a splashy sale for U.S. stockinvestors. They have latelypoured money into dozens ofnew IPOs, eager to find growthin a stock market where salesgrowth has been hard to find.

Alibaba, based in Hangzhou,China, long ago surpassed Ama-

2012 deal, which raised $16 bil-lion. It would be a boon to U.S.stock markets, which have beenin competition with Hong Kongfor the listing.

Separately, China’s version ofTwitter, Weibo Corp., unveiledplans Friday to sell $500 millionof stock in the U.S. The messag-ing service had 129 million usersas of December, compared withTwitter’s 241 million.

Alibaba and Weibo are largelyunknown in the U.S. but theirscale and financial performanceshow how a new breed of Asianplayer is entering the global In-ternet arena.

These companies have deftly

Two of China’s biggest Inter-net companies are moving tocash in on the red-hot U.S. mar-ket for new issues.

E-commerce giant AlibabaGroup Holding Ltd. is preparingfor a U.S. initial public offering,according to people familiar withthe matter, which would be oneof the biggest ever in the U.S.

The deal under considerationwould raise more than $15 bil-lion, these people said, rivalingor surpassing Facebook Inc.’s

Black entrepreneurs havelargely missed out on a reboundin federal small-business lendingsince the financial crisis ended.

More than four years into thenation’s economic recovery, Afri-can-Americans looking for loansare struggling to overcomedeeper financial distress, tighterlending standards and cutbacksby some lenders.

U.S. financial institutionsmade $382.5 million in SmallBusiness Administration loans toblack-owned businesses in thefiscal year ended Sept. 30, ac-cording to an analysis of theagency’s data by The Wall StreetJournal. Black borrowers re-ceived 1.7% of the $23.09 billionin total SBA loans.

The percentage is downsharply from 8.2% of overall SBAloan volume in fiscal 2008. Bynumber of loans, black-ownedsmall businesses got 2.3% of thefederal agency’s roughly 54,000

loans last year, down from 11% in2008.

The declines among blacksmall-business owners are un-usually steep compared with

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WEEKEND

THE

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REVIEW

APrescriptionForDelicious

OFF DUTY

n China Internet behemothsAlibaba and Weibo are pre-paring for IPOs in the U.S.,with Alibaba poised to raisemore than $15 billion. A1n GoDaddy is preparing foran IPO, with shares of theInternet-domain companypotentially trading in thesecond half of this year. B3n The FDIC is suing U.S. andinternational banks for theiralleged role in manipulatingthe Libor benchmark. B2n The Dow for the weeklost the most it has in anyweek since January, sliding2.4% to close at 16065.67. B1n Black borrowers havelargely missed the bounce-back in government-backedsmall-business loans. A1n The Fed earned enoughinterest income to deliver$79.6 billion to the Treasuryin 2013, as its balance sheethit $4 trillion overall. A2n Vivendi is talking withAltice to sell the bulk of itscellphone arm as it seeks toexit the telecom business. B4n Quiznos filed a prepack-aged Chapter 11 bankruptcycase as the sandwich chainreached a deal to reduce itsdebt by about two-thirds. B4n The value of U.S. bondsheld by foreign central banksat the Fed shrank by a recordamount this past week. B5

What’sNews

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Business&Finance

World-Wide

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CONTENTSBooks........................ C5-10Cooking................... D1,6-8Corporate News B1,3-4Heard on Street.......B14Letters to Editor.... A12Opinion................... A11-13

Sports............................ A14Stock Listings.... B10-11Style & Fashion.... D2-4The Week...................... C4Travel........................ D9-10Weather Watch...... B13Wknd Investor.... B7-10

s Copyright 2014 Dow Jones & Company.All Rights Reserved

>

InsideNOONAN A13

WarningsFrom the

Ukraine Crisis

The investigation intothe missing Malaysia

Airlines jet has uncoveredstrong indications someonemay have intentionallychanged its course and triedto mask its whereabouts. A1 The international huntfor the plane widened afternew information that it wasstill flying hours after itblinked off the radar. A7n Federal officials are de-signing a workaround to ex-tend a March 31 deadline forhealth-care coverage if thereare last-minute glitches. A3n The U.S. government ispreparing to give up over-sight of Icann, a body thatmanages domain names andaddresses for the Internet. B1n Long talks on Ukraine be-tween the U.S. and Russiabroke down ahead of a refer-endum Sunday on whetherCrimea should join Russia. A1n The Ukraine crisis posesserious economic and secu-rity threats to nations inCentral and Eastern Europe. A9n Obama’s review of U.S.deportation practices cre-ates a potential conflict be-tween two of his goals. A4n Iraq’s oil production forFebruary surged to its high-est level in 30 years. A7An A move is afoot amongU.S. government agencies toredefine “manufacturing.” A3n Died: Tony Benn, 88, Brit-ish socialist, renounced hisaristocratic title rather thanleave the House of Commons.

The investigation into the dis-appearance of Malaysia AirlinesFlight 370 sharpened its focus onsabotage, according to aviationand industry officials, amid strongindications that one or more peo-ple on the plane deliberatelychanged its course and tried tomask its location.

Officials suspect two differentsystems were shut off after theplane took off last weekend, oneshortly after the other, people fa-miliar with the investigation said.About an hour into the flight, theplane’s transponders stoppedfunctioning, making it more diffi-cult for air-traffic control person-nel to track or identify it via radar.

In the ensuing minutes, a sec-ond system sent a routine aircraft-monitoring message to a satelliteindicating that someone made amanual change in the plane’s di-rection, veering sharply to thewest. Such a turn wouldn’t havebeen part of the original autho-rized route programmed in theflight-management computer thatcontrols the autopilot. Those sys-tem-monitoring messages are sus-pected to have been disabledshortly afterward, according tosome of these people.

“Increasingly, it seems to beheading into the criminal arena,”said Richard Healing, a formermember of the U.S. National

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BY ANDY PASZTORAND JON OSTROWER

PlaneProbeTurns toSabotageSystems DisabledManually on Jet,Officials Suspect

LONDON—A last-minute U.S.diplomatic effort aimed at halt-ing Sunday’s referendum in Cri-mea on joining Russia collapsedafter six hours, pushing the Westto the verge of imposing punish-ing sanctions on Moscow thatwould raise East-West tensionsto new heights.

The rupture Friday of negotia-tions shifted pressing new im-portance onto what happensover the next few days: Sunday’svote in Crimea, the Kremlin’s re-action to the results, the re-sponse by the West and the omi-nous military movements alongthe Ukrainian border by Russia.

President Barack Obama andEuropean leaders vowed afterthe diplomatic failure to beginimposing sanctions on Russia

quickly if the Crimean regionvotes to secede from Ukraine.

Russia continued staging mili-tary exercises with thousands oftroops along its border withUkraine, stoking Western fearsthat Russian President VladimirPutin could seek to hive off addi-tional territory from the formerSoviet republic.

U.S. and Russian officialsdidn’t rule out Mr. Putin’s mov-ing within days to absorb Crimeaafter Sunday’s vote.

“It’s pointless to speculate, weneed to wait for the results,”Russian Foreign Minister SergeiLavrov said in London after histalks with U.S. Secretary of StateJohn Kerry. “Everyone under-stands, and I say this with all re-sponsibility, what Crimea meansto Russia.”

The peninsula was Russianterritory until 1954 and is home

to Russia’s main naval base onthe Black Sea.

Mr. Kerry and other U.S. offi-cials publicly stressed that thedoor for discussions overUkraine remained open and thatthere were ways for the West toaddress Moscow’s security con-cerns.

U.S. officials said they raisedwith Mr. Lavrov the prospects ofCrimea’s largely Russian-speak-ing population getting more au-tonomy, including greater powerover taxes, education, languageand voting. They also enter-tained the prospect that Russia’sparliament, the Duma, could de-cide not to ratify the annexationof Crimea after the referendum.

The American delegation inLondon, however, expressed lit-tle real optimism that Mr. Putinwould pull his support for Cri-mea’s secession or step back

from his commitment to absorb-ing the strategic peninsula.

Mr. Kerry said Mr. Lavrovdidn’t appear empowered by theKremlin to engage in negotia-tions on any American proposalsthat might leave Crimea a partof Ukraine.

“I presented a number ofideas on behalf of the president,which we believe absolutelycould provide a path forward forall the parties,” Mr. Kerry said.“However, after much discussion,the foreign minister made it

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BY JAY SOLOMONAND GEOFFREY T. SMITH

Talks on Crimea Break Down

BY RUTH SIMON AND TOM MCGINTY

FINANCE FALLOUT

Loan ReboundMissesBlack Businesses

Note: For fiscal years ended Sept. 30Source: WSJ analysis of Small BusinessAdministration data

The Wall Street Journal

Credit CrunchBlack borrowers are getting asmaller percentage of SBA loanssince the recession hit.

25

0

5

10

15

20

% of total loan dollars

’05 ’07 ’09 ’11 ’130

5Blacks

Hispanics

Asians

Ukrainian soldiers practiced during a military drill northeast of Kiev on Friday. U.S. diplomatic efforts to halt a Sunday referendum in Crimea todetermine if the region of Ukraine should join Russia foundered Friday, just days before the scheduled vote. Latest updates at WSJ.com.

Sergey

Dolzhenko/EuropeanPresspho

toAgency

By Telis Demos,Rolfe Winkler

and Mike Spector

China Web Giants Prep U.S. ListingsTumblingTumbleweedsUpend the West

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Unruly SpoolsAre Rural Scourge;Covered up in Clovis

BY MIGUEL BUSTILLO

Wilford Ransom woke on aMonday morning in January anddiscovered he was trapped in-side his home in Clovis, N.M.

The 80-year-old retiree triedto peer outside, but his windowswere covered. He tried to openhis door, but it would budge onlya few inches.

Frustrated, he called a policeemergency hotline, asking to berescued. Eventually, a neighborhelped dig him out through hisgarage.

Mr. Ransom was held captiveby an unruly bandit: a tangle oftumbleweeds big enough to sur-round his 1,600-square-foothouse.

A bumper crop of the stuffhas sprouted across the South-west U.S. this season, posingproblems for ranchers and ruralcommunities from Texas to Colo-rado.

In music and movies, the soli-tary tumbleweed is a romanticmotif of the Old West, symboliz-ing the free spirit of the prairiein classic cowboy songs such as“Tumbling Tumbleweeds.”

In reality, “those Westernsdon’t do ’em justice,” says Mr.Ransom, a former bank securityguard. “I don’t want to experi-ence anything like that again. Itwas a little scary.”

But the plants that are synon-ymous with the Wild West areactually interlopers. The twomost common species, kochiaand Russian thistle, are fromEurasia. And this winter, thanksto the Western drought, tumble-weeds are anything but lone-

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Disabling plane’s systems wouldrequire expertise........................... A6

Indian Ocean search grows.... A7

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