Eideard

Carlos Sousa driving a Great Wall Haval to 7th overall in Dakar 2012

Great Wall Motor has become the first Chinese carmaker to open an assembly plant in Europe as it aims to lift sales in the region.

The factory, in the northern village of Bahovitsa in Bulgaria, will eventually produce 50,000 vehicles a year.

The facility was built together with Great Wall’s Bulgarian partner Litex Motors. It will manufacture Great Wall’s Hover SUV, Steed pick-up and Voleex city car models.

The plant will initially employ 150 workers capable of making 4,000 vehicles per year, rising to 2,000 employees when at full capacity in 2013.

“Great Wall’s plans to build a plant in Bulgaria and produce automobiles here are aimed at boosting our production capacity and exporting these automobiles for the European market,” company president and chief executive Feng Ying Wang said. “We estimate that in three to five years we will have a wide range of models made here and that these cars will be sold in all European countries.”

The sort of enterprise following on economic growth and market penetration by the Asian countries preceding China into Western markets. I expect this will continue with sensible entry and growth models – in Europe. It’s all part of sensible, interconnected globalising of economies. That doesn’t require ideology, prayer or xenophobia.

I think Cold War conservatism will continue to get in the way of similar job creation in the United States. A ship of fools.

The final 2 miles held their only encounter with ice

An explorer on Friday said he was “exhilarated” after he and his crew became the first people to row to the magnetic north pole.

Jock Wishart and his five-man team took just under four weeks to complete the 450-mile route. They encountered polar bears and collided with icebergs as they travelled through the Arctic waters in their specially designed vessel.

The trip has only recently become possible because of an increase in seasonal ice melt in the Arctic, which has opened up the waters.

Wishart, who was born in Dumfries, organised the Old Pulteney Row to the pole to highlight the effects of climate change on the ice in the region.

He said: “I think this is one of my greatest achievements. It was a dream four years ago but now it’s reality. Up until last night we still could not say with certainty that we would reach our destination, so we are all exhilarated and relieved that weather conditions were in our favour and we have completed our row to the magnetic north pole while it was still possible.

“It is an enormous achievement, and a privilege for our team to have been part of what is one of the world’s last great firsts…”

Throughout the journey, the rowing crew worked with scientific research partners to provide environmental data on the impact of arctic deterioration on the polar landscape.

RTFA for more of the details. One of the explorers is a cinematographer – so, sooner or later, we’ll get to see a documentary about the expedition.

During the record attempt, the crew consumed 7,000 calories a day. Each.

A spidery crater named for a French composer features in the very first picture MESSENGER took from orbit around Mercury, taken March 29 and released March 30.

Debussy Crater had been known since before MESSENGER’s arrival, thanks to its brilliant appearance in Earth-based radar images of Mercury. But no spacecraft had seen Debussy in visible light until MESSENGER made a flyby on its way into orbit.

The new shot of the 80-kilometer-wide crater is a composite of three out of eight images taken through different light filters. Combining images taken at multiple wavelengths can reveal changes across Mercury’s surface, since different minerals reflect light in unique ways. A black-and-white version of this Mercury picture was released on March 29.

RTFA – go to the NatGeo site and click through each photo and description. Delightful.

Nasser Al-Attiyah (R), co-driver Timo Gottschalk (L) and VW team manager Chris Niessen
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Qatari driver Nasser Al-Attiyah described winning his first Dakar Rally title as “the biggest moment in my career” following Saturday’s final stage of the testing endurance race.

Carlos Sainz won the 13th leg into Buenos Aires from Cordoba to extend his career record of stage wins to 24, but the defending car champion finished third overall behind South African Giniel De Villiers as their Volkswagen team filled the podium.

The 40-year-old Al-Attiyah was delighted following his second-place finish last year, and a disqualification in 2009.
“It means a lot to win a Dakar, for me, for my people, for my country and for my team,” he told the race’s official website after finishing second in the final stage to head off De Villiers by almost 50 minutes.

“It is a great victory. It’s hard to explain everything that goes through your head. But it is a very nice feeling. We demonstrated that we have the strongest team in the world. It is the third time the team has won a Dakar.

I’m the primo maniac in a family of Dakar nuts. It’s the singular form of motorsports that brings together the greatest portion of our extended family.

I’ve been a Carlos Sainze fan for many years; but, I’ve followed Al-Attiyah’s progression through the ranks – mostly driving as a BMW privateer. It’s truly satisfying to watch and witness his first win in the Dakar.

Scientists claimed a breakthrough Thursday in solving one of the biggest riddles of physics, successfully trapping the first “anti-atom” in a quest to understand what happened to all the antimatter that has vanished since the Big Bang.

An international team of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, managed to create an atom of anti-hydrogen and then hold onto it for long enough to demonstrate that it can be studied in the lab.

“For us it’s a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter,” the team’s spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, told The Associated Press.

“This field is 20 years old and has been making incremental progress toward exactly this all along the way,” he added. “We really think that this was the most difficult step…”

Theory posits that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the moment of the Big Bang, which spawned the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. But while matter — defined as having mass and taking up space — went on to become the building block of everything that exists, antimatter has all but disappeared except in the lab…

Scientists have long been able to create individual particles of antimatter such as anti-protons, anti-neutrons and positrons — the opposite of electrons. Since 2002, they have also managed to lump these particles together to form anti-atoms, but until recently none could be trapped for long enough to study them, because atoms made of antimatter and matter annihilate each other in a burst of energy upon contact.

“It doesn’t help if they disappear immediately upon their creation,” said Hangst. “So the big goal has been to hold onto them…”

“We have a chance to make a really precise comparison between a matter system and an antimatter system,” he said, “That’s unique, that’s never been done. That’s where we’re headed now.”

Bravo!

U.S. doctors have begun treating the first patient to receive human embryonic stem cells, but details of the patient enrolled in the landmark clinical trial are being kept confidential.

Geron Corp…has the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration license to use the controversial cells to treat people, in this case patients with new spinal cord injuries. It is the first publicly known use of human embryonic stem cells in people…

Geron’s stem cells come from human embryos left over from fertility treatments. They have been manipulated so that they have become precursors to certain types of nerve cells.

The hope is that they will travel to the site of a recent spinal cord injury and release compounds that will help the damaged nerves in the cord regenerate.

The Phase I trial will not be aiming to cure patients but to establish that the cells are safe to use. Under the guidelines of the trial, the patients must have very recent injuries…

“When we started working with human embryonic stem cells in 1999, many predicted that it would be a number of decades before a cell therapy would be approved for human clinical trials,” Geron President and CEO Dr. Thomas Okarma said in a statement.

Bravo!

UPDATE: Here’s more information on the study in progress in Atlanta.

Took six days to film

Hong Kong director Christopher Sun is currently filming his $3.2 million ’3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy’, which is due for release in May, but Italian director Tinto Brass has already announced he will produce a 3D remake of his 1979 erotic film Caligula.

Although mainland Chinese censors are almost certain to block the movie’s screening, it has sparked wide interest in other Asian markets, including Japan and South Korea, as well Europe, and the United States.

Producer Stephen Shiu said: “This is the future of the movie business — it’s human nature to want to see things in 3D.”

Adding to the pressure, the American company Hustler is making a pornographic spoof of 3D science fiction blockbuster Avatar, the highest-grossing movie of all time and the film that heralded the beginning of the mainstream 3D boom.

Are we supposed to be gullible enough to believe it takes more than a week or two to produce, edit and turn out a porn film? 3D or otherwise?

It is to laugh.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Trinidad and Tobago made history this week when it swore in Kamla Persad-Bissessar as the Caribbean nation’s first female prime minister.

“Change has, indeed, come,” Persad-Bissessar, 58, told a boisterous crowd in Port-of-Spain. “Today, we start the work of transforming the hope and promise of change into the reality of change.”

Persad-Bissessar was elected Monday when her People’s Partnership coalition won 29 of the 41 seats in Parliament.

She defeated incumbent Prime Minister Patrick Manning, who had been in power for 13 of the last 17 years.

Bravo!

Sexual health charity Marie Stopes has launched the first UK TV commercial to offer advice on abortion services.

The TV ad shown on Channel 4, features a number of women from different walks of life who are “late”. A voiceover says that being late for a period could mean pregnancy.

“If you’re pregnant and not sure what to do Marie Stopes International can help,” runs the voiceover. The ad finishes with the strapline “Are you late?…”

Marie Stopes said that the ad, which has been made by ad agency icreate4, will “empower women to reach confident, informed decisions about their sexual health”.

“Many will be surprised that only now will the first advert be broadcast on television to give women information about options they have following an unwanted pregnancy,” said Naomi Phillips, the head of public affairs at the British Humanist Association.

“It is vital that women with unintended and unwanted pregnancies are able to access, in a timely way, accurate, objective information about all of the options open to them. It seems that television advertising could be an effective way of reaching thousands of such women, and is to be welcomed.”

Even if our government here in the States would back up the right to offer such an advert, we’d have to sue most TV networks to get them to run it.

Stepping forward into the 21st Century ain’t too likely when dealing with religions, politicians and corporate governance rooted solidly in the 19th Century.

Arab nations are leading a “historic” charge to make the world wide web live up to its name. Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses to contain no Latin characters.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts.

The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil…

The three new suffixes will allow web addresses to be completely written in native characters.

The first country codes:

Egypt: مصر
Saudi Arabia: السعودية
United Arab Emirates: امارات

“All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written fully right-to-left,” said Kim Davies of Icann in a blog post.

One of the first websites with a full Arabic address is the Egyptian Ministry of Communications.

RTFA for questions and fixes.

This is as welcome as all those preceding.