The first road bridge linking Russia and China is complete following the launch of a natural gas pipeline between the two countries.
The new bridge, which spans the River Amur and is expected to open in the spring, will link the city of Blagoveshchensk in Russia’s Far East with Heihe in northeastern China in an effort to move larger amounts of freight traffic and agricultural products between the two countries.
Construction started in 2016, and while it was completed on the Chinese side by October 2018, the Russian side took longer and was more expensive. The bridge itself required the construction of more than 12 miles of new roads, which was done by a Russo-Chinese company.
The project cost about $295 million and spans more than 1,700 feet, according to CBS News. About 2 million Chinese tourists and 4 million metric tons of goods are expected to cross each year.
This was the first Chinese-built power plant in Europe, whose opening led to the creation of jobs and a pouring of investment into the infrastructure of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A tour inside the Stanari Thermal Power Plant, which has become a source of pride in the local community.
Tsinghua Unigroup, one of China’s leading chipmakers, has hired Japanese semiconductor industry veteran Yukio Sakamoto as a senior vice president and also head of the company’s Japan unit.
Sakamoto, 72, served as chief executive of once-leading Japanese chipmaker Elpida Memory, which was established by combining the memory chip units of NEC and Hitachi.
Sakamoto led Elpida for over a decade, from 2002 to 2013, successfully listing the company’s shares on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2004. But the financial crisis and falling chip prices hurt the company’s finances, eventually leading to its bankruptcy in 2012 and its acquisition by U.S. peer Micron Technology the following year.
Besides Sakamoto’s experience, the Chinese government-backed Unigroup likely aims to put his connections in Japan and beyond to work as it expands its reach.
In a move to stem its property prices from soaring beyond the grasp of ordinary folks like in Hong Kong, Shenzhen is introducing a new reform to its housing system.
The municipal government this week published a regulation stipulating that plots sold for subsidised housing should be priced at 30% to 40% of a benchmark land rate which it has just implemented across the city, reported the South China Morning Post yesterday.
Newly affordable homes in its downtown area, where the special economic zone originally was, will be capped at 50,000 yuan (RM29,601) per sq m (10.8 sq ft). In other areas, the ceiling price for affordable homes will be 20,000 and 30,000 yuan per sq m, reported the state-run Shenzhen Special Zone Daily.
The mega tech-city which links mainland China to Hong Kong has become a place with one of the most expensive properties when its average residential price increased more than 10 times to above 50,000 yuan per sq m between 2005 and 2015.
The first Chinese container train departed from the city of Jinan, the province of Shangdong, on 24 September. A month later, on 24 October, it arrived at the Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) railway station in Belgrade. The train has travelled a distance of around 10,500 kilometres via Mongolia, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.
On the Serbian section of the route, the wagonset loaded with 28 containers was hauled by a Siemens Vectron locomotive of Serbia Cargo (Srbija Kargo), the country’s state-owned rail freight operator. The Jinan – Belgrade train delivered equipment weighing 500 tonnes, including transformers, cables, integrated automation systems for substations, remote control systems for the contact network and other solutions for the future Budapest – Belgrade high-speed line.
The Event 201 scenario Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.
Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.
The disease starts in pig farms in Brazil, quietly and slowly at first, but then it starts to spread more rapidly in healthcare settings. When it starts to spread efficiently from person to person in the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods of some of the megacities in South America, the epidemic explodes. It is first exported by air travel to Portugal, the United States, and China and then to many other countries. Although at first some countries are able to control it, it continues to spread and be reintroduced, and eventually no country can maintain control.
There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year. There is a fictional antiviral drug that can help the sick but not significantly limit spread of the disease.
Since the whole human population is susceptible, during the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week. And as the cases and deaths accumulate, the economic and societal consequences become increasingly severe.
The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.
The project is valued at $3.9bn, Nigerian media reported, adding that it would be a public-private partnership, with Nigeria providing an equity stake of 15%, CRCC an equity stake of 10%, and the remaining 75% borrowed from Cina’s Export-Import (Exim) Bank.
The project includes the construction of a new port at Warri, reports said.
CRCC will operate the railway and the port to recover its investment.
Biological weapons could be built which target individuals in a specific ethnic group based on their DNA, a report by the University of Cambridge has warned.
Researchers from Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) said the government was failing to prepare for ‘human-driven catastrophic risks’ that could lead to mass harm and societal collapse.
In recent years advances in science such as genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles have opened the door to a host of new threats.
