China – SpecNews

India readies plan to clean Delhi’s air, but won’t focus on vehicles

A traffic policeman wears a mask to protect himself from dust and air pollution as he signals to drivers in New Delhi, India, December 23, 2015.
To match INDIA-POLLUTION/
A traffic policeman wears a mask to protect himself from dust and air pollution as he signals to drivers in New Delhi, India, December 23, 2015.
A traffic policeman wears a mask to protect himself from dust and air pollution as he stands on a road-divider in New Delhi, India, December 23, 2015.
The World Health Organisation said last year that 13 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities were in India, with New Delhi the worst.
Instead, the plan will call for enforcing bans on what some environmentalists regard as relatively minor sources of pollution, including burning of garbage and construction dust.

One man pulled alive from landslide in China’s Shenzhen

A half-buried truck is seen at an industrial estate hit by a landslide in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, December 23, 2015.
Damaged vehicles and containers are seen at an industrial estate hit by a landslide in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, December 23, 2015.
Rescuers walk along tyre tracks at the site of a landslide which hit an industrial park on Sunday in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, December 22, 2015.
On Tuesday, police raided offices of the company that was managing the dump site, Shenzhen Yixianglong Investment Development.
Rescue workers work on a damaged building during search and rescue operations at an industrial estate hit by a landslide in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, December 23, 2015.

Construction chiefs should learn from miners’ woes

Such flexibility is surely prudent for all cyclical stocks be they miners or housebuilders (Other OTC: UBGXF – news) .
That has resulted in two interrelated problems: huge oversupply of most commodities and many miners being over-leveraged.
Many miners had progressive dividend policies that required payouts to slowly increase or, at the very least, stay the same over time.
As the markets turned and the miners began to flounder, these badges of pride soon became albatrosses around their necks.
The root cause of their woes, and indeed those of all commodities producers, is the same China .

Orbite Provides HPA Construction Update

Certain information contained in this document may include “forward-looking information”.
Following the dispute settlement, it was determined that working through the Québec end-of-year construction holiday (December 18th – January 3rd) would not result in commercial production prior to year-end.
MONTREAL, QUEBEC–(Marketwired – Dec 15, 2015) – Orbite Technologies Inc. (ORT.TO)(EORBF) (“Orbite” or the “Company”) announced today that a dispute, now resolved, with one of its contractors will push the end of construction of its HPA production facility and start of commercial production into Q1 2016.
In this document, words such as “may”, “would”, “could”, “will”, “likely”, “believe”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “intend”, “plan”, “estimate” and similar words and the negative form thereof are used to identify forward-looking statements.
Without limiting the foregoing, the information and any forward-looking information may include statements regarding projects, costs, objectives and future returns of the Company or hypotheses underlying these items.

Looking back on a lamentable lack of future-proofing in construction of Forth Road Bridge (From Herald Scotland)

It would appear the 1964 Forth Road Bridge was not, if its whole integrity depends on such individual small components.
THE Forth Bridge, opened in 1890, was deliberately over-engineered after the Tay Bridge disaster in 1879.
THERE are two clear and important messages to emerge from the current Forth Road Bridge fiasco (“Share your car or work from home, bridge drivers urged”, The Herald, December 7, and Letters, December 7, 8 & 9).
Perhaps the hard-hats currently poking at the underside of the Forth Road Bridge might learn a lot by way of similar investigations underneath Stevens’s efforts at Hyndford, and others like it.
This was the case in free university tuition (paid for by scrapping more than 140,000 further education college places) and is now the case in scrapping bridge tolls at a time when all budgets were under pressure.

R3 assembles expert technology team

You are here: Home » News » Banking news » R3 assembles expert technology team to lead distributed ledger initiative
Financial innovation firm R3 announced the team tasked with managing the design and delivery of advanced distributed ledger technologies to global financial markets in partnership with its consortium of member banks.
The R3 collaborative model is the best way to quickly, efficiently and cost effectively deliver these new technologies to global financial markets.
The team brings together a unique set of expertise in electronic financial markets, distributed ledgers and blockchain technologies.
In his fifteen-year career at IBM he specialized in the application of new technology in banking and financial markets.
Ian Grigg, Architecture Consultant: Ian is a financial cryptographer with 20 years experience building secure ledger systems for the internet.

Penda highlights global water crisis with pathway installation

“And will there be enough clean water, if the pollution and population of our planet continuous to grow as expected?”
The temporary installation, named Where the River Runs, will invite visitors to follow the path of an imaginary river as it winds its way through the landscape.
“The water the dinosaurs drank millions of years ago is the same water that falls as rain today,” said Penda architects Chris Precht and Dayong Sun, who have offices in both Beijing and Vienna.
It is the other way around,” they said. “Our task is to find a reasonable way to survive inside its boundaries.”
Architecture studio Penda has designed a meadow containing sunken pathways and concealed meeting places, which opens next month as part of China’s International Garden Expo 2015.

China completes construction of lighthouses in disputed South China Sea

China has completed the construction of two lighthouses in the disputed South China Sea, the official Xinhua news agency reported, as tensions in the region mount over Beijing’s maritime ambitions.
A completion ceremony was held for the lighthouses on Huayang Reef and Chigua Reef in the Spratly islands, Xinhua said late on Friday.
China claims most of the energy-rich South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year, and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have overlapping claims.
Beijing has said construction in the region is to help maritime search and rescue, disaster relief, environmental protection and navigational security.
The issue is central to increasingly tense relations between the United States and China, the world’s two largest economies.

Chinese cash could fund Scottish construction

CHINESE investors could be attracted to plough hundreds of millions of pounds into key Scottish infrastructure projects – such as road upgrading and connecting offshore wind farms to the grid – on the back of moves to encourage foreign involvement in the HS2 high speed rail project.
Earlier this year it was revealed that Scotland is becoming a hotspot for Chinese property investors looking for an alternative to London with Edinburgh in particular attracting interest.
Michael Watson, an infrastructure and projects lawyer at Pinsent Masons, said the visit could also have a knock-on impact north of the Border but only if Scotland is able to present an attractive investment proposition for the Chinese.
Chancellor George Osborne this week travelled to China to try and attract investors there to bid for seven contracts worth £11.8 billion in total covering the first phase of HS2, between London and Birmingham.
The key is to have projects which are visible, well developed and ready to be invested in, because we are competing in an extremely competitive global market and the Chinese and other overseas investors have a wealth of options on where to put their money.”
Watson said projects of sufficient scale which could interest Chinese investors include the A9 Perth to Inverness dualling project and rail electrification programmes.

Renewable energy outstrips coal for first time in UK electricity mix

Ageing coal and nuclear plants have been closing in recent years, while renewable energy has been rapidly rolling out.
Renewable energy has for the first time surpassed coal in supplying the UK’s electricity for a whole quarter, according to government statistics released on Thursday.
However, the government’s energy statistics released on Thursday said demand “fell by 2% continuing the recent downward trend”.
Nuclear power was third with 21.5% and coal – the most polluting fuel – fell back to fourth, with 20.5%.
Gas-fired power stations provided the most electricity – 30% – with renewables second.