The first oil pipeline between Russia and China, feted as a mark of growing ties between the world’s biggest oil producer and its biggest energy consumer, started operation on Saturday, state media said.
Oil began flowing through the pipeline that links Siberia with refineries in the northeastern Chinese city of Daqing at 11:50am after two months of testing, Xinhua news agency reported.
Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had symbolically opened the pipeline — which stretches for 2,694km on the Russian side and 930km in China — on Sept. 27.
The pipeline has the capacity to carry 30 million tonnes of oil annually and will make an important contributuion to China’s attempts to diversify energy imports, state media said. Under a 2009 deal, China will receive oil for 20 years in exchange for loans worth US$25 billion.
China has already overtaken the US as the largest energy consumer. It derives 70 percent of its energy from coal combustion, but aims to diversify sources to include gas, nuclear and renewables, such as wind energy.
In October 2009, during a visit to Beijing by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the Russian giant Gazprom and China National Petroleum Co signed a framework agreement providing for deliveries of 70 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China each year.
However, the agreement has yet to come into force because of disagreements between Chinese and Russian negotiators over gas prices.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained