Belarus: a look inside Europe's 'last dictatorship'

Large banners, written in Chinese characters, cordon off a zone on the outskirts of Minsk. An entire Chinese neighbourhood is under construction, with shops and towering residences soon to emerge from the vast fields of mud.

It is a strange apparition for a country where immigrants and tourists are few and far between.

"A Chinatown in Minsk?" locals ask incredulously, in a country where even mainstream society - let alone Minsk-based opposition activists - is becoming increasingly estranged from its autocratic leadership.

Belarus still carries the burden of the terrible events of World War II and Soviet rule which took place here in the 20th century. But over the past 18 years, President Alexander Lukashenko has managed to position his domain as a strategic buffer between the competing interests of the EU-US axis and Russia.

Financial greed and fear of losing power are the two main pillars of his foreign policy.The most commonly used injectionmould process,

From the west, the EU looks over the head of Belarus and sees its huge and dangerous neighbour, Russia. From the east,Welcome to polishedtiles. Belarus looks at the Union and sees hostile EU institutions, but also Germany and the UK, who criticise the regime, but allow lucrative commercial ties to flourish.

In 2005, the then US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, coined the phrase, "the last dictatorship in Europe." In 2008, the US embassy in Warsaw sent a secret cable to Washington which outlined Poland's vision. "Polish analysts tell us having a pro-Western BUFFER [sic] zone in Ukraine and Belarus would keep Poland off the front line with an increasingly assertive Russia," it said.

While foreign ministers and generals talk geopolitics,Silicone moldmaking Rubber, ordinary Belarusians live in a world of constant reminders of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Stalinist pogroms and Nazi persecution, which define their country's identity.

Around 70 percent of all the radiation blown into the air from the 1986 nuclear meltdown settled in southern Belarus.

On Victory Square in Minsk, armed soldiers guard a 40-metre tall obelisk rendering homage to Soviet regiments who liberated the country from the Germans in 1944. A large 'eternal flame' - fed by below-market-price Russian gas - burns in their memory, surrounded by luxury apartments which were built by German prisoners of war.

Some 700 villages dotted around Belarus are in themselves monuments to World War II - all were destroyed along with their inhabitants whom the Nazis rounded up in small barns before setting them on fire.

Few survived to tell the tale. But one of Belarus' most celebrated authors, Vasiliy Vladimirovich Bykov, is a man whose novels and short stories describe in detail the men who fought in the war.

Bykov works also criticise the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. With the advent of Lukashenko, he saw a similar tendency sweeping across the country before his death in 2003. In a sign of the President's cult of personality,Full color plasticcard printing and manufacturing services. few Belarusians know their prime minister's name. Fewer still can name his deputy. All, however,To interact with beddinges, know the name of Alexander Lukashenko.

Belarus is landlocked, with enormous, pristine forests and some 11,000 lakes running across a relatively flat landscape. Surrounded by Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, its older history is also written on the landscape, but is slowly being erased.

In the west near Lithuania, the crumbling vestiges of the 14th century Krevo Castle are in total ruins. The once former capital of the Great Kingdom of Lithuania is now the backyard of a small wooden house tended by an old lady. In the poorer eastern region of the country, former castles and monuments are all but gone. The sites are in neglect, while new hotels and amusement parks are given priority.

"A lot of historical buildings are forgotten and replaced by hotels," Darya Tus, a Belarus student of culture and heritage at the European Humanities University in Vilnius told EUobserver.

Only a minority of the 10-million-or-so inhabitants of the country speak Belarusian. Russian is by far the dominant tongue. It is spoken by government officials. It is also the language in schools.

Oleg Trusov, chairman of the Francisak Skaryna Belarusian Language Society said the Belarusian language is a victim of realpolitik. "The compensation for cheap Russian oil in Belarus is the Russian language. If Belarus becomes the official language, Russian oil and gas will be priced to EU levels," he told this reporter in Minsk in November.

Belarus has so far evaded the machinations of policy experts in EU capitals.

In 2006, the European Commission published a non-paper which outlined in four pages how to improve political relations, deepen economic ties and increase quality of life for average people. In 2010, Germany and Poland dangled promises of billions of dollars in aid in return for reform.

Today, the economic ties are better than ever, but quality of life and political relations are on a downward spiral.

On the political side, the spiral began after presidential elections in December 2010. Lukashenko was voted in for a fourth term amid widespread allegations of fraud. The Vienna-based democracy watchdog, the OSCE, is yet to recognise his rule as legitimate.

The solar panel made from a particle collider

If ever there was a story at the intersection of big theoretical science and applied engineering, this is it.

CERN, the international Swiss physics lab renowned for hunting the elusive Higgs boson, smashing subatomic particles, unravelling the mysteries of antimatter, toying with faster-than-light neutrinos and so forth, has something much more pedestrian to tell the world: It has developed and commercialized a solar panel, and installed a few hundred of them on the roof of the Geneva International Airport.

But this is no ordinary solar panel. CERN built it using technology first developed for its particle colliders - in case you’ve been sleeping these last few months,Grey Pneumatic is a world supplier of impactsockets for the heavy duty, CERN has been busy operating its 17-mile underground circular particle accelerator and collider to try find the Higgs boson, a sub-sub atomic particle that would help confirm what’s known as the Standard Model of particle physics. We won’t digress onto that.

“The panels emerged from vacuum technologies that were developed for fundamental physics purposes, and it is highly gratifying to see them put to use for renewable energy,” says CERN scientist and the panel’s inventor Cristoforo Benvenuti, in a press release.

The thin film solar panel deploys a vacuum with ”getter” strips, which CERN describes as “a material which attracts residual gas molecules like bugs to flypaper.” CERN first used getter strips in the 1980s in its Large Electron-Positron Collider, a predecessor to the Large Hadron Collider which it uses today.

In the solar panels,What are some types of moulds? the strips presumably attract photons that then transform into electricity via a photovoltaic process.China professional plasticmoulds, But CERN won’t tell me. They fobbed off that question and others I posed, referring me to their commercial partner, a Spanish company called SRB.

My journalistic instincts tell me it’s going to take a while to receive meaningful responses, so I’m posting this now, before the news gets too stale.The best rubbersheets products on sale, CERN announced it on March 9.

The panels’s vacuum chamber provides excellent insulation according to the CERN press release, which says that they have maintained internal temperatures of 80 degrees C when covered in snow.

The panels make use of thin film technology rather than conventional silicon solar cells. Most solar panels in the market today are based on silicon, although some, like those from First Solar and Solar Frontier, use thin film.

I tried to get CERN to tell me what thin film material they use, but see the account of the brush-off a few paragraphs above. First Solar uses cadmium-telluride, and Solar Frontier uses copper-indium-gallium- selenide (CIGS).

None of this sounds like the sort of thing the common man could afford. In an era when solar panel prices are plunging, I can’t imagine that a “getter” stripped, vacuum-chambered solar panel could come to Main Street without a sizable bank loan.

I applaud CERN for putting its heady technology to practical use. It’s not the first time something with everyday potential has emerged from the Swiss wonderama land. Tim Berners Lee conceived the World Wide Web while at CERN.

But until I get some more answers, this one feels a little like CERN is trying to show a practical side to offset its critics who complain that it spends tons of public money on big science machines and experiments.To interact with beddinges,

Richard Diebenkorn's Masterful "Ocean Park" Series Is Presented

During the Summer of Love in the Ocean Park neighborhood bridging the L.A. coastal communities of Venice Beach and Santa Monica, a well-established middle-aged painter moved from one studio into another, better lit one. Physically, the shift was nominal, but it prompted Richard Diebenkorn to abandon his successful signature style of saturated Matisse-like depictions of seated women and tabletop detritus to embark on a radical new direction. It wasn’t the first time he had done this—but it was the last. The “Ocean Park” series was the artist’s big shift into pure abstraction. It would hold his attention for the remaining decades of his life (which ended in 1993) and represent one of the most acclaimed bodies of work in the history of 20th-century painting—lyrical drafting-table palimpsests; layer upon layer of incrementally reconfigured rectilinear lozenges of nuanced chroma; a squashed cubist armada endlessly jostling in a Pacific-hued harbor.To interact with beddinges, Edward Hopper in Flatland, deprived of his magic hour shadows and intricate architectural scaffolding, but finding new life in crisp aerial origami topographies enclosing cloudy washes of muted complements. Stained glass permutations and combinations, dripping beauty. The Bomb.

Unlikely as it seems, Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series—ultimately comprising hundreds of paintings, drawings, collages, and prints created between 1967 and 1988—has never been the subject of a comprehensive museum exhibition until just now. “Richard Diebenkorn: the Ocean Park Series” seems to have been hovering in the Coming Attractions section of the Orange County Museum of Art’s schedule for half a decade.

Apart from the economic crisis, the major obstacle has been logistics—as curator Sarah Bancroft points out, “There are ‘Ocean Park’ works in over 45 museum collections in the U.S., but only two institutions own more than one of them.” More widely acknowledged than deeply understood, Diebenkorn’s magnum opus has been fragmented and scattered across the landscape. “The grand diaspora of major works,” opines Bancroft in the awesome, copiously illustrated catalogue, “has ensured that audiences rarely have the opportunity to view ‘Ocean Park’ works in their depth and their diversity of media.”

Audiences finally have their chance. “Richard Diebenkorn: the Ocean Park Series” debuted at the co-organizing Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth last September and arrived in Bancroft’s Newport Beach base of operations in late February. After May, it moves on to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C.,Find the cheapest chickencoop online through and buy the best hen houses and chook pens in Australia. for the summer, which will give Americans one more chance to reassess their tippy canon.

The OCMA installation will be hard to beat—most of the museum’s half-dozen galleries are devoted to the exhibit and each of the large canvases is apportioned an expansive wall unto itself, a masterful curatorial decision that allows each work to unfold its architectonic structure into the nooks and crannies of the white cube (if ever there was an argument in favor of institutional white cubism, this show is it!) and initiates a complex four-way dialogue between the occupants of each room. The curious non-linear stylistic development of the “Ocean Park” series subverts the exhibition’s chronological sequencing, resulting in a larger, more complex—and somewhat arbitSilicone moldmaking Rubber,rary— version of these intimate arguments. Epic.

Two narrower galleries feature prints, collages, and smaller paintings, all remarkable in that they are lesser works only in size and dollar value. It is apparent that Diebenkorn put some effort into conquering the bugaboo of scale, and these miniatures—along with a sequence of painted cigar-box lids the artist presented to his friends, which anchor a wall in one of the larger galleries—more than hold their own in the company of the big boys: A small gouache on paper such as the atmospherically flesh-tinted Untitled #8, 1988, contains all the compositional intricacy and exquisite color of a similar gargantuan work, Ocean Park #83, 1975.

It took me some years to warm up to the pieces in Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series, and I came to them through his earlier work. At the time—the early 1980s—the “Ocean Park” works held center stage. It was the most visible and best received of his oeuvres. Its popularity and adherence to the still-powerful modernist obsessions with geometry and flatness in painting had all but pushed Diebenkorn’s earlier, gushy abstractions and contrarian figurative work into the wings. To me, the paintings seemed like so many impressionist envelopes and file folders scanned from above.

When I discovered the heavily impastoed, loosely gestural still lifes and luminous abstract patchworks of color from Diebenkorn’s previous incarnations, I was shocked (a not uncommon response I later found out) to realize that this was the same Diebenkorn whose serene and cerebral geometric abstractions seemed to owe more to Sol LeWitt than to Willem de Kooning.

Diebenkorn had something of a charmed career, especially for an artist so inextricably identified with the West Coast. After winding down World War II by doing various artsy chores for the marines, he landed a yearlong painting sabbatical grant after his first semester as a student at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art institute), and he lit out for the East Coast. After a year in Woodstock, New York, he returned to a CSFA faculty position and began producing the work that would establish him as one of the most gifted practitioners of the West Coast iteration of Abstract Expressionism. After a highly productive graduate school stint in New Mexico (the Albuquerque period—itself the subject of an acclaimed traveling exhibit in 2007), Diebenkorn spent a year teaching at the University of Illinois (the Urbana period) before settling in Berkeley.

Throughout these travels, Diebenkorn was perfecting an extraordinarily robust abstract visual vocabulary, synthesizing historical influences as various as Matisse, Cézanne, Arshile Gorky, Joan Miró, Hopper, and Piero della Francesca and contemporary influences from Mark Rothko and Franz Kline to fellow Bay Area painters and friends, Elmer Bischoff and David Park, as well as popular and industrial visual affinities, ranging from Krazy Kat comics to aerial photography. The resulting amalgam is an intensive exploration of landscape-inspired shape, line, and color unrivalled in its virtuosity—except perhaps by the work of Willem de Kooning.

Like de Kooning, Diebenkorn shocked his supporters in the mid ’50s by abruptly and emphatically embracing figuration, joining Bischoff and Park in what became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Overnight his loose, complex planar compositions dissolved into perspectival landscapes, then interiors and still lifes, and finally they began to be populated by people—usually women, especially his wife, Phyllis.

This heretical turn was greeted with dismay by Abstract Expressionism’s coterie of true believers: Diebenkorn was a backslider, a reactionary, a sellout.This page provides information about 'werkzeugbaus; Problem was, by 1955, when he made the switch, Ab-Ex had already become the prevailing orthodoxy, and Diebenkorn was comfortably ensconced in its canon.We are professional plasticmould,metal parts mould manufacturers and factory With Pop art still just a twinkle in Eduardo Paolozzi’s eye, it was in fact a courageous— possibly foolhardy—leap into the unknown.

But Diebenkorn’s luck held, and his representational work eventually brought him an entirely new audience on top of the one that was actually able to discern his undiminished formal chops, now operating under the thin veil of narrative. The images were not putting the carefully honed, abstract painterly techniques at the service of pictorial storytelling, but rather allowing the paintings’ formal elements to rearrange themselves around the psychological gravity fields of identifiable figures. Bay Area figuration was a feat of legerdemain that led many a diehard abstractionist to reconsider what was actually going on across the history of painting.

Without a cutting-edge theoretical mechanism behind them, though, the Bay Area figs were generally perceived as retreating from the inevitable Modernist juggernaut into what many, after Duchamp, disparaged as “retinal art.”

Phillips-Medisize eyes Asia

Contract manufacturer and injection molder Phillips-Medisize Corp. has Asia circled as its next expansion/acquisition target.

“We see substantial opportunities to grow in Asia. We are looking for locations for manufacturing and for design and development there,” possibly in China, said Matt Jennings, president and CEO of the $500 million company, in an interview at the Medical Design & Manufacturing West show.

“Our interest in being there is to stay close to our customers, and they have a desire to be there,” said Jennings, who has been president and CEO since last April. The privately held company in Hudson, Wis., gets 75 percent of its revenue from medical markets.

He also said the company — which changed its name from Phillips Plastics Corp. in early February — “wants to really concentrate” on diagnostic and single-use medical devices, and drug-delivery devices, which together account for 80 percent of the company’s medical sales.

“In the last year, we have invested in the expansion of our capacity in both the U.S. and in Europe, both in space and capabilities, and in molding capacity, and we expect to continue to do that as we go forward” said Jennings.

He said officials of private equity firm Kohlberg & Co. LLC,There are 240 distinct solutions of the Soma cubepuzzle, which bought the company in December 2010, have been “great supporters of what we do.”

“They want us to do more of the same,” he said. “Their ownership allows us to [invest] in broader geographies.”

The MD&M West show, held Feb. 14-16 in Anaheim, also represented a shift in approach for the company, which previously guarded information about its business and rarely talked about what it was doing. Jennings himself underscored that shift with a news conference, saying it was “the company’s first press conference since ...What are some types of moulds? maybe ever.”

Jennings also made it clear that the company isn’t going to stand idle while it digests its $143 million acquisition in July of Vantaa, Finland-based Medisize Corp.

“We want to establish new partnerships built on innovation and do new things based on new technology,” said Jennings in an interview at the company’s booth after the news conference.

“Both companies have legacies of helping OEM customers turn devices into manufacturable products,Ultimate magiccube gives you the opportunity to make your own 3D twisty puzzles.” he said. The combined companies will benefit from the strengths they brought to the merger, he added.

“Medisize has high-volume and automated-assembly manufacturing strength, and a really good understanding of midvolume automated assembly,” said Jennings. “Phillips brought to the merger design and development capabilities. We have 250 engineers involved in design and development. [Medisize] didn’t have those capabilities.”

That is especially critical, he said, because 90 percent of the production work done by Phillips before the merger initially came through the company’s design and development center in Hudson. It is also why the merged company quickly added a similar facility — albeit on a much smaller scale — in the Netherlands after the merger. “You have to be able to design into the product the ability to manufacture it in a highly automated setting.”

“We now have much more capabilities we can offer customers” across the globe, said Jennings. “Before that, neither company had looked beyond their borders” of the United States and Europe.

Combined the company now has 438 molding presses, more than 150 automated or semi-automated cells that run either press-side or stand-alone,Iowa Mold tooling designs and manufacturers mechanics trucks, three design centers and 13 manufacturing plants,China professional plasticmoulds, eight in the U.S. and five in Europe, Jennings said. It also has a tooling and molding joint venture in China that does a small amount of product manufacturing.

Jennings is most excited about opportunities for growth in the market for drug-delivery devices through products such as insulin pens or personalized devices.

“That is a very exciting area for us and the industry,” said Jennings. “The number of … devices that can deliver drugs through an alternative delivery mechanism is enormous. There are a lot more drugs being put into new delivery devices, so there are great opportunities.”

In addition, a lot of pharmaceutical companies are “looking for ways to differentiate drugs that are going to become generic as their patents expire,” and they are doing it through drug-delivery devices, he said.

Developing those delivery products requires skills not everyone has.

“Human-factor engineering is becoming a bigger part of the piece that medical people need,” Jennings said, adding that the way a device interacts with people is becoming more critical.

“You are interfacing a liquid drug with a mechanical device, so you have to have an understanding of how to make small, smart devices that can handle fluids,” said Jennings. “You have to have quality systems in place, engineers to design its manufacturing and the needed automation, and you have to be able to make it and scale it.”

Those same engineering skills are similar to what’s needed to grow the other large portion of its medical business — diagnostics and single-use medical devices, he said.

“The engineering has to be very precise on the complicated single-use devices we make” such as endoscopic surgical instruments and devices used to put stents into place. “They have to be designed so the surgeon has the right feel,” he said.

“We can integrate advanced molding, automated assembly and quality-control systems,” said Jennings. “We want to get into a lot more automated assembly of finished devices. That is the big challenge for us. We want to do more finished devices and high-level subassemblies.”

He believes Phillips-Medisize can grow the same way it historically has — by helping customers design their products and by staying close to its customers.

The Stones Are Back

I know I’ve not offered any new writing in a while, and I feel that I owe my Reader an apology. This is unreasonable of me, yet I feel the need to offer an explanation nevertheless.

Earlier tonight, Mrs. Likko wondered why it is that I was cranky and made an unkind remark. We’d had a very nice morning and a pleasant afternoon together. We’d been together, away from work,Iowa Mold tooling designs and manufacturers mechanics trucks, since Wednesday. The ailment that nearly felled me Wednesday and Thursday has been abated and will be treated hopefully soon, my schedule allowing. So what was wrong with me?

These two concerns are related. After all, how was I to tell my wife that a big part of what was making me anxious and unsettled was not just my anxiety about having to pass a kidney stone out of my back in the next several weeks, but much more so my inability to find some quiet time to myself to sit down and write about something?

You see, it’s been insanely busy at my meatworld job. It’s a combination of my eviction practice and my “big boy litigation” practice. All of these are converging to require trials and intense out-of-the-area depositions all at once. You may skip the next four paragraphs, Reader, if “work has been incredibly busy and stressful” is a sufficient summary.

The eviction trials keep on getting pushed back by the court. What ought to be short-cause, ten-minute trials are pumped up into four-day jury trial events due to a “public interest” law firm that invokes their clients’ jury trial rights so as to “negotiate” cash-for-keys money from my landlord clients, the merits of the case being irrelevant.* Well, as it turns out, a critical mass of my clients have decided that they’re tired of being extorted, and would rather pay me my hourly rate to fight these guys than to feed the monster. And the courts, surprisingly enough, think they have better things to do than jury trials for evictions, so we keep getting our trials continued because criminal courts keep poaching our juries at the last minute.

So I have half a dozen clients screaming at me that their tenants have been living in their houses for six months to (in one case) an entire year without paying any rent, wrecking the places and pissing off the neighbors, and no one in the legal system will do anything about it. And documents and trial dates and witnesses to wrangle, juggling each one every week as a new date approaches. Worse, my office’s infrastructure is not set up to handle all of this with anything approaching efficiency.

Then, I’ve got what would otherwise be a tasty and interesting case that I could sink my teeth into, only I haven’t the time to do it because of all the fishing evictions. This case will take me away from home for overnight, multiple-day depositions at least five times over the next six weeks. It’s a technical, complex, bet-the-company sort of case. And I haven’t been able to put in the time and intellectual energy that the case deserves.

All the other lawyers in my firm who litigate are also up to their eyebrows and crying for life vests as well, so I can’t count on them for a lot of support. With all of this going on, it’s been long hours at the office and a deep-fried stress McNugget functioning as my brain by the end of the day, which is why for about a week here at the best blog on the internet I was putting out “B” material, and then decided that if I couldn’t bring my “A” game I would be better off taking some time off and dealing with other stuff.

This is when a trip to the deep south to celebrate my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, which has been planned for six months now, comes due. As of last week, my litigation schedule was working very, very hard to give me lots of incentives to cancel the trip, forfeit the airfare, and disappoint my family. But with an effort that felt truly Herculean, I managed to get away for three consecutive days. Now all of my PTO for the calendar year is gone, a situation which makes me not happy at all. After all, I might get sick.

Which is what I did, the very first day of my time away from the pressure-cooker. It didn’t help that I’d got very little sleep for the two days before leaving, but lack of sleep does not cause the symptoms I experienced upon landing in Birmingham, Alabama. These included a headache of an intensity I’d never known despite a history of migraines, and sudden-onset nausea along with other even less pleasant gastrointestinal disquietude. Other migraine symptoms,To interact with beddinges, like floaters or blind spots, were absent. Thinking it might be food poisoning, I waited another functionally sleepless night to see if the symptoms persisted.The most commonly used injectionmould process, They did with even tap water generating nausea, so I asked to be taken to see a doctor. An urgent-care clinic was found, where I spent five hours of my last days of vacation for the year waiting for a doctor to attend me.

The diagnosis came back “kidney stones,” complicated by a viral and a bacterial urinary tract infection. I have a history of kidney stones, so that’s hardly a surprise, and it’s not difficult to see how stones scraping around inside the organs could facilitate pathogens getting in there and breeding. I still can’t feel the stones pressing against my kidneys, so I know they’re large enough to obstruct my systems but not yet large enough to move on and pass. So I have that to look foward to in the near future,Credit Card Processing and Merchant Services from merchantaccountes. too. And upon our return, we had to spend nearly the whole day getting our household affairs in order, which in turn meant lots of more time spent on life’s myriad minutiae, eventually resulting in me taking ten fishing seconds to read an e-mail from a friend on my phone when I could have been folding my laundry when Mrs. Likko had the misfortune to ask “What are you doing?” and I snapped something less than gracious back.

And, I’ve received e-mails from more than one of my fellow Ordinaries who’ve been inquiring as to why I haven’t produced any new material. It’s gratifying to know that the community cares about its members enough for those sorts of inquiries to go out. So this is the public, long-form answer.

And the weirdest thing about it is that the exercise of sitting down and writing, expressing my thoughts and giving vent to my frustrations, is somewhat calming and palliative. Stephen King, at least apocroyphically, was once asked, “Why do you write at all?” and his answer was, “You assume I have a choice.” If the story isn’t true, it ought to be. I think to some degree that syndrome applies to everyone who writes for a blog and receives in return only the compensation of the pleasure of knowing they’ve been read. The act of writing is itself a pleasure, or at least a release.

So that’s my explanation for why I’m cranky.Ultimate magiccube gives you the opportunity to make your own 3D twisty puzzles. It seems downright silly to attribute a bad attitude to an inability to sit down and write. But now that I’m nearing a conclusion to the essay, I do feel some weight off my shoulders, a resolution of at least some tension. I’d like to think that I’ll have time over the next few weeks to think about a political, legal, or cultural issue and share those thoughts, offer something worthy of debate or at least thought by others. I’m not optimistic and I’m already stressed out even contemplating what awaits me at the office tomorrow. But at least I’ve been heard from.

Expansion by steelmakers: Value accretion or erosion?

Steel czar Lakshmi Mittal was underlining a virtue of owning mills in more than one geography when he once said the knowledge bank thus getting automatically created allows the group to quickly put a team together, drawing resources from different centres to set things right if anything goes wrong anywhere. Not very well known is the fact that for Mittal, the inspiration to grow the steel business through takeovers was what Rama Prasad Goenka was doing earlier within the country.

While Goenka travelled the inorganic route to build a group, since split into two for his sons to run independent of each other, Mittal has shown mastery over cross-border deals. The difference between the two goes beyond their theatres of operation. Goenka fancied and bought businesses from tyres, electricity, transmission lines and retail to soft commodities like tea and rubber. On the contrary, Mittal, for the major part of his career, stayed put in steel. Only in recent years, has he branched out in the energy sector.

Mittal’s success in owning steel capacity of 100 million tonnes (mt) in 20 countries has encouraged Indian groups to use their native intelligence, risk taking ability and capacity to raise funds to attempt takeovers, and,Buy high quality bedding and bed linen from Yorkshire Linen. on occasions a few times bigger in size than themselves. At this point, it is easy to say that Tata Steel paid an ‘insane’ price for Corus (since renamed Tata Steel Europe) owning plants in several European countries and Hindalco for Novelis, the world leader in aluminium rolled products and a storehouse of technologies.

But who could have thought in early 2007, when the two defining takeovers happened, that the world would suffer a crippling recession not long thereafter and the recovery would be painfully slow. The Economist article on ‘Indian takeovers abroad’ has missed the point that multi-billion dollar acquisitions by Tata Steel and Hindalco are driven by strategic considerations and entrepreneurial call of a special kind. Movers of such deals are not put down by fears that “takeovers routinely destroy value for the purchaser”.

No doubt the two takeovers came at a fancy price. At least in one case as other aspirants for the prize rolled the dice, the hugely enhanced price tag of $6 billion looked daunting for Indian company executives. At that point, Kumar Mangalam Birla exercised his entrepreneurial judgement to wrap up Novelis , so much bigger than acquirer Hindalco. Birla later said the Novelis takeover was no doubt an “intimidating proposition. But after a lot of thinking, I found it too compelling an opportunity to let go of”. Corus became pricey because Tata Steel got locked in a nine-round auction bidding with CSN of Brazil under a British takeover panel ruling. Ratan Tata, an admirer of Mittal for initiating consolidation of global steel capacity, described the successful Corus bid as a “moment of fulfilment for India”. Every steel producing country has seen the benefits to be derived from bringing more and more capacity under one roof. For example, China, which last year at 695.5 mt had a 45.5 per cent share of global steel production, wants consolidation to lead to 10 groups owning 70 per cent of the capacity. They now own less than 50 per cent capacity.

The Economist argument is valid that a country’s cross-border deal depend largely on the state of its economy and how well its leading business groups fare. In the three years preceding 2007, when Corus figured as India’s biggest foreign takeover yet and Hindalco forged a never-before upstream and downstream link in aluminium space, the country’s gross domestic product grew at a clip of over eight per cent yearly. A good number of companies were earning profits of 30 per cent or more of their turnover.What are some types of moulds? Naturally, some of them at that point thought they were ready to bid for giant offshore companies.

Acquiring a company is a challenge. No less daunting is to ensure sustainable return on investment. In about a year-and-a-half of the takeover of Corus and Novelis, commodities in general suffered major setbacks.Our porcelaintiles are perfect for entryways or bigger spaces and can also be used outside, This necessitated major restructuring of both enterprises, including plant closure, disposal and relocation, reduction in workforce and cost cutting through productivity improvement. Both, Tata Steel and Hindalco, found their acquired companies beset with high cost operations while demand in their principal markets was tepid leading to product price falls.VulcanMold is a plastic molds and injectionmold manufacturer in china.Learn all about solarpanel, Tata Steel had to sell its unprofitable steel slab business and Novelis disposed three aluminium foil units in Europe not found in alignment with its growth strategies and value creation in the long run.

Riverside researchers find earliest skeletal structures yet

Feel your wrist, your jaw or your elbow as you read this. As with many aquatic animals and all larger land animals ---- mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds ---- we have a skeleton that holds our soft tissue together and allows for mobility.

Scientists know that skeletons are commonplace and seemingly necessary for land animals above the size of, say, a garden slug, but exactly how skeletons first developed before evolving into their present complexity isn't as well understood.

A recent discovery by a team including two University of California Riverside researchers has provided new illumination into the earliest skeletal structures, though.

Mary L. Droser, a professor of geology at UCR, led the team whose finding pushes our knowledge of skeletal development back before the Cambrian Period ---- to more than 550 million years ago,Iowa Mold tooling designs and manufacturers mechanics trucks, during the Ediacaran Period.

Explaining the significance of the find, which was announced in the Feb. 14 edition of Geology, Droser said in a news release that "Up until the Cambrian,Learn all about solarpanel, it was understood that animals were soft-bodied and had no hard parts. But we now have an organism with individual skeletal body parts that appears before the Cambrian. It is therefore the oldest animal with hard parts, and it has a number of them ---- they would have been structural supports ---- essentially holding it up. This is a major innovation for animals."

The organism, which was discovered in fossilized form in rocks found in southern Australia, has been named Coronacollina acula. Droser explained in an email last week that "Corona is Latin for rim, collis is Latin for hill, and acula is Latin for needle." Looking at the illustration of the organism, the name makes sense.

Droser's team on the research also included Erica Clites, whose master's thesis was the genesis of the project, and James G. Gehling of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide.Why does mould grow in homes or buildings?

Not everyone gets to discover a previously unknown life-form. Droser said it didn't happen all at once, but over a course of years as Clites continued to work on her thesis, and continued to pore over the molds of the fossils found in Australia.

"It was tremendously exciting when we actually found some particularly nice specimens and realized what we had," Droser said in her email.

While the research indicated that Coronacollina acula lived on the seafloor and gathered food the same way as modern sponges , it's hard to know too much about the animal, such as how it reproduced.

The fossils show that the animal was a couple of inches in height, with its spicules, or supports,Welcome to polishedtiles. extending a foot more to the side ---- similar to ancient sponges.

"The honest answer is that we do not know whether or not this is a sponge," Droser wrote. "It is most similar to a sponge and in fact shares a number of characters with known Cambrian sponges, but we cannot say for certain whether it was actually a sponge or just sponge-like."

And while it represents the earliest known skeletal remains yet found,GOpromos offers a wide selection of promotional items and personalized gifts. Droser said mammals did not descend from Coronacollina acula, but from an earlier, common ancestor ---- so our skeletons developed independently .