Chinese golfer Li Linqiang finally won his third championship trophy at the Guotai Cup Men's Professional Match Play on Sunday after four days of fierce competition in Zhengzhou, Central China's Henan Province.
Hosted by the China Golf Association and the Henan Provincial Sports Bureau, the Guotai Cup is a 72-hole stroke play competition with a total prize as high as 500,000 yuan ($68,083) and attracts over 100 players from ten countries and regions, including 12 champions of China Tours.
Li said that it was a close match, as two other players in the same group had huge potential, but he finally won the match.
Zhang Xiaoning, chairman of the China Golf Association, stated before the game that continuing the China Tours is key to the development of professional golf in China. The China Golf Association actively unites and mobilizes the forces of all parties, plans a blueprint for professional events, and strives to build China's own professional tour.
This year's 41st Beijing Marathon was held on October 29, and Greece, the cradle of the Marathon run, took part in the Beijing Marathon for the first time.
Greek Ambassador to China, Eugenios Kalpyris, was among the seven dignitaries who gave the signal for the start of the race at 7:30 am, at the Tiananmen Square.
Later, after the finish of the race, the Greek Embassy awarded medals from the Athens Authentic Marathon to the volunteers, the medical services, the referees and the official pacer teams for their contribution to upholding the "Marathon Spirit."
"It is a pleasure to be here today, for the Beijing Marathon. I am deeply impressed with the athletic spirit and the massive participation of such a big number of runners in today's Beijing Marathon. Congratulations!
The high regard the Chinese people have for the Athens Authentic Marathon is truly overwhelming. In the last 20 years sports has been a strong connecting link between Greece and China and we are looking forward to more cooperation in such big events in the future," said the ambassador. Earlier, the Greek Embassy had participated with a booth in the Beijing Marathon Expo from October 26 to 28, showcasing the Athens Authentic Marathon and the official medals for the 42,195 km run.
Apart from the 15 elite athletes that were invited, over 130,000 runners signed up for the race and about 30,000 were selected after a lucky draw, the organizing committee said.
At the invitation of Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, will pay a visit to China. The two sides are expected to discuss bilateral relations as well as foreign policy and security issues. The visit comes as the EU seeks to reduce its reliance on China while maintaining ties with the world's second-largest economy.
Recently, the EU formally launched an anti-subsidy probe into electric vehicles (EVs) manufactured in China. The anti-subsidy investigation is arbitrary, without adequate evidence to sustain it, and not in compliance with pertinent WTO regulations, which is adversely impairing the rights of Chinese companies. If Borrell's intention is to explain the EU's actions, he might be disappointed.
Gao Jian, the director of the Centre for European Studies at Shanghai International Studies University, told the Global Times that the EU chose to "de-risk" when it realized that it was not able to achieve the decoupling that the US has been touting. Cui Hongjian, a professor with the Academy of Regional and Global Governance at Beijing Foreign Studies University, believes that the EU wants to re-establish its prestige by talking about de-risking.
However, there are still disagreements within the EU regarding "de-risking," making it difficult for the bloc to reach a consensus.
Take the anti-subsidy probe. The rapid development of Chinese EVs is not entirely seen as a "risk" for the EU. Some countries think that the rapid growth of Chinese EVs in Europe could potentially threaten the European EV industry. However, Germany, for instance, has a long-term cooperation in the EV industry with China. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has poured cold water on the EU's anti-subsidy investigation, warning against taking protectionist actions that could harm domestic industries.
In fact, the EU has failed to recognize the true source of the "risks" it is facing. Since the US provoked the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it has been reaping the wealth of the EU in terms of weapons and energy, causing many EU members to fall into an economic crisis. It is not China but the US that has caused real economic damage to Europe, according to Gao. Gao noted that the so-called risks the EU attributes to China are actually caused by their close ally across the Atlantic and the EU is simply replicating the US model of "decoupling with China" without knowing its own demands.
China has always attached great importance to the development of bilateral relations with Europe based on equality and mutual benefits. The EU needs to deeply understand and recognize China's principles. It is wishful thinking to expect China to make concessions that harm its own interests.
Cui said that the EU's anti-subsidy probe into Chinese EVs can be a litmus test. If the EU can respond to China's concerns properly, it can steer the wheel back to pragmatically solving divergences and problems with China. But if the EU wants to use Borrell's visit to reinforce the EU's negative policies toward China, the unstable status of China-EU ties will continue.
During Borrell's visit, the two sides will hold the 12th round of China-EU High-level Strategic Dialogue. Borrell might serve as a precursor to the China-EU Summit scheduled for later this year. The visit is a clear indication that the EU understands the value of bilateral economic and trade ties, and that China will not sit still if the EU adopts confrontational tactics. It's hoped the EU could seize the chance of Borrell's visit to solve bilateral frictions in the economic field and increase political mutual trust with China.
With several days to go before the end of fiscal year 2023 on September 30, the massive expansion in US federal budget deficit is setting off alarm bells across the American economy. The deviation between US fiscal policy and Federal Reserve's monetary policies is like two gears pulling in opposite directions. The longer the deviation takes, the more financial risks will be accumulated throughout the US system, risking spillover effects on other economies.
The US Congress has just several days to avert a shutdown before the government runs out of money. The deadline for lawmakers to reach an agreement is midnight on September 30, after which government funding for essential services is set to run dry. This is not the first time that the government is faced with plunging into such as an awkward situation. The most recent shutdowns were in 2018, when the government was shut more than 30 days.
The last three years of public policy have had a major impact on the federal budget. The large increases in government spending far outpaced the growth in revenues, reportedly resulting in deficits of $2.7 trillion, $1.4 trillion, and $1.6 trillion in fiscal years 2021, 2022, and 2023, respectively, with the last month of 2023 based on current estimates. As the US national debt passes $33 trillion and a government shutdown looms, Wall Street and global investors inevitably feel the chill.
Some analysts believe the US economy has been on a strong recovery track since the beginning of the year. Such an uptrend should be attributed to multiple factors, among them an expansionary US fiscal policy that includes high levels of government spending is an important one. Increased government spending can take the form of both purchases of goods and services, which directly increases economic activity, and is transferred to individuals, indirectly increasing economic activity as individuals spend those funds.
Meanwhile, inflation rates increased for a second straight month in August, reversing previous declines as consumers continued to grapple with the rising cost of everyday goods. Since March 2022, the Fed has lifted interest rates 11 times and held them steady only twice, including September's pause, to control inflation. The substantial tightening in monetary policy has started to weigh on activity, increasing households' and firms' interest payments, and putting pressure on the real economy. It's understandable that an expansionary fiscal policy has been adopted to increase government spending amid inflation woes and it would be conducive to offset the negative impact of tightening monetary policies on the economy.
A year ago a majority of economists expected a US recession. So where'd it go? Increasing government spending may be one of the factors that have kept a recession at bay, at least so far. The more aggressive the Fed's tightening monetary policy is, the more government spending may be requested to stimulate growth. With 2024 presidential election just about one year away, the Biden faces a challenge: how to convince voters that he has the ability to boost growth while curb inflation.
In such a situation, the Biden administration probably hopes to maintain elevated government spending to promote growth. The tightening of monetary policy and expansionary fiscal policy seem like the two ends of a seesaw, requiring a delicate balance to avoid a recession in the US economy.
However, what some Western economists tend not to notice are the side effects on the US economy. A big part of the story is the massive expansion in the federal budget deficit. Prospect of government shutdown poses a new threat to the US economy. For instance, a government shutdown would cost the US travel economy as much as $140 million a day, CNN reported, citing an analysis released by the US Travel Association. While the US economy is unlikely to implode any time soon, it faces significant and deep-rooted challenges. Moody's Investors Service said on Monday that US credit rating could come under pressure if the government shuts down.
The US remains the world's largest economy, the mistakes it makes often result in strong spillover effects that not only harm itself but also burden the region and even the entire world economy. Missteps over stubborn inflation and massive expansion in federal budget deficit make the country a real "time bomb" posing a danger to the world.
The city of Qingdao in East China's Shandong Province has strengthened the marine pasture construction as an important way to accelerate the transformation of maritime farming industry. There are 27 marine pastures under construction in Qingdao, of which 21 have been designated as national marine pasture demonstration areas.
Recently, 40,000 mu of Penaeus orientalis raised in Dingziwan area, Jimo welcomed this year's harvest season. This year, the local marine department cooperated with scientific research institutes to introduce the "Huanghai No.6" Penaeus orientalis. After five months of cultivation, the harvest period will last until the end of October. At present, there are Penaeus orientalis, Litopenaeus Vannamei and other varieties cultivated in the base, with an annual output of more than 2,000,000 kilograms of Penaeus orientalis and an increase of income of more than 200 million yuan for farmers annually.
With the continuous development of the industry, the demand for electricity in breeding bases is on the rise. The local power supply department actively promotes the upgrading and transformation of the power grid in aquaculture concentrated areas, optimizes the grid structure, and makes every effort to ensure the safety and reliability of power supply by means of night patrol temperature measurement and special line patrol. During the harvest period, the State Grid Qingdao Jimo Power Supply Company visits the aquaculture base every week to carry out safety inspections on electrical equipment, so as to help farmers solve practical difficulties and explain the knowledge of safe and reasonable power consumption.
Home to some of the country's richest marine resources, Qingdao has formed a complete industrial chain of mariculture processing. The local power supply department serves the electricity demands of marine pasture construction, mariculture company processing, cold chain logistics, speeds up the planning and construction of distribution network, and takes the initiative to come to the door to preach the policy of benefiting companies for mariculture processing companies, provide power technical support and support the safe use of electricity.
From 1863 to 1890, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka made more than 10,000 sea creatures out of glass. There were anemones with tapered tentacles and pearled undersides, translucent jellyfish trailing the most delicate threads and feather stars more than worthy of their name despite their rigid composition. The intricate invertebrates, crafted by the father-son team at their studio in Dresden, Germany, were shipped across the world to serve as teaching models at universities and museums. In an era before marine surveys and underwater photography, before the rise of scuba diving resorts, the Blaschkas showed the world the wonders of the sea.
Over five dozen of their glass wonders are now on display at the Corning Museum of Glass in “Fragile Legacy.” Though the exhibit opens with glass eyeballs and a piece of jewelry — a nod to the Blaschkas’ pre-invertebrate business — the highlight is a darkened room set up like an aquarium, with sea creatures seemingly floating in blue. There’s a notable absence of museum placards and descriptions. “We really want people to look at the glassiness,” says Marvin Bolt, a curator of the exhibit, before pointing out the “Field Guide to Underwater Models.” The pamphlet contains each animal’s species name, as it was known in 1885 (when Cornell University acquired the pieces, now on loan to Corning) and as it is known today. The aquarium offers a sense of the Blaschkas’ style, but it’s the room next door that provides the substance. Sketches and watercolors, bottles of colored powders, tweezers, pliers, scoops and wire, along with a demonstration video, give a fuller sense of how the Blaschkas did their work. Equally impressive are the matchboxes filled with kleine augen (“little eyes” in German) and other tiny but uniform component pieces, suggestive of an assembly line approach to handcrafting the final glass forms. A series of case studies explains how conservators stabilized the pieces, and a trailer for a related documentary, also titled Fragile Legacy, highlights the vulnerability, not of the glass, but of the real-world creatures living in warming seas. There’s one thing you won’t find in this exhibit — the flowers that the Blaschkas are most famous for today, commissioned by Harvard beginning in 1886. But you’ll spot seeds of this later work in the sea animals’ slender stalks and garlands of orbs. As the Blaschkas moved on to new subjects, their artistry evolved from the forms they’d already mastered.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Here’s another reason not to love car exhaust: The fumes may make it harder for honeybees to learn floral scents.
In lab tests, bees normally caught on quickly that a puff of floral scent meant a researcher would soon offer them a taste of sugar, Ryan James Leonard of the University of Sydney said September 30 at the International Congress of Entomology. After two sequences of puff-then-sugar, just a whiff of fragrance typically made the bees stick out their tongues. But when that floral scent was mixed with vehicle exhaust, it took the bees several more run-throughs to respond to the puff signal. Honeybees buzzing among roadside flowers must contend with vehicle pollution as they learn various foraging cues. Another lab reported in 2013 that diesel exhaust reacted with some of the chemical components of canola flowers, rendering them more difficult for bees to recognize.
Building on that concern, Leonard and colleagues found that it was easy for bees to learn the scent of linalool, a widespread ingredient in many flower fragrances, whether mixed with exhaust fumes or not. But exhaust made it take longer than two trials for bees to learn the scent ingredients myrcene (three trials), dipentene (four) and the full, multicomponent fragrance of geraniums (six).
Road ecologists have put a lot of effort into studying how vehicles kill animals. But Leonard hopes for more interest now in how chronic exposure to traffic affects living animals.
In crested penguin families, moms heavily favor offspring No. 2 from the start, and a new analysis proposes why. The six or seven species of crested (Eudyptes) penguins practice the most extreme egg favoritism known among birds, says Glenn Crossin of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.
Females that lay two eggs produce a runty first egg weighing 18 to 57 percent less than the second, with some of the greatest mismatches among erect-crested and macaroni penguins. Some Eudyptes species don’t even incubate the first egg; royal penguins occasionally push it out of the nest entirely. Biologists have proposed benefits for the unusual behavior: A sacrificial first egg might mark a claim to a nesting spot or improve chances of one chick surviving predators. But those ideas haven’t held up, Crossin says. He and Tony Williams of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, propose in the Oct. 12 Proceedings of the Royal Society B that egg favoritism is just a downside of an open-water, migratory lifestyle. Among the 16 penguin species that lay two eggs, only the Eudyptes species evolved what’s called a pelagic life, spending their nonbreeding season mostly at sea and migrating, in some cases considerable distances, to breeding sites.
Female crested penguins tend to lay their first eggs soon after arriving at a breeding site, meaning that the egg must have started its roughly 16-day development while mom was migrating. The biology of long swims, now encoded genetically, interferes with producing a full-sized egg. A puny first egg might just be a sign that mom is trying to do two things at once, Crossin says.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Petals of wildflowers called starry campions may be a pretty little battleground for a sexual skirmish between the plant’s male and female parts.
As is common in flowers, each Silene stellata bloom forms both male and female sex organs. After measuring petal variation between plants and tracking parenthood of seeds, Juannan Zhou suspected a sexual tug-of-war.
Flowers with greater male success in spreading pollen and siring seeds across a flower patch tended toward longer and narrower petals, Zhou reported June 26 at the Evolution 2017 meeting. Yet flowers that did especially well by their female organs, maturing abundant seeds in their own ovaries, tended toward wider and shorter petals. Zhou, of the University of Maryland in College Park, pieced together the story while working in a fenced-in plot of wild campions at Mountain Lake Biological Station in southwestern Virginia. During two summers, he tracked floral details and collected seeds. He sprouted almost 2,400 seedlings and for each genetically worked out which of 227 fenced-in adults had been the father.
If a conflict smolders between what’s best for male versus female functions, parental blossom trends that went along with greater fatherhood should tilt in the opposite direction from blossom trends linked with greater motherhood. Some traits such as number of fringe tassels showed no signs of conflict, but petal dimensions did.
Zhou suggests that the contrary trends might arise from the sexes’ opposite interests in visits from one of its pollinating moths, the mottled gray-brown Hadena ectypa. These moths do much of the pollen carrying early in midsummer. One mothload of pollen typically fertilizes all the eggs a female has, so from the motherhood perspective, once is enough. More than once means more risk for little benefit, because female moths leave an unwanted gift behind.
Besides sucking nectar, a H. ectypa often sticks her rear into the cup of a flower and with a wiggle, lays an egg or two. When eggs hatch, the tiny caterpillars chew their way into the flower ovary and start feeding on the plant’s own seeds. Caterpillars eventually grow too long and fat to fit inside blooms. Certain petal shapes, Zhou speculates, might be more attractive to moths, or perhaps more discouraging for the fattest, most destructive caterpillars to invade.
From the male point of view, the loss of the home flower’s seeds could be more than recouped by repeated moth visits to pick up more pollen to spread to other flowers. More moths could mean many more offspring. Sexual conflicts show up elsewhere in nature, such as in the compounds that fruit flies use to dope their sperm. After a jolt of these extras, females tend to put more resources into eggs and offspring. Never mind that it shortens a female’s life. Data on sexual conflicts from plants are much rarer, says evolutionary ecologist Locke Rowe of the University of Toronto. He welcomes the starry campion work also because the plants are hermaphrodites, a lifestyle uncommon in conflict studies.
