In a message to Chinese aerospace engineers and researchers for “Youth Day” earlier this month, President Xi Jinping shared his ambitions for the industry. Young workers should advance the cause of Chinese self-reliance, he said, following in the footsteps of their predecessors who developed a home-grown nuclear weapon, missile and satellite, with little help from outsiders, in a campaign in the era of Mao Zedong called “Two bombs, one satellite”.
On April 6th 2016 a 38-year-old former investment banker who, two years before, had been appointed as a minister in France’s Socialist government announced that he wanted to change French politics.
IN GEOPHYSICS, an epicentre is the place on the surface of the Earth closest to the point in its depths where intolerable pressure has triggered an earthquake.
ON MARCH 22ND, in a penal colony 1,000km north-east of the front lines around Kyiv, Alexei Navalny, the jailed leader of Russia’s opposition, was sentenced to another nine years imprisonment.
“REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR,” Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, entreated America’s Congress. “Remember September 11th…Every night for three weeks, in various Ukrainian cities, Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death.”
KHERSON IS ABOUT as far up the Dnieper from the Black Sea as Bordeaux is up the Gironde from the Bay of Biscay; its population, 280,000, is a bit larger.
THE PANTSIR-S1 is an impressive beast, almost 17 tonnes of top-notch hardware capable of shooting down planes tens of kilometres away.
TODAY’S HYDROGEN business is, in global terms, reasonably small, very dirty and completely vital. Some 90m tonnes of the stuff are produced each year, providing revenues of over $150bn—approaching those of ExxonMobil, an oil and gas company.