Rolls-Royce sees sales hit by Chinese slowdown

Rolls-Royce has seen sales of its luxury cars hit by a fall in demand in China.

The chief executive Torsten Mueller-Oetvoes said the turnaround in the market had been unexpectedly fast.

"We have been surprised by the speed of development in the Chinese market in a completely different direction," he said.

Chinese buyers have been affected by the slump in the stock market, slower growth and a corruption clamp-down.

He was speaking on the day of the launch of the Dawn, Rolls-Royce's new £250,000, 155 mph convertible, which the company described as "the sexiest Rolls-Royce ever built".

Mr Mueller-Oetvoes, talking to the BBC World Service's World Business Report, said: "The whole anti-corruption campaign... is very much around investigating where your money is from, to whom you are related and so on and so forth.

"That of course scares people who are quite affluent, and no one wants to be visible currently in that kind of environment and people are shying away from... obvious luxury goods, and that is not only true of cars but for jewellery and for precious watches and so on," he added.

But he added: "I am not in any way scared about that. We may see a dent in our volume line due to China, but that is a partial dent. And in particular with the new car that we will launch next year, the Rolls Royce Dawn, I am very optimistic."

Professor David Bailey from Aston Business School in Birmingham said: "I do think that China is going to affect the premium end of the market. The stock market crash will have some effect.

"But then again the ultra-high end of the car market works in a way of its own, so who knows exactly how sales will be hit," he added.

Mr Mueller-Oetvoes played down fears that recent events in Chine would last long, forecasting that sales there would recover in the next two years.

"China has never been our number one market. Our number one market is the United States and due to the fact we are properly balanced we can cope with some of the downturn in China," he explained.

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Japan's shares surge more than 3% in early trade

Japan's Nikkei surged by more than 3% on opening on Wednesday after the index saw all the gains made this year wiped out on Tuesday.

The benchmark was up 4.56% at 18,221.28 points in mid morning trade after finishing the day down 2.43%.

Investor sentiment was up across Asia after markets in China and the US finished in positive territory.

Tuesday's weak economic data from China has also raised hopes of more stimulus for that economy and its markets.

On mainland China, the Shanghai Composite was up 0.56% at 3,190.35 points - after finishing the day up up 2.9% - while Hong Kong's Hang Seng benchmark was up 2.05% at 21,696.51.

In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 was up 1.09% at 5,170.90 points, taking its lead from US markets.

Analysts said resource and commodity stocks would also likely continue to buoy the Australian index on Wednesday.

South Korea's Kospi benchmark index was also in positive territory in early trade, up 1.78% at 1,912.14 points. Official data released on Tuesday showed the country's latest unemployment figures for August sitting at their lowest since January this year.

'Sea of green'

Chris Weston from IG Markets said it would be a good news day for markets and that there was a "sea of green on screen in risk associated assets".

"This pick-up in sentiment once again started from a nice move higher in S&P futures during Asia, helped on by some really bullish flow in the Chinese markets," he said in a note.

"Specifically, the H-shares (Chinese dual-listed companies trading in Hong Kong) had its best day [on Tuesday] in months," he added.

"In the Chinese mainland, there has been some focus on headlines on a 50% reduction in personal income tax dividends for larger shareholders, with the idea being to move the market away from short-term and focus on the longer-term."

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United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek quits amid corruption probe

The chief executive and chairman of the board of United Airlines, Jeff Smisek, has quit amid a corruption investigation.

Two other executives of the US's third largest airline also resigned.

According to US media reports, federal authorities are investigating whether Mr Smisek sanctioned a money-losing flight to benefit the head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

United said that it was cooperating with investigators.

At the time the route operated from Newark, New Jersey, to Columbia, South Carolina, United Airlines was lobbying for improvements at Newark Liberty International Airport, which the Port Authority owns.

Former Port Authority Chairman David Samson owned a vacation home in Columbia at the time.

United launched the twice weekly, direct flight route shortly after Mr Samson was appointed and cancelled it after Mr Samson left the Port Authority.

Oscar Munoz, the chief operating officer CSX Corp, was named Mr Smisek's replacement as CEO.

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Is This The Best Beach City or Expact

So, in 2011, Belfer took the plunge and moved there on a student visa for a master’s degree program at Tel Aviv University. Now, after founding his own creative agency in 2014, he spends his days promoting Israeli companies internationally.

The Mediterranean coastal city is hot right now, and not just for its nearly year-round summer temperatures, which can reach 40 degrees Celsius. In the last few years, Tel Aviv has been ranked the best smart city by the Smart City Expo World Congress, one of the best beach cities in the world by National Geographic, the best gay travel destination by gaycities.com and an outstanding culinary destination by Saveur Magazine.

You're talking about people that aren't afraid to take risks.

While Jerusalem is Israel’s holiest city and capital, Tel Aviv is its defacto economic capital. Easily reached via the Ben Gurion international airport, Tel Aviv is also home to Tel Aviv University — one of Israel's largest — the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, foreign embassies and one of the highest start-up densities in the world, according to Compass’s 2015 Startup Ecosystem Ranking.

But it's not all business.

With miles of white sand beach; acres of green park surrounding the Yarkon River; one cafe, restaurant or club for every 221 residents; the adjacent ancient port city of Jaffa, which was established as a seaport in the Middle Bronze Age, and events ranging from political protests to annual public water gun fights, it is also considered by many to be Israel’s cultural heart.

On the radar

Elianna Bar-El, editor of Time Out Israel, attributed Tel Aviv's growing popularity to word of mouth. “People come during the summer, for holidays or for pride,” she said. “They go back to their countries and talk about it. It is especially intriguing since Israel is always in the news because of the Conflict.”

The “city that never stops” is now the 6th fastest-growing destination city in the Middle East and Africa, with visitors estimated to spend $1.5bn in 2015 according to the 2015MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index.

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The Mysterius Origin of Punctuation

As readers and writers, we’re intimately familiar with the dots, strokes and dashes that punctuate the written word. The comma, colon, semicolon and their siblings are integral parts of writing, pointing out grammatical structures and helping us transform letters into spoken words or mental images. We would be lost without them (or, at the very least, extremely confused), and yet the earliest readers and writers managed without it for thousands of years. What changed their minds?

In the 3rd Century BCE, in the Hellenic Egyptian city of Alexandria, a librarian named Aristophanes had had enough. He was chief of staff at the city’s famous library, home to hundreds of thousands of scrolls, which were all frustratingly time-consuming to read. For as long as anyone could remember, the Greeks had written their texts so that their letters ran together withnospacesorpunctuation and without any distinction between lowercase and capitals. It was up to the reader to pick their way through this unforgiving mass of letters to discover where each word or sentence ended and the next began.

In early Greece and Rome, persuasive speech was more important than written language

Yet the lack of punctuation and word spaces was not seen as a problem. In early democracies such as Greece and Rome, where elected officials debated to promote their points of view, eloquent and persuasive speech was considered more important than written language and readers fully expected that they would have to pore over a scroll before reciting it in public. To be able to understand a text on a first reading was unheard of: when asked to read aloud from an unfamiliar document, a 2nd Century writer named Aulus Gellius protested that he would mangle its meaning and emphasise its words incorrectly. (When a bystander stepped in to read the document instead, he did just that.)

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Is Alcohol Actually Bad for You

Those of us who enjoy the occasional glass of beer or wine would dearly love to believe that we’re doing our bodies a service.

Any study suggesting a glass or two a day can keep the doctor away is greeted with disproportionate enthusiasm by the media and general public. But it is a complex task to determine whether or not alcohol in moderation has health benefits.

It is a complex task to determine whether or not alcohol in moderation has health benefits

One of the earlier studies drawing a link between alcohol consumption and health was performed by the late, great Archie Cochrane; the godfather of evidence-based medicine. In 1979, Cochrane and two colleagues tried to work out what exactly was responsible for the differing rates of death from heart disease across 18 developed countries, including the US, UK and Australia.

Their analysis came up with a clear and significant linkbetween increasing alcohol consumption – specifically of wine – and decreasing rates of ischaemic heart disease (heart disease caused by the build-up of fatty deposits inside the blood vessels supplying the heart).

Citing earlier studies that had found an association between alcohol consumption and lower rates of deaths from heart attack, Cochrane and colleagues suggested that the aromatic and other compounds in alcohol – recently hypothesised to be antioxidants such as plant-based polyphenols – were likely responsible for the benefits, rather than the alcohol itself. In the spirit of evidence-based medicine, they called for an experimental approach to the question.

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The Lost Tunnels buried deep beneath the UK

The air is still. It’s quiet. Occasionally, the sound of a water droplet bursting feebly onto stone echoes through the chamber. Somewhere, somehow, moisture is getting in. But for the most part, it’s dry. And were it not for the smattering of electric lights, this 200-year-old tunnel beneath the streets of Liverpool would be very dark – and very lonely.

Of all of Liverpool’s engineering projects over the last 200 years, the building of the Williamson Tunnels must be the most mysterious

“I still can’t get over the ferns and the moss,” says Dave Bridson, a local historian and manager at the Williamson Tunnels heritage centre in Liverpool, England. He points out where the water seeps through the porous stone, nurturing the light green moss that has formed spontaneously next to lightbulbs. Ever since light was brought into the long-lost tunnels, little pockets of vegetation like this have taken hold.

It took years, however, for that light to arrive.

The tunnel system must be one of the most mysterious engineering projects in Liverpool’s history (Credit: Chris Iles/Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels/www.williamsontunnels.com)

Of all the engineering projects that ever took place in the industrial centre of Liverpool – like the world’s first exclusively steam-powered passenger railway – the building of the Williamson Tunnels in the early 19th Century must be the most mysterious. The patron of the tunnels, tobacco merchant Joseph Williamson, was extraordinarily secretive about their purpose. Even today, no one is sure exactly what they were used for. Nor does anyone know for sure even how many of the tunnels there are, scattered underfoot beneath the Edge Hill district of Liverpool in northwest England.

Meanwhile, for centuries, the tunnels had been buried. They were filled in after locals complained of the smell – apparently the caverns were long used as underground landfills and stuffed with everything from household junk to human waste.

For centuries, the tunnels had been buried. They passed from knowledge to myth

As time went by, the tunnels passed from knowledge to myth.

“A lot of people knew about the tunnels, but that was as far as it went – they just knew about them or heard about them,” explains Les Coe, an early member of the Friends of Williamson Tunnels (FoWT). “It was just left at that. But we decided to look for them.”

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