Author: Himalaya Post

COSCO NETHERLANDS – Waves gently pat the hull of COSCO Netherlands, a giant merchant vessel which is sailing on the Indian Ocean towards Greece and plans to finally reach Valencia, Spain on Aug. 31. It is the first time for the multifunctional vessel, which is owned by China COSCO Shipping Corporation Limited, to take this route. In November 2013, one month after China proposed the Belt and Road Initiative, the manufacturing of COSCO Netherlands was completed at a Chinese ship engineering company’s factory along the Yangtze River. In the following five years, this vessel has been sailing between the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, carrying various types of merchandise, retracing and extending the ancient Maritime Silk Road, a trade route that can date back to China’s Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.). As the fifth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative approaches, the nearly-five-year-old COSCO Netherlands departed from Yangshan Deep Water Port in Shanghai at the end of July, starting its new voyage from the East to the Mediterranean. The ship had traveled from the East China Sea to the South China Sea, and berthed in the ports of Ningbo, Kaohsiung, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Singapore. Previously its destination was northwestern Europe, including the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. Its new voyage this time has resulted from the ever-growing trade between China and Europe. COSCO Netherlands, 366...

TAMPA –  NASA on Sunday blasted off a $1.5 billion spacecraft toward the Sun on a historic mission to protect the Earth by unveiling the mysteries of dangerous solar storms. “Three, two, one, and liftoff!” said a NASA commentator as the Parker Solar Probe lit up the dark night sky aboard a Delta IV-Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 3:31 am (0731 GMT). The unmanned spacecraft aims to get closer than any human-made object in history to the center of our solar system. The probe is designed to plunge into the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, during a seven-year mission. It is protected by an ultra-powerful heat shield that can endure unprecedented levels of heat, and radiation 500 times that experienced on Earth. – Strange veil – NASA has billed the mission as the first spacecraft to “touch the Sun.” In reality, it should come within 3.83 million miles (6.16 million kilometers) of the Sun’s surface, close enough to study the curious phenomenon of the solar wind and the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, which is 300 times hotter than its surface. The car-sized probe is designed to give scientists a better understanding of solar wind and geomagnetic storms that risk wreaking chaos on Earth by knocking out the power grid. These solar outbursts are poorly understood, but pack the potential to wipe out power to...

LONDON – British author V.S. Naipaul, a famously outspoken Nobel laureate who wrote on the traumas of post-colonial change, has died at the age of 85. Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad and the son of an Indian civil servant, was best known for works including “A House for Mr Biswas” and his Man Booker Prize-winning “In A Free State”. “He died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour,” his wife Lady Nadira Naipaul said in a statement on Saturday. She described the outspoken author as a “giant in all that he achieved”. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul settled in England and studied English literature at Oxford University on a scholarship. But he spent much of his time travelling and despite becoming a pillar of Britain’s cultural establishment, was also a symbol of modern rootlessness. Naipaul’s early works focused on the West Indies, but came to encompass countries around the world. He stirred controversy in the past, describing post-colonial countries as “half-made societies” and arguing that Islam both enslaved and attempted to wipe out other cultures. When he was awarded the 2001 Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy described him as a “literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice”. It said he was “the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense:...