Dede Sophie

Papua New Guinea PRIME Minister James Marape has given details of his weekend trip to Singapore. In his first official trip following his re-election as PM, he took the trip to pursue the frontier breaking clean green energy deals he has been championing over the last two years. Papua New Guinea PRIME Minister James Marape  Prime Minister Marape met with leaders of Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) in Singapore on Sunday to progress the talks further. PM Marape continued these important trade and investment conversations, including those on Papua LNG, Pasca LNG, P’nyang LNG and also to get Porgera and Wafi-Golpu sanctioned. PM Marape said from Singapore that FFI had voiced its intention to partner PNG in a big way to harvest clean green energy from both hydro and geothermal sources as well as move later down the line into solar and wind energy production. Currently, FFI has identified and set up project sites in Gulf Province for hydro and West New Britain Province for geothermal work ...

Imagine this. A high altitude village in the Western Himalayas of India that is made up of a small group of people living in Tibetan styled mud and stone houses and who are surrounded by snow capped mountains and the rolling hills of the mighty Himalayas. Now, imagine their mountainous land being the home to a rich array of fossils of marine animals and plants from millions of years ago. Sounds impossible right? Well, such a village exists at an altitude of 4400 metres above MSL in the high Himalayas of Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh. This village called Langza is a picturesque village that lies at the base of the Chau Chau Kang Nilda peak and that is just made up of a few hundred people. The interesting thing is that Langza and most of Spiti valley was under the ancient Tethys sea many millions of years ago and it was home to many ancient marine flora and fauna. The entire mountain landscape that we see today was all under a huge ocean before the tectonic plates shifted leading to t...

If all these Volkswagen ID numbers are somewhat confusing to you, you’re probably not alone, writes Brian Byrne. Quick primer: all IDs are electric; ID.3 is a compact family hatchback; ID.4 an SUV in the same C-segment; ID.5 a coupe version of that last; and ID.Buzz is the van-based passenger MPV and commercial vehicle. There’s an ID.6 in China, a 7-seater in the D-segment; and planned for this year are a city car ID.1, a small ID.2 crossover, and large saloon and estate ID.7s. So what you see is Volkswagen’s roadmap to offering a range of EVs to match most of its current internal combustion models. Nothing in the pickup to match the upcoming new generation Amorak yet, but given the cooperation agreement with Ford on LCVs and future blue oval passenger EVs, doubtless there will be a VW variant of Ford’s US F-150 Lightning at some stage. All of which brings me to the ID.5 which is the subject for my review this week. The style is slick, recognisably an ID, but wit...