Libro de Visitas

Leonardgycle

27 Apr 2025 - 01:28 pm

Everyone is talking about Greenland. Here’s what it’s like to visit
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A few months ago, Greenland was quietly getting on with winter, as the territory slid deeper into the darkness that envelops the world’s northerly reaches at this time of year.

But President Donald Trump’s musings about America taking over this island of 56,000 largely Inuit people, halfway between New York and Moscow, has seen Greenland shaken from its frozen Arctic anonymity.

Denmark, for whom Greenland is an autonomous crown dependency, has protested it’s not for sale. Officials in Greenland, meanwhile, have sought to assert the territory’s right to independence.

The conversation continues to intensify. A contentious March 28 visit to a US military installation by Usha Vance, the second lady, accompanied by her husband, Vice President JD Vance, was the latest in a series of events to focus attention on Trump’s ambitions for Greenland.

The visit was originally planned as a cultural exchange, but was shortened following complaints from Greenland Prime Minister Mute B. Egede.

Had the Vances prolonged their scheduled brief visit, they would’ve discovered a ruggedly pristine wildernesses steeped in rich Indigenous culture.

An inhospitable icecap several miles deep covers 80% of Greenland, forcing the Inuit to dwell along the shorelines in brightly painted communities. Here, they spend brutally cold winters hunting seals on ice under the northern lights in near perpetual darkness. Although these days, they can also rely on community stores.

The problem for travelers over the years has been getting to Greenland via time-consuming indirect flights. That’s changing. Late in 2024, the capital Nuuk opened a long-delayed international airport. From June 2025, United Airlines will be operating a twice-weekly direct service from Newark to Nuuk.

Two further international airports are due to open by 2026 — Qaqortoq in South Greenland and more significantly in Ilulissat, the island’s only real tourism hotspot.

Rogerlet

27 Apr 2025 - 10:42 am

Siham Haleem, a private tour guide for 15 years, says that Doha now has many world-class, modern museums — the National Museum of Qatar being a firm personal favorite. And yet he says that visiting Sheikh Faisal’s museum should still be on everybody’s to-do list.
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“For those eager to learn about Qatar’s — and the region’s — heritage and beyond, the museum is an ideal destination,” he says. “Personally, I’m captivated by the car collection, the fossils, and especially the Syrian house, painstakingly transported and reassembled piece by piece.”

Stephanie Y. Martinez, a Mexican-American student mobility manager at Texas A&M University in Qatar likes the museum so much she includes it on all of her itineraries for students visiting from the main campus in Texas.

“The guided tours are very detailed, and the collections found at the museum have great variety and so many stories to unfold,” she says. “Truly, the museum has something to pique everyone’s interest. My favorites are the cars and the furniture exhibits showcasing wood and mother-of-pearl details. Definitely one of my favorite museums in Qatar, every time I visit I learn something new.”

Raynor Abreu, from India, also had praise for the unusual and immense collection.

“Each item has its own story, making the visit even more interesting,” he says. “It’s also impressive to know that Sheikh Faisal started collecting these unique pieces when he was very young. Knowing this makes the museum even more special, as it reflects his lifelong passion for history and culture.”

It takes time and dedication to truly examine the many collections within the museum — especially since most of them are simply on display without explanation.

Eclectic it may be, but it’s hard to fault the determination of Sheikh Faisal, who has brought together items that tell the story of Qatar and the Middle East.

Sarah Bayley, from the UK, says she visited the museum recently with her family, including 16 and 19-year-old teenagers, and was won over by its sheer eccentricity.

“Amazing. Loved it. It is a crazy place.”

Rodgerzes

27 Apr 2025 - 10:34 am

Remote and rugged
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A more organic way to see this coast is by the multi-day coastal ferry, the long-running Sarfaq Ittuk, of the Arctic Umiaq Line. It’s less corporate than the modern cruise ships and travelers get to meet Inuit commuters. Greenland is pricey. Lettuce in a local community store might cost $10, but this coastal voyage won’t break the bank.

The hot ticket currently for exploring Greenland’s wilder side is to head to the east coast facing Europe. It’s raw and sees far fewer tourists, with a harshly dramatic coastline of fjords where icebergs drift south. There are no roads and the scattered population of just over 3,500 people inhabit a coastline roughly the distance from New York to Denver.

A growing number of small expedition vessels probe this remote coast for its frosted scenery and wildlife. Increasingly popular is the world’s largest fjord system of Scoresby Sound with its sharp-fanged mountains and hanging valleys choked by glaciers. Sailing north is the prosaically named North East Greenland National Park, fabulous for spotting wildlife on the tundra.

Travelers come to see polar bears which, during the northern hemisphere’s summer, move closer to land as the sea-ice melts. There are also musk oxen, great flocks of migrating geese, Arctic foxes and walrus.
Some of these animals are fair game for the local communities. Perhaps Greenland’s most interesting cultural visit is to a village that will take longer to learn how to pronounce than actually walk around — Ittoqqortoormiit. Five hundred miles north of its neighboring settlement, the 345 locals are frozen in for nine months of the year. Ships sail in to meet them during the brief summer melt between June and August.

Locked in by ice, they’ve retained traditional habits.

“My parents hunt nearly all their food,” said Mette Barselajsen, who owns Ittoqqortoormiit’s only guesthouse. “They prefer the old ways, burying it in the ground to ferment and preserve it. Just one muskox can bring 440 pounds of meat.”

Kevinwaymn

27 Apr 2025 - 10:09 am

A long time in the making
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. More than 12 years later, the rover has driven over 21 miles (34 kilometers) to ascend Mount Sharp, which is within the crater. The feature’s many layers preserve millions of years of geological history on Mars, showing how it shifted from a wet to a dry environment.
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Perhaps one of the most valuable samples Curiosity has gathered on its mission to understand whether Mars was ever habitable was collected in May 2013.

The rover drilled the Cumberland sample from an area within a crater called Yellowknife Bay, which resembled an ancient lake bed. The rocks from Yellowknife Bay so intrigued Curiosity’s science team that it had the rover drive in the opposite direction to collect samples from the area before heading to Mount Sharp.
Since collecting the Cumberland sample, Curiosity has used SAM to study it in a variety of ways, revealing that Yellowknife Bay was once the site of an ancient lake where clay minerals formed in water. The mudstone created an environment that could concentrate and preserve organic molecules and trapped them inside the fine grains of the sedimentary rock.

Freissinet helped lead a research team in 2015 that was able to identify organic molecules within the Cumberland sample.

The instrument detected an abundance of sulfur, which can be used to preserve organic molecules; nitrates, which are essential for plant and animal health on Earth; and methane composed of a type of carbon associated with biological processes on Earth.

“There is evidence that liquid water existed in Gale Crater for millions of years and probably much longer, which means there was enough time for life-forming chemistry to happen in these crater-lake environments on Mars,” said study coauthor Daniel Glavin, senior scientist for sample return at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.

Chesterveith

27 Apr 2025 - 05:44 am

Curiosity has maintained pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample in a “doggy bag” so that the team could have the rover revisit it later, even miles away from the site where it was collected. The team developed and tested innovative methods in its lab on Earth before sending messages to the rover to try experiments on the sample.
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In a quest to see whether amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, existed in the sample, the team instructed the rover to heat up the sample twice within SAM’s oven. When it measured the mass of the molecules released during heating, there weren’t any amino acids, but they found something entirely unexpected.

An intriguing detection
The team was surprised to detect small amounts of decane, undecane and dodecane, so it had to conduct a reverse experiment on Earth to determine whether these organic compounds were the remnants of the fatty acids undecanoic acid, dodecanoic acid and tridecanoic acid, respectively.

The scientists mixed undecanoic acid into a clay similar to what exists on Mars and heated it up in a way that mimicked conditions within SAM’s oven. The undecanoic acid released decane, just like what Curiosity detected.

Each fatty acid remnant detected by Curiosity was made with a long chain of 11 to 13 carbon atoms. Previous molecules detected on Mars were smaller, meaning their atomic weight was less than the molecules found in the new study, and simpler.
“It’s notable that non-biological processes typically make shorter fatty acids, with less than 12 carbons,” said study coauthor Dr. Amy Williams, associate professor of geology at the University of Florida and assistant director of the Astraeus Space Institute, in an email. “Larger and more complex molecules are likely what are required for an origin of life, if it ever occurred on Mars.”

Davidspene

27 Apr 2025 - 02:52 am

By Henry Austin
A Russian-American woman who was imprisoned for treason by Russia has been freed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday.
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Former ballerina Ksenia Karelina was born in Russia but had built a new life as an aesthetician at a Los Angeles spa after immigrating to the United States over a decade ago. She “is on a plane back home to the United States,” having been “wrongfully detained by Russia for over a year,” Rubio said on in a post on X. He credited President Donald Trump with securing her release.
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Karolina’s lawyer, Mikhail Mushailov, confirmed her release in a statement on Instagram. “Two hours ago she was in touch with her relatives and took off from Abu Dhabi to the U.S.,” he wrote, adding that he had known about her release since Tuesday.
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Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) detained Karelina in January 2024 while she was visiting her parents and young sister in the city Yekaterinburg. It did not provide further details or evidence of her alleged crime.
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At the time, Russian legal group Perviy Otdel said it had information that Karelina had donated just over $51.80 from her U.S. bank account on Feb. 24, 2022 — the day that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — to a charity that sends aid to Ukraine. A spa where she had previously worked confirmed this in a statement on Facebook.

Although Russia’s FSB did not confirm that figure, it said Karelina’s donation “was subsequently used to purchase tactical medical supplies, equipment, weapons, and ammunition for the Ukrainian armed forces.”

She was sentenced in August to 12 years in a penal colony for “high treason,” having “fully admitted her guilt” at a closed trial in the southwestern Russian city of Yekaterinberg, Sverdlovsky Region Court said in a news release at the time.

The sentence came against the backdrop of Russia’s 3-year-long war with Ukraine during which President Vladimir Putin’s government has cracked down on dissent. Any perceived criticism of the military is banned.

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Michaelcam

27 Apr 2025 - 02:10 am

How Trump changed his mind on tariffs

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Peter Nicholas, Garrett Haake and Carol E. Lee
Reporting from Washington
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“Liberation Day” gave way to Capitulation Day last night.

President Donald Trump pulled back yesterday on a series of harsh tariffs targeting friends and foes alike in an audacious bid to remake the global economic order.

Image: President Donald Trump
Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images
Trump’s early afternoon announcement followed a harrowing week in which Republican lawmakers and confidants privately warned him that the tariffs could wreck the economy. His own aides had quietly raised alarms about the financial markets before he suspended a tariff regime that he had unveiled with a flourish just one week earlier in a Rose Garden ceremony.
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The stock market rose immediately after the about-face, ending days of losses that have forced older Americans who’ve been sinking their savings into 401(k)s to rethink their retirement plans.

Read the full story here.

32m ago / 12:55 PM GMT+3
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China's foreign ministry calls the U.S. a '21st century barbarian'

Peter Guo

Reporting from Hong Kong

China's public language on its trade war with the U.S. has become increasingly bellicose and took a new turn today when Beijing's foreign ministry said the Trump administration's tariffs have made the U.S. a “barbarian of the 21st century.”

Trump’s tariffs will “never America great again” ministry of foreign affairs spokesperson Huang Jingrui, wrote in an open letter today in Hong Kong’s newspaper South China Morning Post.
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“A tariff-wielding barbarian who attempts to force countries to call and beg for mercy can never expect that call from China,” Huang said, adding that the U.S. is “obsessed with the art of bullying and blackmailing the entire world.”

47m ago / 12:40 PM GMT+3
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EU welcomes 90-day tariff pause

Peter Guo

The EU President Ursula von der Leyen said today that the region welcomes Trump’s announcement to pause tariffs for 90 days.

Von der Leyen said the EU remains “committed to constructive negotiations” with the U.S., according to a statement from her office.

Meanwhile, Europe continues to focus on diversifying their trade partnerships, engaging with countries that account for 87% of global trade, she said.

Trump’s tariffs have shown that the European internal market is the region’s “anchor of stability and resilience” in times of uncertainty, von der Leyen added.

1h ago / 12:27 PM GMT+3
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Trade war with China 'to spark a wave of smuggling'

Peter Guo

Reporting from Hong Kong
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Irregular trade including smuggling will most likely rise amid the U.S.' and China's tit-for-tat tariffs, an economist warns.

The cost of tariffs has become “prohibitive to almost every company,” Tianchen Xu, senior economist at Economist Intelligence Unit.

“As a result, trade flows in both directions will tumble, and irregular trade will proliferate, including smuggling, transshipment and systemic under-reporting of trade value during customs clearance,” Xu said in a note.

Xu said trade negotiations and a partial de-escalation in the ongoing trade war may ensue in the coming months, but those tensions are likely to worsen in the short term between the world’s two largest economies.

1h ago / 12:09 PM GMT+3
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California plant business owner says costs will double with tariffs

Gadi Schwartz and Phil Helsel
The owner of a California home decor and plant shop said that even in dealing locally, the sourcing of goods from China is impossible to avoid.
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Davidbeamy

27 Apr 2025 - 02:09 am

While the Cumberland sample may contain longer chains of fatty acids, SAM is not designed to detect them. But SAM’s ability to spot these larger molecules suggests it could detect similar chemical signatures of past life on Mars if they’re present, Williams said.
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“Curiosity is not a life detection mission,” Freissinet said. “Curiosity is a habitability detection mission to know if all the conditions were right … for life to evolve. Having these results, it’s really at the edge of the capabilities of Curiosity, and it’s even maybe better than what we had expected from this mission.”

Before sending missions to Mars, scientists didn’t think organic molecules would be found on the red planet because of the intensity of radiation Mars has long endured, Glavin said.
Curiosity won’t return to Yellowknife Bay during its mission, but there are still pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample aboard. Next, the team wants to design a new experiment to see what it can detect. If the team can identify similar long-chain molecules, it would mark another step forward that might help researchers determine their origins, Freissinet said.

“That’s the most precious sample we have on board … waiting for us to run the perfect experiment on it,” she said. “It holds secrets, and we need to decipher the secrets.”

Briony Horgan, coinvestigator on the Perseverance rover mission and professor of planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, called the detection “a big win for the whole team.” Horgan was not involved the study.
“This detection really confirms our hopes that sediments laid down in ancient watery environments on Mars could preserve a treasure trove of organic molecules that can tell us about everything from prebiotic processes and pathways for the origin of life, to potential biosignatures from ancient organisms,” Horgan said.

Dr. Ben K.D. Pearce, assistant professor in Purdue’s department of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and leader of the Laboratory for Origins and Astrobiology Research, called the findings “arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars.” Pearce did not participate in the research.

Lloydbrear

27 Apr 2025 - 01:40 am

Tesla is bringing its electric cars to oil-rich Saudi Arabia amid falling global sales
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Tesla will start selling its electric vehicles in Saudi Arabia, entering the Gulf region’s largest economy as the company’s global sales are sliding and CEO Elon Musk courts controversy with his role in the US government.

The carmaker announced Wednesday that it would host a launch event in the kingdom on April 10, where it will showcase its EVs. Attendees will also have the chance to “experience the future of autonomous driving with Cybercab and meet Optimus, our humanoid robot, as we showcase what’s next in AI and robotics,” Tesla (TSLA) said.

Tesla may struggle to gain market share in oil-rich Saudi Arabia as EVs make up a little over 1% of all car sales in the country, according to a report by consultancy PwC published in September.
Tesla’s entry into the new market comes as the company fights battles on several fronts.

Last year, it recorded the first annual decline in sales in its history as a public company, posting a drop of 1%.

The company is facing intensifying competition in China, the world’s largest auto market. On Tuesday, BYD, a Chinese maker of electric and hybrid cars, reported $107 billion in annual sales for 2024, beating the near-$98 billion notched by Tesla.

And last week, BYD unveiled an ultra-fast charging system, which it said was capable of adding 250 miles (402 km) of range in just five minutes, easily outdoing Tesla’s charging technology. Tesla’s Superchargers take 15 minutes to charge an EV, providing a range of 200 miles.

Tesla has also suffered slumping sales in Europe. In February, the carmaker sold around 40% fewer vehicles on the continent compared with the same month in 2024, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

Jasonliemi

27 Apr 2025 - 01:28 am

Arctic auroras
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For getting around during winter, the Inuit here nowadays prefer snowmobiles, although they still keep their sled dogs. During winter they’ll offer intrepid visitors, wrapped up warm against the deep-freeze temperatures, dog-sledding jaunts. These can last either an hour or be part of expeditions over several days, sometimes with the added experience of learning how to build an igloo. Sisimiut on the west coast and Tasilaq in the southeast are active winter centers for dog sledding.

Winter’s most stellar attraction, though, is northern lights watching. With little urban light pollution, Greenland is a dark canvas for spectacular displays, and aurora borealis-watching vacations are becoming more popular.

Staying outdoors, Greenland is developing a reputation among adventure enthusiasts: from long-distance skiing expeditions and heliskiing on the icecap to hiking the 100-mile-long Arctic Circle Trail from Kangerslussuaq, where firearms need to be carried for warning shots in case of polar bear encounters.

Life is definitely changing here. The climate crisis is eating away at its icecap and Greenland may well end up as a pawn in a game of geopolitical chess. But for now, the bright glare of international attention should shine a favorable light on one of the wildest travel destinations on Earth.

Travel writer Mark Stratton is an Arctic specialist who has traveled to Greenland six times and counting. He’s marveled at the aurora borealis, sailed to Disko Island, dog-sledded with the Inuit, and once got stuck in an icefloe.