It has been known for months that there is a crisis at MV Werften. But how delicate the situation really is, only became clear on Friday, when trading in shares of the Asian Genting Group, which had acquired the shipyards in 2016 for the construction of cruise ships for its own shipping companies, was suspended on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Almost immediately, the due payment of wages and salaries for the around 2000 employees in Wismar, Rostock and Stralsund was postponed to next week. “We have 30 million euros in liquidity. But there are legal frameworks under which we were not able to pay the wages and salaries today ”, said managing director Carsten Haake following a staff meeting. The future of Lloyd Werft in Bremerhaven, which also belongs to Genting, is also uncertain.
Even without showing their best face and in the absence of their two leaders ֤ Émilien Jacquelin and Quentin Fillon-Maillet, the Biathlon Blues still won a podium. This Saturday, the mixed relay made up of Antonin Guigonnat, Simon Desthieux, Anaïs Bescond and Julia Simon took third place in the mixed relay in Oberhof, Germany. The tricolor quartet, however, ended up far from Norway and Belarus.
The French were unfortunately penalized by their numerous shooting faults, with 11 picks, once morest only 6 and 5 for the two teams who had beaten them. They thus finished more than 2 minutes from Norway, but can already be happy with this podium, since they were still stuck in 7th place before the last stint. It took a Julia Simon on the attack on all her shots to manage to remake the delay accumulated so far and finally outdistance by seven seconds from Sweden.
While waiting for the prosecution
With this comeback, Simon confirmed his good legs, having already taken 2nd place in the sprint on Friday. She will have a card to play in the women’s pursuit on Sunday (2:45 p.m.). But all eyes will be on the male pursuit, to see if the choices of the coaching of the France team are paying off. The coaches of the Blues had decided to rest for the relay Jacquelin and Fillon-Maillet, who currently occupy in this order the head of the general classification of the World Cup.
Second in the sprint at Oberhof on Friday, Jacquelin will once once more wear the yellow bib for this race. “I remember drawing Raphaël Poirée with my brother, he explained on Twitter. Then I grew up watching Martin Fourcade. I dreamed of it. Wearing it is a huge source of pride, but not the end. “
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No less than 603 entries, of which 450 were cars and trucks, start on January 1, 1988, from Versailles on the way to Dakar, at 12,874 kilometers. That tenth edition of the test created by Thierry Sabine (who died in 1987, in a helicopter accident), with such a number of entries, was difficult to manage. The number of participants meant that the last of the classification might not start before noon, thus being forced, mathematically, to shoot at night.
On January 4, in the first African stage, in Algiers (Algiers-el Oued), a succession of dunes of 600 kilometers, the difficulty is of such magnitude that, when the sun goes down, regarding two hundred participants have abandoned.
And four stages later there are only two hundred left in the race. Follow the test. The “anti Dakar”, from their seats in Europe, criticize raids for the accidents, several fatal, that occur. French President Mitterrand confesses his passion for the Dakar, but also that his wife is once morest the race. The president of the FISA (Federation Internationale du Sport Automobile), the French Jean Marie Balestre, is facing the heads of TSO (Thierry Sabine Organization), with René Metge, director of the event, and Gilbert, the father of Thierry Sabine to the head, and accuses them of not respecting the federative regulations.
But the environment within the race itself is also bad. The end of the stage is gruesome, the men arrive like zombies and, especially for motorcyclists, the layout is torture. Many have to abandon having lost their trucks or assistance cars (which, by regulation, have to participate in the test) sunk in the dunes. René Metge wanted to recover the original spirit of the Dakar, to limit the big factory teams so that the private ones had their chance. But the result is very different. Jean Todt himself, at the helm of the leading team, the Peugeot Talbot Sport, declares: “wanting to limit us, the TSO has set the bar too high. The private and, even less the fans, can no longer continue »
And in front of the survivors, a Finn, a king of ice, the 1981 world rally champion, Ari Vatanen, seems to fly in his Peugeot 405 Turbo 16 Grand Raid despite the fact that a problem in a suspension ball has caused a small fire on the stage of January 9, which his co-driver Bruno Berglund managed to control. On January 17, when the fourteenth stage between Timbuktu and Bamako ends, Vatanen and Berglund are still leading the test with the Peugeot 405, with the number 204. Everything seems to presage that he will repeat his triumph of the previous year, in a Peugeot 205 T-16 Grand Raid, on that occasion with Bernard Giroux as co-pilot.
In the early morning of January 18, René Metge, returning to the bivouac, crosses over the bridge that crosses the Niger and connects with Bamako, with the 405 from Vatanen driven, he will say later, “by a target.” There is nothing out of the ordinary, as two hours following starting it may be a team member who performs the last checks before the race starts once more.
But little by little a rumor springs up: “Vatanen’s 405 has been stolen.” Jean Todt, head of the Peugeot team, reportedly received a call announcing that the 405 was “hijacked” and that if they wanted to recover it they would have to deposit a large sum of money. The rally awakens, the mechanics put the finishing touches on the cars, the drivers put on their overalls…, and Vatanen drives desperately while Todt does not separate himself from his satellite phone.
Journalists bombard with their questions How can a racing car disappear from the crowded campsite with the noise coming from its exhaust? And that, as if that were not enough, that it does not start like any street car, since it requires a complex process to get going. All the living forces of the country, the police, the army itself, the organizers, the journalists …, scour the area in search of the missing 405.
Each competitor has their start time marked with a tolerated margin of 30 minutes. For every minute beyond the scheduled time, one minute is penalized. The service truck carrying the parts for Vatanen’s Peugeot does not start. The timekeepers warn the team that the minutes are passing and no exceptions will be made. They might start and wait, but they don’t want to, they prefer to be out of the race.
Suddenly the news spreads. The 405 has been found in a field 2 kilometers from the starting point. It is intact, with full tanks and ready to devour the kilometers of the day’s stage. But it will not be so. Time has passed and he is out of the running. Peugeot does not appeal this decision. Finally it will be another Peugeot, the 204 from Kankkunen, who arrives at the head of the Dakar beach.
From there, there will be many theories. Some unlikely, such as that Jean Marie Balestre would have “commissioned” the kidnapping, given his wishes that Peugeot should not continue participating in the Dakar. Another, no less bizarre, is that of Fenouil, which seems to be taken from an album by Michael Vaillante, the pilot created by cartoonist Jean Graton.
The theory of Fenouil
Jean Claude Morellet, known as Fenouil and also “like the madman of the desert”, a true pioneer, as a participant in motorcycle, raids, writer, organizer and inspirer of events such as the Rally of the Pharaohs or Dakar itself, put forward a theory in “Dakar l’envers du décor”, one of his books. This theory would have been told by several protagonists of the Dakar, among them the late Ulrich Brehmer, at that time the patron of the Mitsubishi team. At the end of the stage, the Peugeot men noticed a major engine failure (a cracked block or crankshaft). By regulation their change was prohibited (they were sealed before the start of the test). Desperate, the mechanics had pushed the car aside so they might work quietly.
And the disqualification of the assistance truck had been provoked since, outside of the race, it was not controlled which parts it loaded inside. A plane carrying a new engine had landed at 3 a.m. in Bamako, but it was not possible to connect it to the gearbox. So they decide to take the 405 to a garage away from prying eyes to make, or at least try, the corresponding adaptation. But the job might not be finished on time. And the lead seals? Fenouil goes back to an event that had occurred at the TSO headquarters a fortnight before the start of the Dakar: the leads and clamps used to make the verification seals had been stolen. One can imagine that there was one or, perhaps, several teams that had been made with these seals, in such a way that, in a “discreet” way, they might remake.
The official version of Peugeot
The official version of Peugeot is that the 405 would have been stolen by a gangster group from Bamako. But the author did not know anything regarding the car and it would have stopped two kilometers later without gasoline, and he did not know that the two injection pumps had to be activated to power the engine. So, he would have chosen to go to a house to make the phone call, asking for the ransom. A Bamako resident, passing by on his moped, had discovered the car and called the authorities.
Ari Vatanen’s position
Ari Vatanen, who had happened to the 405 in Bamako, has been asked on a few occasions. His answer has always been the same: “It was stolen. He would never have allowed a drill. Also, I lost the race because of this matter. Given the character and renowned integrity of the Finnish driver, this is a confirmation of the Peugeot version. But, in any case, it is difficult to put limits to the imagination, and less in the desert.
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The contagion of COVID-19 remains uncontrolled in Spain, with 1.3 million cases diagnosed in the last 14 days and an incidence not seen before, saturated primary health care and a gradual increase in hospitalized patients, although mass vaccination contains the number of serious cases and deaths.
The sixth wave of the infection breaks records throughout the country favored by the expansion of the omicron variant, highly contagious, and the successive Christmas celebrations, which ended this Thursday. However, its effects will take some time to be noticed, the health authorities foresee, when the maximum number of detected cases is reached.
The average incidence per one hundred thousand inhabitants in 14 days exceeds 2,500 cases. Meanwhile, critically ill patients occupy more than 21% of the intensive care beds in the Spanish hospital network, according to the latest data published by the Ministry of Health.
“LIVING WITH COVID-19”
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, predicted “high” numbers of new infected over the next few days, although he stressed that Spain is better prepared than a year ago. “We are going to have to learn to live (with COVID-19) as we do with many other viruses,” he said.
He added that this growth in infections does not translate into “exponential growth in hospitalizations or ICU admissions,” since most cases “are of asymptomatic people”.
COVID-19 out of control in Spain: Record numbers and saturated primary health care despite contagion higher than ever, a large part of the regions currently apply far fewer socioeconomic constraints or more lax than before, and most consist of limiting certain capacities to avoid crowds or hours of nightlife activities.
The two states of alarm decreed so far in Spain to contain the epidemic (although they were later declared unconstitutional) allowed regional authorities limit people’s mobility and apply curfews.
Now, without a state of alarm, They have to ask the Justice to authorize these measures because they affect people’s freedom, as is the case in Catalonia, where the curfew is applied between 1 at night and 6 in the morning.
MORE VACCINATION, LESS DEATHS
In Spain, a country of 47.5 million inhabitants, 31.5% of children between the ages of 5 and 11 have already received a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the latest official data, and 86.8% of the population between 12 and 19 years of age have the complete pattern.
More than 80% of the entire population is fully vaccinated. Likewise, people over 40 years old receive a booster dose, which they already have in eight out of ten over 60 years, reported Pedro Sánchez.
Sánchez, 49, received it and defended in Twitter vaccination and prudence, since “they are the best way to fight the virus.”
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Among other results, the incidence of cases is lower at the moment in the older age groups.
The average lethality of the disease in Spain is 1.3%. Previously, it was 4% shortly following the epidemic broke out, which has caused regarding 90,000 deaths, according to health records.