1 Lamborghini aims to double sales (Khaleej Times) Lamborghini
Chief Executive Officer Stefano Domenicali has said the luxury automaker
expects to at least double production to 7,000 vehicles a year by 2019 once it
rolls out a new SUV.
Domenicali said that the automaker plans to cap
yearly production of its supercars at 3,500. He also expects SUV production
will be at least as high but could be higher depending on demand. The Italian
automaker is part of Volkswagen Group. Domenicali said Lamborghini also plans
to boost its worldwide dealer network by about 20 per cent to 160, from the
current 132.
About 30 percent of its dealers and sales are in the
US, its largest market. Lamborghini sold a record 3,245 vehicles worldwide in
2015, including just over 1,000 in the US. Lamborghini is adding 500 employees
and doubling the size of its Sant'Agata Bolognese plant in Italy as part of an
investment worth hundreds of millions of euros announced in 2015. The new SUV
will go on sale in 2018 starting at around $200,000.
Lamborghini is joining a number of luxury carmakers
that have entered the profitable SUV market, including VW's Porsche unit. Domenicali
said he wants to keep brand volume limited. The company unveiled its Centenario
Roadster in California, and said the company had already sold out of the 20
roadsters it was building at a starting price of 2 million euros before taxes. Lamborghini
is owned by Volkswagen through its Audi brand.
2 FARC rebels end half-century war (San Francisco
Chronicle) Colombia's government and the country's biggest rebel group reached
a historic deal Wednesday evening for ending a half-century of hostilities in
one of the world's longest-running and bloodiest armed conflicts.
President Juan Manuel Santos hailed the agreement
with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as an opportunity to turn the
page on decades of political violence that has claimed more than 220,000 lives
and driven more than 5 million people from their homes. He said he would hold a
plebiscite on Oct. 2 to give Colombians the chance to vote on the accord.
Without their approval implementation can't begin.
In Colombia's capital of Bogota, some 400 people
gathered in a plaza to watch on giant screen the agreement being announced by
negotiators in Havana who have been working around the clock in recent days to
hammer out the final sensitive details left to the end of the four years of
talks. "We've won the most beautiful of all battles: the peace of Colombia,"
the chief FARC negotiator, Ivan Marquez, said at the announcement in Havana.
The accord, whose final text has yet to be
published, commits Colombia's government to carrying out aggressive land
reform, overhauling its anti-narcotics strategy and greatly expanding the
state's presence in long-neglected areas of the country. Negotiations began in
November 2012 and were plagued by distrust built up during decades of war
propaganda on both sides.
The rebel army was forced to the negotiating table
after a decade of heavy battlefield losses that saw a succession of top rebel
commanders killed by the US-backed military and the its ranks thinned by half
to the current 7,000 troops.
3 White, male and well-off grads dominate professional
jobs (Richard Adams in The Guardian) White, male and better-off graduates
continue to dominate the professional classes more than three years after
leaving university, even after quality of qualifications and other factors are
taken into account, according to data compiled from universities in England.
The study by the Higher Education Funding Council
for England (Hefce) found that professional employment rates of students graduating
in 2011 were as much as nine percentage points lower for black, Bangladeshi and
Pakistani graduates than for white graduates.
The analysis found smaller but persistent gaps
between male and female graduates, with 79% of men in professional occupations
or study, compared with 74% of women, even though more women were in jobs
overall.
Substantial gaps were also seen among graduates from
disadvantaged backgrounds compared with those from better-off areas, suggesting
that an effort to widen access to professional occupations such as law and
accounting still has a long way to go.
The single minority ethnic group that saw its
prospects brighten was that of ethnic Chinese graduates, whose professional
employment rates improved compared with a similar survey in 2009, and whose
2011 cohort enjoyed employment rates similar to those of their white peers.
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