What the ban’s long-term effect will be is unclear but although the Lincolnshire Hunts Club and West Of Yore have
Posted in General on 05. Sep, 2010
What the ban’s long-term effect will be is unclear, but although the Lincolnshire Hunts Club and West Of Yore have dropped out of the list their absence is not a direct consequence.
Those meetings have been replaced by the Radnor and West Hereford adding a day to their April date at Cold Harbour (29-30) and by the Vine and Craven, who race at Hackwood Park on Easter Monday, 17 April, staging a fixture at Barbury Castle on 18 February.The recent rain could not have arrived at a more fortuitous time for the fast-draining Cottenham track where the going is good. Faria’s time of 1:37.07 was more than a minute faster than the KTM-Gauloises of Esteve.Faria is still trying to make up a 12-minute time penalty and is well behind the leaders, despite finishing second and first on the opening two days. My goal in Portugal was to stay in touch with the front-runners.”The title holder Stephane Peterhansel was down in sixth after a puncture once again ruined his day.Portugal’s Ruben Faria made the most of local knowledge to win the motorcycle stage on his KTM.Faria was on terrain he knows well and used his expertise to good effect as he kept new leader Isidre Esteve Pujol at bay. The hilly course and slippery tracks between Portimao and Malaga in Spain suited the VW driver who said: “Everything went fine today, I had even more pleasure than yesterday on the course.
“It’s not that perfect to have the leadership before reaching Africa.
I’m still waiting for the desert to know what I can really do over there.” Sainz took one hour, 34min and 28sec to cover the stage, beating Frenchman Luc Alphand’s Mitsubishi by 25 seconds.Alphand said: “That was a fantastic stage, the pace was much higher than usual in the Dakar and I was a bit worried about the cliffs on the side of the course.”Since our car has been made for the desert, Portugal was not the perfect ground for us but I did quite well in these two stages. Carlos Sainz kept up his perfect start to the Dakar Rally with a second stage win in Portugal yesterday. But the former world rally champion believes he will not find out if he can win the event on his debut until the race reaches the deserts of North Africa. Matt Humphries is taking over on the Australian boat ING Brunel, and Marcel van Triest is joining Torben Grael’s Brasil 1 in place of Adrienne Cahalan, who was the only woman among the 70 crew on the seven boats.
Grael also has Norway’s Knut Frostad to help for the Southern Ocean legs.Damian Foxall has joined Neal McDonald on Ericsson in place of Tony Kolb, and Anthony Merrington, takes over from Freddy Loof on the Disney-backed Pirates of the Caribbean.. Two yachts did not make it at all, and two more had to cope with significant damage.Mike Sanderson, the overall leader, whose ABN Amro 1 has shown blistering speed in stronger breezes, said: “We are looking forward to getting into [the second stage]. But I think everyone will have learned their lesson about keeping things in one piece.”He has made just one crew change as Britain’s Brian Thompson steps in for Mark Christensen, the watch leader, who needs more time to recover after breaking two bones in his right arm.Two new navigators also settle into their seats. The sunshine of Cape Town in holiday mode will quickly be forgotten today as the crews of the seven yachts in the Volvo Ocean Race around the world dig out their oilskins and boots to head south to the Southern Ocean on the second, 6,100-mile leg to Melbourne
The contest promises to be both fast and furious. The yacht designers and race organisers are predicting faster leg times, to take into account the high speeds – averaging up to 17 knots – which are being achieved by these new, 70-foot racing machines.
The skippers know they must keep both their boats and crews in good working order after the battering that they took on the first leg from Vigo, Spain. Ninety per cent of the world’s palm oil comes from Malaysia and Indonesia, and most of the plantations are on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. As rainforests are cleared to make way for plantations, the orang-utans are forced out, and are either killed or captured to be sold as pets.Campaigners say that Britain, the second biggest importer of palm oil in Europe after the Netherlands, and consumers should take a leading role in ensuring the product does not come from destructive sources.Orang-utans, which share 96.7 per cent of human genetic make-up, are a critically endangered species, and of the 50,000 left in Borneo an estimated 5,000 will be lost each year..
I’m not at all surprised they are being abused.”The global demand for palm oil, one of the world’s most popular vegetable oils and used in products such as soap, chocolate and lipstick, is encouraging the destruction of the orang-utan. Coming back from Borneo made me doubt if there was any hope for mankind”.Loggers in Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo are notorious for killing large numbers of orang-utans every year, but new claims of abuse on the Indonesian side suggest a level of vindictiveness not seen before.Sue Sheward, founder of the Sepilok Orangutan Appeal which works with the Malaysian government, said the brutal manner in which loggers and locals treated orang-utans in Borneo was unparalleled “Things in Indonesia are just awful. “Sometimes they are shot but more often than not they are killed with machetes or beaten to death.”Iolo Williams, a wildlife expert who recently returned from the region, said he went to a rescue centre near the Kalimantan Rainforest in Indonesian Borneo where he saw baby orang-utans who had had their hands cut off as they clung to their mothers “What I saw was horrendous. One of the things I’m definitely going to do better is to resolve my transport issues. My life revolves around my car, but I’ve realised there’s no point in having a fast one. I’m going to look into getting something greener – a dual-fuel car I want to make myself a greener traveller.