MINING group Rio Tinto has unearthed an extremely rare pink diamond, Australia's biggest rough pink diamond weighing 12.76 carats at its Argyle mine.
More than 90 percent of the world's pink diamonds come from the Argyle mine in the East Kimberley region in the far northeast of Western Australia.
The diamond, discovered in the Argyle open pit, will be known as The Argyle Pink Jubilee, Rio Tinto said.
It is a light pink diamond, similar to The Williamson Pink, the diamond Britain's Queen Elizabeth received as a wedding gift and which was later set into a brooch for her coronation.
Diamond polisher Richard How Kim Kam, who has worked for Argyle for 25 years, has begun polishing the diamond in Perth.
After two months of careful assessment and planning, it will take about 10 days to cut and polish it as a single stone.
Richard said: "I'm going to take it very carefully. I know the world will be watching."
Afterwards it will be graded by experts and promoted before being sold as part of the Argyle pink diamonds tender later this year.
Argyle pink diamonds manager Josephine Johnson said: "A diamond of this calibre is unprecedented - we may never see one like this again."
Christie's has auctioned 18 polished pink diamonds over 10 carats in 244 years.
Read More @ Source Flight delays decrease in 2011
China.org Business
Flight delays from Chinese airports dropped in 2011. [File photo]
Flight delays from Chinese airports were reduced last year, despite an increase in flight numbers, data showed.
Data from air traffic management revealed that 77.9 percent of scheduled flights were on time last year, a 2-percentage-point improvement from 2010.
Flights between Beijing and Guangzhou were the worst in terms of punctuality, at 66 percent, followed by flights between Beijing and Shanghai at 73 percent, said an official with the Air Traffic Management Bureau under the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC). The official declined to give his name.
Still, "significant improvements" have been made on the two routes, he said, as the proportion of punctual Beijing-Shanghai flights increased by 30 percentage points, and those on Beijing-Guangzhou routes by 11 percentage points, compared to 2010, he said.
Li Jun, deputy director of the CAAC, told a working conference earlier that airlines, airports and air traffic control authorities have boosted cooperation to reduce delays, and capacity at major airports, such as Beijing, Nanjing and Chongqing, were expanded last year.
Flight punctuality will be targeted to improve by 2 percentage points this year, and average flight delays should be reduced by at least 5 percent.
Analysts said the opening of Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail link in June, which halved rail transport time to less than five hours, has pushed airlines to improve performances.
Despite the improvement, however, passengers said that they have not noted any changes for the better.
He Wei, a frequent flier from Beijing, said he did not notice any improvement, not even on the Beijing-Shanghai route with a 30-percentage point jump.
"Last year, several Shanghai to Beijing flights that I took were delayed for one to two hours," he said.
"The improvement of 2 percentage points or 30 percentage points may be more of a statistical significance and does not mean much to travelers," he said.
Still, civil aviation officials, experts and airlines argued that the improvement was hard-earned, given increasingly busy air traffic.
The country's air transport fleet increased by 150 planes last year. The Air Traffic Management Bureau recorded a growth of 7.6 percent in the number of flights it handled, which reached 6.07 million last year.
"Just like on the highway, more cars will cause traffic jams. More planes flying in the sky will also produce congestion and delays," said Li Xiaojin, professor at Civil Aviation University of China.
The authority needs to control the purchase of planes and refine air traffic management to allow more planes to pass through quickly, he added.
Comments