AS Monaco’s Belgian prospect Eliot Matazo has vowed to “climb the ladder under the Monegasque jersey” as he signed a new contract keeping him at the Principality side until 2026.
The Belgian U21 midfielder has asserted himself as a first-team regular this season making 11 appearances in Ligue 1, six of which have been starts. He has prospered in a double pivot role alongside Aurelien Tchouameni, a partnership that is constantly improving as familiarity and understanding grows.
In a press conference on Friday, AS Monaco manager Philippe Clement told Monaco Life, “I’m happy that he’s re-signed because the important thing here is the project with the young players. It is clear that he has talent.” The Belgian manager, however, said that his compatriot needs to improve: “In terms of selection, he has to prove himself every day.”
In a press release, Vice-President Oleg Petrov was full of praise for Matazo, saying, “After having stood out during his time at the Academy, Eliot quickly adapted to the requirements of the professional group and showed very good things on the pitch.”
In the same release, Matazo thanked the club that has developed him from a young age, stating, “I would like to thank the Club for once again showing its confidence in me. Since my arrival in 2018, I have had the opportunity to assert myself and progress within AS Monaco Academy.”
Signing until 2026, Matazo now has the task of repaying the faith that the hierarchy have shown in him, and he says he is determined to do so. “I am attached to it (the club) and I intend to continue to be fully involved in order to climb the ladder under the Monegasque jersey.”
Photo left to right: Oleg Petrov, Eliot Matazo and Paul Mitchell, source AS Monaco football club.
A mid-game slump proved costly for AS Monaco Basketball, as they narrowly lost out to mid-table Nanterre on Saturday, bringing to an end a four-game winning streak.
Sasa Obradovic’s men came into the game high on confidence after a crucial win in Bavaria in mid-week, but their 83 point-haul wasn’t enough to see them over the line this time. The game was lost during the middle two quarters in which a lack of creativity and efficiency in offense proved costly, as the Principality side were limited to just 16 points in each quarter.
Monaco began poorly, but a nine-point run allowed them to quickly turn things around in the first quarter. Ibrahima Fall Faye, scorer of 24 points on the night, was the architect of the side’s early comeback, as ASM finished the quarter with a slender five-point advantage.
Monaco came out for the second quarter engaged, and Fall Faye continued to wreak havoc in the Nanterre defence. The match was ultimately decided in a shambolic 15 minutes for Monaco in which they conceded their advantage and allowed Nanterre to construct a lead of their own.
The third-quarter was particularly damaging. Monaco struggled to consistently create openings, whilst Nanterre converted a flurry of three-pointers.
Monaco managed to close the gap on the Parisian side in the final quarter, but it wasn’t enough to overturn the deficit and come away with the victory. The result sees them maintain their second-place standing in the Betclic Elite, although Le Mans and Strasbourg could go level with the Principality side if they win their games in hand. <
Monaco next play Lyon-Villeurbanne in the rescheduled Euroleague match on Tuesday, where a win is vital for Obradovic’s men if they want to keep their hopes alive in the competition.
Monaco Telecom has renewed its support of an initiative with the Prince’s Foundation and Terrae to establish organic vegetable gardens in the Principality’s schools.
For the third year, Monaco Telecom is co-funding the project, this year donating €12,118, a direct result of savings the company incurred over the last year by eliminating paper invoices to customers and going digital.
Martin Peronnet, Managing Director of Monaco Telecom, handed over the cheque to the Foundation’s Vice-President and Managing Director Olivier Wenden, as well as Cécile Mouly, Head of Educational and Extracurricular Projects at the Department of National Education, Youth and Sports (DENJS) and Jessica Sbaraglia, Founder of Terrae.
“For the third year, we are continuing our support for the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation by donating all the sums collected for printing paper invoices. I am delighted that this year our commitment is materialised by a project anchored in Monaco and dedicated to educational action aimed at the youngest,” said Peronnet in his speech.
Monaco Telecom has long been interested in getting involved in establishing organic vegetable gardens at Monaco schools. The programme, which was started by Terrae, provides many educational activities related to the environment and development of urban organic vegetable gardens.
“We are delighted that Monaco Telecom has chosen to support this project, which is not only about education for healthier food, but also about a desire to establish a new relationship with nature from an early age,” said Olivier Wenden. “We thank them for getting involved with us to promote sustainable development through concrete actions.”
This year’s donation will directly affect the École des Révoires, which will benefit from a new garden “very soon”. The garden will be installed on the roof of the school and will be one of the largest, as it will be divided into large terraces.
Thettransversal pedagogy method will be employed so older students who learnt from the Terrae team will in turn pass on their knowledge to the younger pupils.
Jessica Sbaraglia sees this intergenerational step as hugely important, saying, “A vegetable garden in a school is an ecological echo. It educates children of all ages who leave with their tomato plant, which will pass into the hands of the parents, then will be planted in the grandparents’ garden, but which, in the end, will be eaten by the children.”
As for the children, they will have the opportunity to really get their hands dirty, interact with nature and discover where it is that the food in the supermarket actually comes from. An education on healthy, balanced eating and food choices will also be part of the programme.
The project, which began in Autumn 2020, has already set up vegetable patches in six local establishments, including the Prince Albert II Leisure Centre, l’école du Parc, l’école de Fontvieille, le Lycée Technique et Hôtelier de Monaco and l’école de la Condamine. More than 2,000 students per year are already gardening and harvesting their own produce.
Photo: Vice-President and Managing Director of the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation Olivier Wenden, Founder of Terrae Jessica Sbaraglia, Managing Director of Monaco Telecom Martin Peronnet, and Cécile Mouly, Head of DENJS educational and extracurricular projects, by L. Arneodo / Prince Albert Foundation.
The Seaglider – is this the future of coastal transport?
Imagine cruising the coastline between Monaco and Saint Tropez in this high-speed, low-altitude, zero-emission seaglider. It could happen as soon as 2025, and co-creator Billy Thalheimer tells us how.
It was during the recent Transition Forum in Nice where Billy Thalheimer, Co-Founder and CEO of REGENT (Regional Electric Ground Effect Nautical Transport), presented his company’s new game changing vehicle. Created by a team of MIT-trained, ex-Boeing engineers, the seaglider is a wing-in-ground-effect (WIG) craft that operates a few metres off the water’s surface and couples the high speed of an aircraft with the low operating costs of a boat.
“All of the heliports in Monaco today are near the water with a harbour right next to them, so you can imagine us fitting in perfectly to that eco-system, eventually supplementing these helicopter fleets with a quiet, completely sustainable, much lower cost of transportation for Monaco,” Billy Thalheimer tells Monaco Life.
It has long been recognised that flight close to the water’s surface is more aerodynamically efficient than flight in the free stream. The first WIG aircraft were developed in the 1960s, mainly for military applications, and since then, Germany, Russia and the United States have carried much of the WIG momentum.
But none have succeeded in taking these vehicles to the mainstream transportation market.
“WIGs have not been adopted historically because of poor wave tolerance, poor harbour operability, and poor safety records,” explains Thalheimer. “However, we now have all of this new technology that has been developed for electric aviation and electric automotive – with electric propulsion and digital flight control systems on eVTOLs (electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft) and sensors on self-driving cars, we can solve all three of those problems and for the first time unlock the WIG as a commercially viable form of transportation.”
Seagliders are a new type of WIG vehicle that use hydrofoils and distributed propulsion systems. With existing electric batteries, the seaglider can travel at speeds of 300 kilometres per hour, with a range of between 300 and 370 kilometres. That would easily get you from Monaco to Saint Tropez, or at maximum from Nice to Corsica, fast. There is also potential to triple that distance.
“With some of the battery prototypes we are seeing today, we have the possibility to extend that range to around 800 kilometres,” says Thalheimer enthusiastically.
The Seaglider is projected to operate under Coast Guard jurisdiction
That puts a trip from Monaco to Majorca on the cards, travelling at aircraft speeds but with ferry prices. “Our approach is to initially take advantage of this shorter 300km range market because we can connect many routes with existing batteries, then expand that to the 800km range as the batteries come to market over the course of the decade. We are talking about servicing over 30 million people in the Mediterranean alone.”
Brittany Ferries, which operates a fleet of ferries and cruiseferries between France and the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain, was first to place provisional orders with Regent for its cross-Channel routes. There’s also been substantial interest from airlines in the United States, notably in the northeast corridor and in the south-east of the country. Nice has also shown strong interest.
“We are starting with a 12-seat vehicle that we expect to get to market by 2025, and moving on to a 50-seater. Some airlines and ferry lines are asking for a 100 to 150 seat class vehicle, which we can bring to market by around 2028, so that will start to replace fast ferries on routes because we will have the capacity to take 100 or more people dock to dock with aircraft-like speeds.”
Thalheimer says his company has so far secured a sales book of over 4.6 billion US dollars from airlines and ferry companies for the first seaglider deliveries. They’ve officially selected their classification society from the International Association of Classification Societies – Bureau Veritas – and are scouting the world for potential uptake locations.
“There are four primary stakeholders that we need to enter a new region: an operator, which is typically an airline or ferry company, the local government for permits, community for acceptance and other local issues, and an energy company who will help us develop the charging infrastructure,” explains Thalheimer.
But with many ports already moving towards electrification, Thalheimer says existing infrastructure is often enough to power a 12-seat vehicle, which requires about half a megawatt to fully charge in an hour.
Billy Thalheimer, Co-Founder and CEO of REGENT, with CTO Mike Klinker
But why WIGs?
Billy Thalheimer never pictured himself developing a fleet of this kind of craft. He actually had aspirations to become an astronaut or fighter pilot. The self-proclaimed “aviation nerd” worked with engineering teams at aerospace companies Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, then moved into electric aircrafts and helped develop an electric passenger vehicle for Boeing.
“But while the promise of what electric aviation can offer is fantastic – the elimination of emissions, reduced fuel and maintenance costs, and reduced noise – there were two main problems that were preventing us from bringing it to market,” explains Thalheimer. “First, there’s the length and cost of an aviation certification programme. A new aircraft takes about a decade and a billion dollars to certify.
“The other is the limited range of existing battery technology and the need for reserve fuel, which is half an hour’s worth by day, and 45 minutes by night. With only an hour’s worth of electrons in our existing batteries, it is crippling for our business case to say that half of our electrons are relegated to this reserve mission that we actually never expect to use.”
So, Thalheimer dusted off the concept of the WIG vehicle and saw that it solves these two biggest challenges in bringing an aircraft to market.
“We are a type A wing in ground vehicle, meaning that we stay within about a wing span of the water, flying at altitudes of between two to 10 metres above the water’s surface. That is what gives us that aerodynamic efficiency but also what allows us to be classified as a maritime vessel as opposed to an aircraft,” he explains. “And because they’re flying on this cushion of air and can always land on the water, they don’t have the same reserve fuel requirements. So, we actually get double the range than an electric aircraft.”
Seagliders are a new type of wing-in-ground-effect (WIG) vehicle that use hydrofoils and distributed propulsion systems
To overcome the problems of poor wave tolerance and poor harbour operability, Thalheimer says: “We will actually step up onto our hydrofoils at very low speeds of between 20 and 40 knots, similar to what you see on America’s Cup boats, which will provide about a two-metre wave tolerance in harbour and make the craft highly manoeuvrable at intermediate speeds. We are a boat where it makes sense to be a boat. Then, once we get to the periphery of the harbour and there is no traffic, we will take off onto our wing and accelerate to 300 kilometres an hour.”
In terms of safety, the Seaglider will have a captain and a digital flight control system that will sense and control its behaviour, as well as tracking radar systems and altitude sensors to detect things like terrain, wave heights, marine animals and other boats.
“Much of this is actually proven technology,” says Thalheimer. “Meanwhile, we are flying radar systems on helicopters at speeds in excess of 200kms an hour, 15 metres over the water, to show not only how we can detect these vehicles, but also how much time we have to avoid them. The water is less crowded than the air.”
With regards to timing, the company is on track for the first flight of its 1⁄4 scale prototype by Q1 2022. The Seaglider is then expected to be delivered for pilot programmes by 2023-24, “to prepare for commercial entry into service by 2025.”
Monaco could very well be part of that pilot programme. Prince Albert has committed that his country will play its part in efforts to stabilise the global warming of the planet by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% in 2030, and 80% by 2050, by which time the Principality will be carbon neutral.
Zero-emission urban mobility is essential in achieving that goal.
Photos source: Regent. This article was originally published on 15th January 2022.
Isabelle Berro-Amadeï is new Minister for Foreign Affairs
Ambassador for Belgium Isabelle Berro-Amadeï has been selected to replace Laurent Anselmi as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, as Anselmi takes over as Prince Albert II’s Cabinet Head.
When Laurent Anselmi was named as the Prince’s new Chief of Staff in December, it left a hole that would need to be filled quickly.
Now, just weeks later, the position of Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation has officially been granted to the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to His Majesty the King of the Belgians, Isabelle Berro-Amadeï, who will take over on 17th January.
Before coming into this post, 56-year-old Berro-Amadeï was an eminent legal figure, serving as judge and then Section President to the European Court of Human Rights. From 2016, she slid into the diplomatic realm where she served as the Principality’s Ambassador to Germany, Austria, Poland, as well as to international organisations in Vienna.
“The legal and diplomatic qualities demonstrated by Madame Isabelle Berro-Amadeï lead HSH the Prince to maintain her responsibility for the continuation of discussions with the European authorities on a draft Association Agreement alongside Sophie Thevenoux and Gilles Tonelli,” said the Prince’s government in a press statement.
Berro-Amadei’s replacement as Ambassador of Monaco to Belgium is expected to be announced soon.
The World Health Organisation has approved two new drugs to treat the Covid virus, including an existing arthritis medication. It comes as the organisation predicts that half of all Europeans will contract the Omicron variant.
Omicron has taken over, according to Hans Kluge, Regional Director of the World Health Organisation (WHO). If current infection rates continue, the latest variant of the Covid virus is about to cause “an east to west tidal wave” which will sweep its way across the continent, he said in a press conference on Tuesday.
“At this rate, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) forecasts that more than 50% of the population in the region will be infected with Omicron in the next six to eight weeks,” Kluge warned reporters.
Of the 53 nations making up WHO’s European region, 50 of them had confirmed Omicron cases.
WHO went on to add that 26 of these countries were reporting that 1% of their populations were contracting Covid every week and that the region has seen more than seven million new cases in the first week of the new year alone.
Data collected from the past few weeks has confirmed Omicron is more transmissible and can infect even the vaccinated and those who previously had the virus, but, Klug stresses, “approved vaccines do continue to provide good protection against severe disease and death, including for Omicron.”
Meanwhile, WHO experts have found that two new drugs are effective in the fight against severe illness stemming from the disease. The first, an arthritis drug called baricitinib, used in conjunction with corticosteroids, has proved effective in lessening the need for severely affected patients to be on respirators as well as leading to better survival rates.
The second is a synthetic antibody treatment called Sotrovimab. This is for people with less serious cases, but who are still at risk for hospitalisation. This includes the elderly, those with chronic diseases such as diabetes or people with immunodeficiencies. Its effectiveness against Omicron is still unknown.
Only three other treatments for Covid have been given the green light by WHO since the approval of the use of inflammation-fighting corticosteroids in September 2020.
Arthritis drugs tocilizumab and sarilumab, which were endorsed in July, are IL-6 inhibitors that suppress an overreaction of the immune system to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Baricitinib is in a different class of drugs known as Janus kinase inhibitors, but it falls under the same guidelines as the IL-6 inhibitors.
“When both are available, choose one based on issues including cost and clinician experience,” guidelines recommend.
In September, Regeneron, another synthetic antibody treatment, was approved by WHO and guidelines say Sotrovimab can be used for the same kind of patients.
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