Mr. Abel says he is still stinging from an especially harsh beat-down at the hands of "some 12-year-old girls fromJapan" in a giant-robot game called Chromehounds.
But some manufacturing company executives also argued that European industry was holding its own against both the old-world competition from the US and Japan and newer rivals from China or India.
The old line was that high-quality cars came almost exclusively from Germany and Japan, and you had to pay for the privilege of the "right" nation of origin.
Kazuya Ito, a 31-year-old worker with the Japan-based group Peshawar-kai, was dragged from his car in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan on Tuesday, the Afghan Interior Ministry said.
The 19-year-old from Florida will play Serbia's Bojana Jovanovski -- a 6-2 7-6 winner over Japan's Kimiko Date-Krumm on Saturday -- for a place in the quarter final.
But despite his near two-month absence from competition, the 31-year-old was back in the groove swiftly to set up a meeating with either Japan's Kei Nishikori or Viktor Troicki of Serbia.