TIANJIN, China-The first Airbus A320 jet assembled outside Europe has successfully completed its first flight. MORE

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia-About 100 workers of the Ford Motor Co. assembly plant on Friday protested the introduction of a four-day working week amid the slumping demand for cars. “We gathered to protest such measures because we understand that it will lead to a salary cut of about 25 percent,” said the plant’s union leader Alexei Etmanov, who led the protest in the town of Vsevolozhsk outside St.Petersburg where the plant is located. MORE

TOKYO-Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. will invest up to $315 million to build a lithium-ion battery plant in Japan, increasing its production capacity for those batteries six-fold. The batteries will be used in gas-electric hybrid cars. Sanyo plans to start operations by March 2011. MORE

KIRKLAND, WA-The Kenworth Truck Co. manufacturing plant here was recently honored by the King County Industrial Waste Program. The plant received the county’s Commitment-to-Compliance Award for five consecutive years of outstanding compliance with the plant’s industrial wastewater discharge permit. MORE

The plant won ASSEMBLY magazine’s inaugural Assembly Plant of the Year award in 2004. You can read more about the plant here.

DYERSBURG, TN-NSK Steering Systems of America plans to move its Nissan Altima steering-column assembly line here from Bennington, VT. Scheduled for October, the move will bring 50 new jobs to the Dyersburg plant. NSK opened the Tennessee plant in August 2007 and began assembling automotive steering columns for Honda, Toyota and Subaru in January 2008. MORE

CHATTANOOGA, TN-Volkswagen has decided to make its new plant in Tennessee even bigger than originally intended. MORE

DETROIT-A spokesman for General Motors in Shanghai has said it is “only a matter of time” before vehicles made in China are imported into the company's home market. MORE

LOS ANGELES-Chinese solar panel maker Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd. plans to establish a manufacturing facility in the United States, though it has yet to choose a location. Suntech CEO Zhenrong Shi said the company’s decision to set up a U.S. plant was due to strong growth in demand from U.S. utilities and federal incentives for solar power. MORE

WOODSTOCK, Ontario-When Toyota opened its newest North American assembly plant here last fall, it was chock full of the company’s very latest thinking and innovations for building a car efficiently.

But with the global automobile industry mired in its worst crisis in a quarter-century, even Toyota's latest standards for lean manufacturing are not good enough. Now, employees have been charged with finding upward of $100 million in annual savings from the Woodstock factory and a nearby plant in Cambridge. MORE

BERLIN-Daimler plans to close a bus factory in Japan and a truck plant in Thailand as part of an effort to streamline production in the region. MORE