WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has approved a deal in which a United Arab Emirates company would operate six major ports in the United States. A U.S. government panel has determined that the UAE firm, DP World, would not endanger national security. DP World, based in Dubai, has offered $6.8 billion for the purchase of a British firm that operates the ports of Baltimore, Miami, New York, New Jersey, New Orleans and Philadelphia. DP World intends to acquire the London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation [P&O] Co. The sale was expected to be approved on Monday. “The P&O directors have withdrawn their recommendation of the offer by PSA, which was announced on Jan. 26, 2006, and unanimously recommend that P&O Stockholders vote in favor of the revised proposals at the meetings, which are now scheduled to take place on Feb. 13,” DP World said in a statement. The company said the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States “thoroughly reviewed the potential transaction and concluded they had no objection.” The committee includes representatives from the departments of Treasury, Defense, Justice, Commerce, State and Homeland Security. The United Arab Emirates has been described […]
NEW YORK Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) has asked Veterans Affairs Secretary James Nicholson for a thorough inquiry of his agency’s investigation into whether a V.A. nurse’s letter to the editor criticizing the Bush administration amounted to “sedition.” Merely opposing government policies and expressing a desire to change course “does not provide reason to believe that a person is involved in illegal subversive activity,” he said. Bingaman said such investigations raise “a very real possibility of chilling legitimate political speech.” Laura Berg, a clinical nurse specialist for 15 years, wrote a letter in September to a weekly Albuquerque newspaper criticizing how the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq Wwr. She urged people to “act forcefully” by bringing criminal charges against top administration officials, including the president, to remove them from power because they played games of “vicious deceit.” She added: “This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil….Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.” The agency seized her office computer and launched an investigation. Berg is not talking to […]
WASHINGTON — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years. New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government. Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period. Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by laws and regulations that date back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and Congress wanted to encourage more exploration and drilling in the high-cost, high-risk deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. “We need to remember the primary reason that incentives are given,” said Johnnie M. Burton, director of the federal Minerals Management Service. “It’s not to make more money, necessarily. It’s to make […]
DAMASCUS — Syria has switched all of the state’s foreign currency transactions to euros from dollars amid a political confrontation with the United States, the head of state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria said on Monday. “This is a precaution. We are talking about billions of dollars,” Duraid Durgham told Reuters. The bank, which still dominates the Syrian market although private banks have been allowed to set up in the last few years, has also stopped dealing with dollars in the international foreign exchange flows of private clients. The United States has been at the forefront of international pressure on Syria for its alleged role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri a year ago. Damascus denies involvement in the killing. “It looks like a kind of pre-emptive action aimed at making their foreign assets safer, preventing them from getting frozen in case of any conflict,” said a Middle East economist who requested anonymity.
When the journal Science recently retracted two papers by the South Korean researcher Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, it officially confirmed what he had denied for months: Dr. Hwang had fabricated evidence that he had cloned human cells. But the editors of Science were not alone in telling the world of Dr. Hwang’s research. Newspapers, wire services and television networks had initially trumpeted the news, as they often do with information served up by the leading scientific journals. Now news organizations say they are starting to look at the science journals a bit more skeptically. “My antennae are definitely up since this whole thing unfolded,” said Rob Stein, a science reporter for The Washington Post. “I’m reading papers a lot more closely than I had in the past, just to sort of satisfy myself that any individual piece of research is valid. But we’re still in sort of the same situation that the journal editors are, which is that if someone wants to completely fabricate data, it’s hard to figure that out.” But other than heightened skepticism, not a lot has changed in how newspapers treat scientific journals. Indeed, newspaper editors openly acknowledge their dependence on them. […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
