At least 56 bodies have now been recovered from the ruins of a small Yemeni village that was devastated in a landslide earlier this week, a relief official said on Saturday. "Relief operations are still going on to find those missing, which are estimated at over 50," the official said, adding that there was little hope of finding any survivors. Rocks slid off a mountain on Wednesday and crushed 27 houses in al-Dhofair village, about 20 km (12 miles) southwest of the capital Sanaa. Landslides are rare in Yemen, at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, but the country is prone to floods in spring and summer.
If they'd been Unitarians that wouldn't have happened.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/01/2006 00:00 ||
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#1
Dear Yems, if yer thinking of moving to California, forget it.
Moscow/Kiev - Russia began cutting off natural gas supplies to Kiev at 0700 GMT on Sunday, a move described by Ukraine President Yushchenko 'as showing clear signs of a threat to our national security'.
Officials at Gazprom Schroeder must be helping Putin with a spine injection., Russia's state-run gas concern, said Russia began reducing pressure in gas pipelines to Ukraine immediately after a 0700 GMT deadline passed. The Russian energy giant had threatened to cut Ukraine's gas supplies off, if Kiev did not agree to a five-fold price hike by midnight on New Year's Eve.
After meetings with senior government and energy industry officials, Yushchenko declared Sunday the Russian severance as directly threatening Ukrainian national security, and announced 'readiness' ask nuclear club nations and the European Union to intervene in the conflict with Moscow.
'We consider this an obvious form of economic pressure ... and a violation (by Russia) of treaty obligations,' Yushchenko said.
In 1996, Ukraine became the first country in history to renounce nuclear weapons, in exchange for a commitment from the U.S. and Russia of support in case of an external threat to the former Soviet republic.
Yushchenko's threat, if made good, would mark a dramatic escalation of a long-running energy conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Representatives from both countries have been wrangling over gas prices for almost a year.
Gazprom said it was only allowing gas intended for Europe into Ukraine, and was halting all other deliveries including its own supplies to Ukraine, and Turkmenistan gas contracted by the Ukrainians, and delivered to Ukraine via pipelines across Russia, Kuprianov said.
Ukrnafta executives were quick to retaliate, and to try and shift the onus for economic fall-out from the boycott onto Moscow by declaring mid-afternoon that as far as Ukraine was concerned, Gazprom had reduced overall volumes intended for Europe.
'This could bring a reduction of pressure in pipelines and as a result a limitation in deliveries of gas to Europe, and a partial reduction to Ukrainian consumers,' a Sunday Ukrnafta statement said in part.
The initial effect of the severance on Ukrainian households was negligible, with cities across the country reporting normal gas supplies.
#1
"...as far as Ukraine was concerned, Gazprom had reduced overall volumes intended for Europe...The initial effect of the severance on Ukrainian households was negligible..."
Europeans may have to rethink their "global warming" positions.
#2
Only a fool would think Ukraine wouldn't retaliate. Eastern Europe is served by the trans-Ukraine gas line and is effectively shut down. Poland confirms it. Capt Ed is all over this. Yuschenko also has the option of telling Russia Navy to get out the Ukrainian ports on the black Sea....Putin must think Yuschenko doesn't remember getting poisoned in the campaign.
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 18:10 Comments ||
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#3
The Russkies play hardball. Ukraine has no choice but to back down.
#4
rriiggghhtt. Gasline = accidents, over and over
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 21:12 Comments ||
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#5
Despite the tone of this and similar articles, Ukraine holds most of the cards. The only way Russia can stop gas supply to Ukraine is to stop all flow through the pipeline, which will cause real pain in Europe.
Look for the Euros to pay the difference between what Russia wants and what Ukraine is willing to pay.
#6
There are two lines serving Poland and Germany, as can be seen on this map. Once Molotov-Ribbentrop II comes in effect, with the pipeline on the Baltic seabed, Putin will have most of Europe in his back pocket. Interesting.
Norway must step up to the plate with their gas, otherwise...
Posted by: Rafael ||
01/01/2006 22:53 Comments ||
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... as opposed to 333 last year, and with a state of mergency and 25 000 policemen on the field. As tv sez, situation is improving.
Happy new year, you 425 car owners! Cheers!
Paris - Rowdy revelers in France torched 425 vehicles overnight in scattered New Year's Eve unrest that has become an annual problem in troubled neighbourhoods, the national police chief said on Sunday. Last year, 333 cars were burned. Police Chief Michel Gaudin also said there were no major clashes this year between youths and police overnight. Police were particularly vigilant this time because of the three weeks of rioting and arson that took place in October.
A state of emergency imposed during the rioting is still in effect, and 25 000 police were on alert for the holiday. Police took 362 people into custody, up from 272 last year. Among police, 27 officers were injured on the job, Gaudin said. The nature of their injuries wasn't disclosed.
Car burnings have become a barometer of unrest in France. In other incidents, a small fire broke out at a school in Toulouse, in southwest France, and was quickly put out, local authorities said. In Nice on the French Riviera, firefighters were pelted with stones when they responded to an anonymous phone alert, officials said. In the nearby Var department of southern France, youths also threw rocks at firefighters in a troubled neighborhood of La-Seine-sur-Mer, local authorities said.
President Jacques Chirac spoke of the unrest during his annual New Year's Eve television address and urged the French to do more to fight racism and a lack of opportunities in poor neighborhoods - problems that fed frustrations among young rioters. "Diversity is part of our history: It is a resource," he said. "It is an asset for our future."
Chirac also promised to do more to fight crime and violence.
In troubled French neighbourhoods, dozens of vehicles are set afire on an average night. The figure has risen to around 300 on New Year's Eve in recent years, according to the Interior Ministry.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy met with police on Saturday afternoon and said that officials had decided to mobilize helicopters because they played a decisive role in stopping the autumn riots. At the time, helicopters equipped with spotlights and video cameras were used to track bands of marauding youths who sped from attack to attack in cars and on motorbikes. "The orders I have given are very strict," Sarkozy said. "When there are delinquent acts there will be arrests. Those guilty must be accountable for their acts."
#5
Ah, to be an auto insurance agent in France. The delicious irony of denying claims in a secular society as being uncovered "Acts of God" must be dizzying. They just don't say whose God...
Like Steyn, I can't improve on VDH, so I'll leave it as is Mi Casa Es Su Casa
America's porous border enables Mexico's misrule.
BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Sunday, January 1, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
SELMA, Calif.--"Shameful," screams Mexico's President Vicente Fox, about the proposed extension of a security fence along the southern border of the U.S. "Stupid! Underhanded! Xenophobic!" bellowed his foreign secretary, Luis Ernesto Derbez, warning: "Mexico is not going to bear, it is not going to permit, and it will not allow a stupid thing like this wall."
The allusions to the Berlin Wall made by aggrieved Mexican politicians miss the irony: The communists tried to keep their own people in, not illegal aliens out. More embarrassing still, the comparison boomerangs on Mexico, since it, and not the U.S., more resembles East Germany in alienating its own citizens to the point that they flee at any cost. If anything might be termed stupid, underhanded or xenophobic in the illegal immigration debacle, it is the conduct of the Mexican government.
"Stupid" characterizes a government that sits atop vast mineral and petroleum reserves, enjoys a long coastline, temperate climate, rich agricultural plains--and either cannot or will not make the necessary political and economic reforms to feed and house its own people. The election of Vicente Fox, Nafta and cosmetic changes in banking and jurisprudence have not stopped the corruption or stemmed the exodus of millions of Mexicans.
"Underhanded" also sums up the stance of Mexico, masquerading in humanitarian terms the abjectly immoral export of its own dispossessed. Indeed, such cynicism directly protects the status quo in three critical ways. The flight of the poor is Mexico's aberrant version of Fredrick Jackson Turner's safety-valve theory of the frontier. But instead of homesteaders heading west, the impoverished go northward, preferring simply to leave rather than change their government.
Mexico receives between $10 billion and $15 billion in annual remittances from illegal aliens in the U.S., a subsidy that not only masks political failure at home, but comes at great cost to its expatriates abroad. After all, such massive transfers of capital must be made up from somewhere. Poor workers who send half their wages to kin are forced to make do in a high-priced U.S. through two exigencies--they lower their standard of living here while often depending on state and local governments for supplemental housing, education, medical and food aid.
Rarely in the great debate over illegal immigration do we frame the issue in such moral terms: If life back home is improving thanks to money wired back, first-generation Mexican enclaves in the U.S. remain chronically poor, not investing where they live and work.
Mexico senses that the longer its poor are away from Mexico, the more likely they are to grow sentimental about a homeland that they can visit but need not return to. In short, the growing Mexican expatriate community offers valuable political leverage with the U.S. As the politics demand, the community can be characterized either as poor and exploited to shame the U.S., or as successful and industrious to claim credit for the economic boom up north. In our Orwellian world, the welfare of the neglected of Mexico warrants more concern from their government when they are no longer in Mexico.
How did we get to this impasse--where Americans would embrace such a retrograde solution as building a fence, or Mexico would routinely slander its northern neighbor? The answer is the vast size of the illegal population--now over 10 million--and the inability or unwillingness of the U.S. government to sanction employers or deploy sufficient resources to enforce the border. Sheer numbers has evolved the debate far beyond the old "We need labor" and "They have workers," to something like, "Can the U.S. remain a sovereign nation with borders at all?"
With a few thousand crossing illegally each year we could all look the other way. Free-market libertarians could lecture that illegal immigrants toned up the labor market and helped us avoid the demographic stasis that Europe now suffers. Critics of illegal immigration--who complained that their property on the border was vandalized, or that their relatives from India and the Philippines waited patiently while others cut in front of the immigration line--were written off as racists and worse.
Americans liked their food cooked, yards kept and dishes washed cheaply--as long as the invisible workers with little education, less English and no legal status stayed invisible, and as long as illegal immigration could not directly be linked to plummeting public school test scores in the Southwest or 15,000 prison inmates in the California penal system. But somewhere around the year 2000 a tipping point was reached. The dialogue changed when the number of illegals outnumbered the population of entire states. There also began a moral transformation in the controversy, with the ethical tables turned on the proponents of de facto open borders.
Employers were no longer seen as helping either the U.S. economy or poor immigrants, but rather as being party to exploitation that made a mockery of the law, ossified the real minimum wage, undermined unions and hurt poorer American citizens. The American consumer discovered that illegal immigration was a fool's bargain--reaping the benefits of cheap labor upfront, but paying far more later on through increased subsidies for often ill-housed and poorly educated laborers who had no benefits.
Nor is the evolving debate framed so much any more as left-versus-right, but as the more privileged at odds with the middle and lower classes. On one side are the elite print media, the courts and a few politicians fronting for employer and ethnic interests; on the other are the far more numerous, and raucous, talk-radio listeners, bloggers and cable news watchers, the ballot propositions, and populist state legislators who better reflect the angry pulse of the country.
Those who own farms and run hotels, who hire nannies and housecleaners, who head Washington lobbying organizations, and who staff the Mexican ministries, really do need the millions of illegals that in so many different ways serve their needs. But the American poor who wish to organize for better wages; the reformers in Mexico who need pressure on the Mexican government; and the middle class, which pay the taxes and tries to obey the letter of the law, are increasingly against illegal immigration. And they no longer much worry over being slurred, by their illiberal critics, as nativist.
So the world is upside down. The once liberal notion of ignoring illegal immigration is now seen as cynically illiberal. And taking drastic steps to enforce the law--including something seemingly as absurd as a vast fence--is now seen as more ethical than the current subterfuge that undermines the legal system of the nation.
Mr. Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming" (Encounter, 2003).
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/01/2006 17:59 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Mi Casa Es Su Casa 
