Up to seven people have been killed by gunmen during a rally ahead of elections at the end of this month in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Unidentified gunmen opened fire on the rally near Rutshuru in the North Kivu province of the country reviving fears that the polls could be disrupted by violence. The central African country will hold its first free multi-party election in four decades on July 30, but rebels and militias continue to terrorise the civilian population despite the presence of the world's biggest United Nations peacekeeping force.
Jean-Luc Mutokambale, the independent parliamentary candidate who staged the rally, fled to Uganda in fear for his life after the shooting. Other local candidates have asked for UN protection. Officials said on Tuesday that several people were also wounded in the worst violence so far. Jacqueline Chenard, a UN spokeswoman in North Kivu, said a team had been sent to investigate the attack.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/19/2006 00:00 ||
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For an accurate definition of the term "quagmire", I direct your attention to the article above.
CALGARY - Some of the world's biggest energy companies, among them Calgary-based EnCana Corp., have gathered in a tiny town on Greenland's west coast to consider developing one of the last untapped offshore oil frontiers. Greenland is auctioning exploration rights to eight blocks covering 92,000 square kilometres in the Davis Strait between the huge island's west coast and Canada's Baffin Island.
The 13 oil producers invited to Ilulissat include the largest from Europe, the United States and several from Canada in addition to EnCana, Jrn Skov Nielsen, the top bureaucrat with Greenland's Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum, said yesterday. He would not give specific names. The climate is harsh, the work window short and no exploration wells have been drilled in the region since the 1970s and '80s, when companies' attempts to find commercial-sized, onshore oilfields on Disko Island were unsuccessful.
The forces driving the world's oil industry have changed significantly since then but Greenland's potential to become a large oil producer has not, Mr. Skov Nielsen said. "Many thought the costs of coming here were a little too high but they've discovered now, compared to other places in the world, that they aren't so high," Mr. Skov Nielsen said from Ilulissat. "Ice isn't the trouble companies thought it was, oil prices are sky high and companies badly need to replace their reserves with new finds."
Firms have three days, starting yesterday, to pore over seismic data collected by the Greenland government over the past five years. The bidding round closes on Dec. 15.
Posted by: Steve ||
07/19/2006 11:14 ||
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John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator whose movie-star looks overshadowed his merely workmanlike performance as John Kerry's vice-presidential running mate two years ago, has been carefully fashioning a presidential run of his own for 2008. He gives speeches, floats ideas, and tests themes. This is a good idea for any hopeful presidential candidate, of course, but particularly for Edwards. He needs it more than most.
After the self-immolation of Howard Dean in the early 2004 campaign season, Edwards emerged unexpectedly as Kerry's only plausible opposition in the Democratic primaries. For much of that period of sudden fame, he looked like he didn't know what hit him. His campaign became a series of shifting rationales, a textbook instance of the chameleon candidacy. First, Edwards billed himself as a policy wonk, issuing detailed position papers on every conceivable national issue. This scattered approach, however, never congealed into a personal identity that could fasten itself in voters' minds, so Edwards soon abandoned talk of allocation formulas for post- secondary student loans in favor of stressing his own life story: the horny-handed son of a South Carolina mill worker who clawed his way up the entrepreneurial heap to become a self-made millionaire.
That touching narrative lost much of its pathos on examination. Edwards's father, though never wealthy, was in fact a member in good standing of the textile industry's managerial class. John's entrepreneurial energy, moreover, had been consumed by his work as a personal-injury lawyer, a profession even less attractive than the textile executives who shut down mills and, as Democrats say, ``ship the jobs overseas.''
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
07/19/2006 00:00 ||
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What pukes
Posted by: Captain America ||
07/19/2006 0:40 Comments ||
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He is too whiny and his prior career as an ambulance chasing lawyer, will kill any Presidential run.
How about "his work suing OB/GYN's because babies were born with CP, claiming the complications of labor could some how have been averted by these doctors, and prevented the CP? Oh, and later his state Medical Board, as well as the AMA, released a study which shows there is no link between the two". So a man made his millions telling bold-faced lies and getting juries to buy it. Just what this country needs.
#10
We live, Edwards announced, in ``two Americas'' -- ``one for the privileged and powerful, who get everything they need, and one for the rest of us, who have to struggle for everything we get.'' And he pledged to rectify this state of affairs, by means unspecified (although I believe tax increases were involved). By ``rest of us,'' incidentally, he was not referring exclusively to trial attorneys with a net worth of $50 million.
I love it when Democratic pols spit out that "the rich" phrase, like they've never met any. Shit, they see one in the mirror every morning.
And I'm with Spot. What the hell is horny-handed?
Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani said he is "seriously considering" a run for president in 2008. But he reiterated, as he has in many campaign-style appearances, that he was focused on the 2006 midterm elections. He said he would continue to travel the country to gauge the breadth of his support and his ability to raise the money needed for a presidential bid. "Eventually, when you make the decision, you have to go through a kind of soul-searching about how much you think you can bring to it," Giuliani said.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/19/2006 00:00 ||
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In other surprising developmens, the sun rose in the east today, birds sang, water ran downhill, and the guests on today's Jerry Springer were idiots.
Posted by: Mike ||
07/19/2006 9:34 Comments ||
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the guests on today's Jerry Springer were idiots
WOW, YOU GOTTA BE SH!TT*N' ME!!!
A strong earthquake caused tall buildings to sway in the Indonesian capital Wednesday, sending panicked residents fleeing to the streets just days after a deadly tsunami struck main island of Java. There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties. The 6.0-magnitude quake was centered 25 miles beneath the Sunda strait, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site, and struck 90 miles southwest of Jakarta.
Suharjono, head of the earthquake division at Jakarta's meteorological agency, told Metro TV that based on the initial estimate of Wednesday's quake strength, it was not strong enough to trigger a tsunami. But he urged people to be on guard.
On Monday, a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 7.7-earthquake slammed into Java's southern coast, killing more than 530 people. A series of strong aftershocks have rattled the region since then.
Posted by: Steve ||
07/19/2006 11:19 ||
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Indonesia pledged to build a nationwide tsunami alert system as soldiers pulled bodies from ravaged beaches, homes and hotels Tuesday. Parents searched tearfully for their children and the death toll hit at least 341, with nearly 230 people missing.
Bodies covered in white sheets piled up at makeshift morgues, while others lay beneath the blazing sun in the tourist resort of Pangandaran, a 6-month-old baby among them. The search for survivors continued Tuesday, with parents among the last to give up. "The water was too strong," said Irah as she dug through a pile of rubble with her bare hands, close to the spot where she last saw her 6-year-old son. "Oh God. Eki, where are you?"
The magnitude 7.7 undersea quake on Monday triggered walls of water more than six feet high that crashed into a 110-mile stretch of beach on Java island, an area spared by the devastating 2004 Asian tsunami. The waves destroyed houses, restaurants and hotels and tossed boats, cars and motorbikes far inland. The death toll rose Tuesday to at least 341, according to Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Aburizal Bakrie, and, with 229 more missing, the number was expected to climb. "We are still finding many bodies. Many are stuck in the ruins of the houses," said police chief Syamsuddin Janieb.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/19/2006 00:00 ||
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What is this, the fourth or fifth natural disaster of some significance to level a Muslim area? Allan is not pleased.
I love these stories. They drive the Greenies nuts. EVERY cloud has a silver lining. A contaminated lake designated hazardous is turning out to be a source of novel chemicals that could help fight migraines and cancer.
"It's exciting to know that something toxic and dangerous might contain something of value," says Andrea Stierle, a chemist at the University of Montana in Butte.
Berkeley Pit Lake, also in Butte, filled with groundwater after the copper mine closed in 1982. Dissolved metal compounds such as iron pyrites give the lake a pH of 2.5 that makes it impossible for most aquatic life to survive. In 1995 Stierle discovered novel forms of fungi and bacteria in the lake. More recently her team has found a strain of the pithomyces fungi producing a compound that binds to a receptor that causes migraines and could block headaches, while a strain of penicillium fungi makes a different compound that inhibits the growth of lung cancer cells.
This week they reveal that a novel compound called berkelic acid from another new strain of penicillium fungus reduces the rate of ovarian cancer cell growth by 50 per cent (Journal of Organic Chemistry, vol 71, p 5357).
Stierle is rushing to identify more of these extremophile creatures before the toxic site is cleaned up.
The explosion in bioinformatics and high-speed screening techniques is allowing companies to survey greater numbers of microorganisms for desired biocatalytic activity, she says. Advances in "directed evolution" methods for tailoring these organisms also play a role.
Such techniques, de Brabander says, allow companies to survey more potential biocatalysts faster than ever before.
You'll find it about halfway down in the link. Seems some of these extremophile bugs have been identified as particularly useful as biocatalysts.
#3
2b, this is not my area, but I understand they have machines that profile compounds to see if they have potential in certain areas. The biotech companies use them so I assume they work.
#4
2b, you don't need a lung cancer patient to test fungi if they have an effect on lung cancer cells. All you need is a culture in a petri dish (or more of them thereof to get some statistical correlations).
Cancer cells, due to their chemistry that differs from normal cells, are susceptible to certain toxins. For instance, hydrocyanic acid in dosages that are relatively safe for normal cells kills off cancer cells like there's no tomorrow. Of course, you need at least healthy liver to process the resulting waste.
#5
2b, there is a long, proud history in medicinal chemistry of looking for new compounds in the strangest places. A fair number of medicinal chemists have made their careers poking around in strange plants, sponges, fungi, etc. There are numerous biomedical journals devoted completely to the topic.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/19/2006 10:54 Comments ||
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Does anyone else find it ironic that a polluted lake is named Berkeley. Talk about driving the greenies nuts...
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.
Up to seven people have been killed by gunmen during a rally ahead of elections at the end of this month in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Unidentified gunmen opened fire on the rally near Rutshuru in the North Kivu province of the country reviving fears that the polls could be disrupted by violence. The central African country will hold its first free multi-party election in four decades on July 30, but rebels and militias continue to terrorise the civilian population despite the presence of the world's biggest United Nations peacekeeping force. 
A strong earthquake caused tall buildings to sway in the Indonesian capital Wednesday, sending panicked residents fleeing to the streets just days after a deadly tsunami struck main island of Java. There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties. The 6.0-magnitude quake was centered 25 miles beneath the Sunda strait, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site, and struck 90 miles southwest of Jakarta.
Indonesia pledged to build a nationwide tsunami alert system as soldiers pulled bodies from ravaged beaches, homes and hotels Tuesday. Parents searched tearfully for their children and the death toll hit at least 341, with nearly 230 people missing.
