Enbridge pipeline deal with native group fraying (Reuters)

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) ? A deal with a native chief that Enbridge Inc held up last week as an example of rising support of their planned oil pipeline to the Pacific appears to be unraveling as the community battles over who has the authority to negotiate.

Enbridge touted the Gitxsan agreement to take an equity stake in the Northern Gateway pipeline as the first public display of what it says is substantial support for the C$5.5 billion ($4.5 billion) project among British Columbia's First Nations, the aboriginal groups whose traditional territories make up vast swaths of the province.

Enbridge signed the deal with Hereditary Chief Elmer Derrick, chief negotiator for the Gitxsan Treaty Society (GTS), an embattled organization that is facing a legal challenge to its authority from four of the five community bands that make up the first nation.

Some other hereditary chiefs, community members and the three clans that form the complex structure of Gitxsan First Nation oppose the deal and met on Monday to try to shut down the treaty office and fire Derrick and other staff.

"Many of the hereditary chiefs said that they had not been directly posed the question of 'Do you want to sign this deal with Enbridge?'" said Doug Donaldson, who represents the region in the British Columbia legislature. "From a Gitxsan governance point of view, that's not the way decisions are made, as far as not consulting everyone."

Many first nations have voiced firm opposition to Northern Gateway, which would carry crude to the Pacific Coast, where it could be shipped to Asia on supertankers.

The line is supported by the Canadian energy sector and the Conservative federal government, who seek to diversify Canadian oil exports after Washington decided last month to delay approving the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil sands crude to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Public hearings into the project are slated to start in the West Coast port town of Kitimat, British Columbia, on January 10 and run until final arguments in April 2013, the Joint Review Panel hearing the application said on Tuesday. It said it could make a final go-ahead decision by the end of that year.

Chief Councilor Majorie McRae of the Gitanmaax band, one of those suing the treaty society, said she does not believe Derrick had the authority to make a deal with Enbridge without broad consultations with other chiefs and band councils, and she thinks Enbridge made a mistake in negotiating with Derrick in the first place.

"I'm still a bit perplexed that Enbridge didn't do their homework," McRae said.

"You can't tell me they didn't know that there were four bands out of five who disapproved of the GTS process, model and structure," McRae said.

Derrick could not be immediately reached for comment, but Enbridge said the deal built on an agreement signed two years ago at a meeting of the Gitxsan hereditary chiefs.

"Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines has spent several years consulting with the Gitxsan Nation and working to understand and respect their traditional government," spokesman Paul Stanway said in an emailed statement. "It's our belief Chief Elmer Derrick and the Gitxsan Treaty Office represent the consensus view of a majority of that leadership and is recognized as an authoritative voice of the Gitxsan people."

Last week more than 60 British Columbia first nations said they were uniting to oppose oil pipelines across the Pacific province of British Columbia as well as increased tanker traffic in coastal waters, citing fears of oil spills.

Enbridge says it expects to win support from a majority of the native communities along Northern Gateway's 1,177 km (731 mile) route from Edmonton, Alberta, to a deepwater port at Kitimat on British Columbia's northern coast.

The company said last week it had signed other deals some aboriginal groups for an overall 10 percent equity stake in the project, but declined to offer specifics, citing confidentiality agreements.

As its hallmark deal frays, Enbridge suffered another setback late on Monday, as the National Energy Board ruled that its plan to reverse the flow direction of a pipeline in Eastern Canada must go before a public hearing in the autumn of 2012, pushing the company's timeline out by at least several months.

Enbridge had applied for a streamlined review process for its C$17 million Line 9 reversal, which would bring Western Canadian oil to refineries in the East, saying that the project would require no land disturbance.

It had hoped to start the work on reversing the flow of the 240,000 barrel a day pipeline next spring, with a planned startup in September.

The company said the application was just for a section of the line between Sarnia and Westover, Ontario, and reversal of the section between Westover and Montreal would be decided later.

But the board sided with environmental groups, who complained the project was just the start of a larger plan to move oil sands-derived crude to the Atlantic seaboard to be exported to U.S. refineries and should be subject to a full hearing. ($1=$1.01 Canadian)

(Editing by Janet Guttsman, Gary Hill)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/energy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111207/wl_canada_nm/canada_us_enbridge_pipeline

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Obama to give economic talk in Kansas (cbsnews)

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4 aboard small plane that crashed in Colorado (Providence Journal)

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Is Child Sexual Abuse on the Rise?

Image: Flickr/Lisa Ann Rogers

With the stream of accusations of child sexual abuse not losing any gusto lately, from the ever-growing charges against former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky to allegations of such behaviors by assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine, it'd be easy to assume a real upsurge in such abuse.

But that may not be the case.?

First, Sandusky was accused of sexually molesting at least eight boys over the past 15 years; he has pleaded not guilty to the more than 40 charges against him.

Then last week Fine of Syracuse University was fired amid accusations of sexual abuse. So far three men, including two former Syracuse ball-boys, have come forward stating that Fine molested them as minors.

Neither Sandusky nor Fine has been found guilty of any crime, but these are only the latest in what seems to be a year filled with news reports about sexual harassment and sexual abuse. Earlier this year an ABC News investigation revealed that USA Swimming (the governing body for the sport up to and including the U.S. Olympic team) has banned for life nearly 40 swimming coaches over the last decade because of sexual misconduct. [Child Abuse: Why People Look the Other Way]

So what's going on?

According to the nation's top experts, children are actually safer from physical and sexual abuse than they have been for decades. A National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect issued by the Department of Health and Human Services found that both physical and sexual abuse of children have dropped significantly over the past 20 years: From 2005 to 2006, an estimated 553,000 children suffered physical, sexual or emotional abuse, down 26 percent from the estimated 743,200 abuse victims in 1993. And between 1993 and 2005, the number of sexually abused children dropped 38 percent, while number of children who experienced physical abuse fell by 15 percent and those who were emotionally abused declined by 27 percent.

In fact, incidence of sexual abuse of children began to drop two decades ago, according to Dr. David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

In his book "Childhood Victimization: Violence, Crime and Abuse in the Lives of Young People" (Oxford 2008), Dr. Finkelhor notes, "The child victimization declines of the 1990s were something new, and not simply the extension of trend lines from the past. For example, available data on child abuse show strong increases in all forms of maltreatment from the mid-1970s into the 1990s. After a short plateau, the sexual abuse decline seemed to start in 1992, and the physical abuse decline gained momentum after 1996. Many analysts did not interpret the earlier rise as necessarily indicative of a real increase in child maltreatment but rather as the result of a new public and professional mobilization to identify and report cases. But some data suggested real increases in the 1980s."

Overall, Dr. Finkelhor told LiveScience.com, "There is very little evidence that child sexual abuse is on the rise in the U.S., and considerable evidence that it is declining, including data from law enforcement, child protection and surveys of victims themselves." He added that though the prevalence of child sexual abuse worldwide is hard to assess, "there are some indicators of decline in other countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom."

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=a623ef51696044f5fb5cd6a6ef8c2904

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Mexico discovers gas reserves off Gulf coast (AP)

MEXICO CITY ? Deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has revealed reserves that could multiply Mexico's production of natural gas, the country's state oil company said Thursday.

Petroleos Mexicanos said the Nen 1 exploratory well found a deposit estimated to hold 400 billion cubic feet of gas. It said that could lead to production of 27 million cubic feet a day. This year's daily average is 6.64 billion cubic feet.

The company said the gas deposit is 14,270 feet (4,350 meters) feet deep, including 4,898 feet (1,493 meters) of water.

The well is 68 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Coatzacoalcos in an area that doesn't yet have a pipeline to shore.

Because natural gas cannot be shipped like oil, Pemex would have to build a pipeline in order to develop the newly found gas. It's not yet clear if that would be profitable, said David Richardson, an analyst for the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

"It would be more significant if it was an oil discovery," Richardson said.

He said Pemex would need roughly four years to bring the new gas deposit into production.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/energy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111202/ap_on_bi_ge/lt_mexico_pemex

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Efficient Data Management With Microsoft Hadoop For Windows Azure

Efficient Data Management With Microsoft Hadoop For Windows Azure

One of the main challenges faced by big Corporate business organizations is the inability to process huge volume of unstructured data. On the contrary, data explosion is still on the go with limited hardware and resources to interpret and store it in a very cost effective manner. Microsoft is extending its support to Apache Hadoop by developing its own hadoop distributions for its windows azure server for better management of Big Data. Not only data explosion, but data complexity also makes it difficult for the users to utilize it in a productive and effective manner with proper storage and access management.

The term Big Data became a buzz word in the complex high performance IT market with ample data-sets to work upon. Because of the high velocity of data that flowed through the information hierarchy of big organizations, there were many difficulties including acquiring, storing, searching , sharing, and visualizing Big data. All these were done with the motive of analyzing future trends .The size of big data varies depending on the ability of an organization to manage Big Data sets. The sizes are constantly changing with the target currently ranging from terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.

Apache hadoop is an open source project by Apache which handle massive amounts of data, structured, semi-structured or unstructured data, in the best possible manner. Its popularity can be tracked back to its ability to store and process large amounts of data, in a quick and cost-effective manner across clusters of different hardware. And it is estimated that more than half of the global data will be on top of Hadoop in the near future.

Big data solution by Microsoft
Previously, it was a tedious process for organizations to extract information from unstructured data. Microsoft is planning to provide business insights to all users from any data, including unstructured data. The new Hadoop based distribution from Microsoft enables customers to derive business insights on structured and unstructured data of any size and activate new types of data. Rich insights from Hadoop can be combined seamlessly with the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform. It also offer interoperability with other Hadoop distributions.

Benefits

The key benefits are being summarized here:

Broad Accessibility of Hadoop
Microsoft is also working upon broadening the accessibility of Hadoop to even developers and to the technical community. The new Hadoop distribution for windows azure by Microsoft offers ease of use by simplifying the acquisition, installation and configuration experience. The Hadoop package and its tool set comes in a cool manner which users find very easy to install and deploy .For the advantage of developers, Microsoft is investing to make JavaScript a first class language within Big Data to write high performance programs by using JavaScript.

Enterprise ready hadoop
Microsoft is taking big steps to make hadoop to be readily accepted as an enterprise solution. There will be added flexibility for hadoop for deployment along with with Windows Azure. The Azure deployment of Hadoop can be used to extend the on-premise solution in periods of high demand.

Other relevant insights
The Big Data solution by Microsoft with Windows Azure offers breakthrough insights by enabling customers to combine the richness of relational data from databases with unstructured data from Hadoop like reduced time to integrate to other software and analyze the data with popular tools such as Excel, Power view etc.

Source: http://www.hostreview.com/blog/111130-efficient-data-management-with-microsoft-hadoop-for-windows-azure

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UK expels Iran diplomats after embassy attack (Reuters)

TEHRAN (Reuters) ? Britain shut down the Iranian embassy in London and expelled all its staff on Wednesday, saying the storming of the British diplomatic mission in Tehran could not have taken place without some degree of consent from Iranian authorities.

Foreign Secretary William Hague also said the British Embassy in Tehran had been closed and all staff evacuated following the attack on Tuesday by a crowd who broke through gates, ransacked offices and burned British flags in a protest over sanctions imposed by Britain on the Tehran government.

It was the most violent incident so far as relations between the two countries worsen due to a wider dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

Hague said Iranian ambassadors across the European Union had been summoned to receive strong protests over the incident. But Britain stopped short of severing ties with Iran completely.

"The Iranian charge (d'affaires) in London is being informed now that we require the immediate closure of the Iranian embassy in London and that all Iranian diplomatic staff must leave the United Kingdom within the next 48 hours," Hague told parliament.

"We have now closed the British embassy in Tehran. We have decided to evacuate all our staff and as of the last few minutes, the last of our UK-based staff have now left Iran."

It was the worst crisis between Britain and Iran since full diplomatic relations were restored in 1999, 10 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa to kill author Salman Rushdie for his book "The Satanic Verses."

Hague said it was "fanciful" to think the Iranian authorities could not have protected the British embassy, or that the assault could have taken place without "some degree of regime consent."

"This does not amount to the severing of diplomatic relations in their entirety. It is action that reduces our relations with Iran to the lowest level consistent with the maintenance of diplomatic relations," he added.

British Prime Minister David Cameron chaired meetings of the government's crisis committee on Tuesday night and again on Wednesday morning to decide London's response.

But mindful of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, when radical students held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, Britain waited till all its two dozen diplomatic staff and dependents had left the country to announce its move.

IRAN ELITES FEUD

While the attack raises tensions between Iran and the West, it also exposes widening divisions within Iran's ruling elite over how to deal with the increased international pressure as sanctions take their toll on the already stagnant economy.

The protest appeared to be a move by the conservatives who dominate parliament to force President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to heed their demand to expel the British ambassador.

Ahmadinejad and his ministers have shown no willingness to compromise on their refusal to halt Iran's nuclear work but have sought to keep talks open to limit what sanctions are imposed.

The West believes the program is aimed at building a nuclear weapon, a charge Tehran strongly denies.

"It was planned and organized by the students, but it was not something that came from the government," said Mohammad Marandi, an associate professor at Tehran University.

"The students were telling me days before that they were planning to be there in large numbers. They said some students would try (to storm the embassy)," he said. "I don't think the government is happy with what happened."

Conservative newspapers trumpeted the embassy seizure.

The daily Vatan-e Emrouz declared "Fox's den seized," referring to Britain's nickname "the old fox" which reflects a widely held view in Iran that the former imperial power still wields great power behind the scenes in Iranian and international affairs.

While Iranian police at first did not stop the protesters storming the embassy gates, they later fired teargas to disperse them and freed six Britons held by demonstrators.

Iran's Foreign Ministry expressed its regret for the "unacceptable behavior of few demonstrators."

The protesters hit back at the Foreign Ministry and police.

"While the protesting students were seeking to answer to the plots and malevolence of this old fox in support of the decision of the revolutionary parliament to expel the ambassador of the British government we witnessed the harsh blow of the police on these students," said a statement by a group calling itself the Islamic community of seven Tehran universities.

"We expected the police to be on the side of the students instead of confronting them."

"CARNAGE"

Britain last week banned all its financial institutions from any dealings with Iran, including its central bank, after a report by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency suggested Iran may have worked on developing a nuclear arsenal.

Iran, the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, says it only wants nuclear technology to generate electricity.

The United States and Canada also tightened their sanctions on Iran last week but France is pressing for more.

"France is advocating sanctions on a scale that would paralyze the regime: freezing of central bank assets and an embargo on hydrocarbon exports," French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said in an interview in a weekly news magazine.

Referring to an EU meeting on Iran in Brussels on Thursday, Juppe said: "We want to reach a common position so that the pressure will be utmost. We cannot keep letting the Iranians take us for a ride."

The protesters stormed the main British embassy in downtown Tehran, smashing windows, torching a car and burning the British flag, while at the same time, another group broke into a British diplomatic residential compound at Qolhak in north Tehran.

Several sources told Reuters that diplomats had had their movements restricted by protesters and one said staff in the main British embassy had been herded into a room while protesters ransacked the premises.

Both properties were severely damaged, with official and personal possessions looted or destroyed, said sources who had spoken to embassy staff. One described the scene as "carnage."

There was a heavy police presence outside the British embassy on Wednesday with patrol cars on every corner and police officers stationed on foot every few meters.

EU ambassadors met in Tehran on Wednesday to discuss the security of their staff and premises. Norway said it had temporarily closed its embassy but other European missions were operating normally.

(Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb and Mitra Amiri in Tehran, Adrian Croft in London and Parisa Hafezi in Istanbul; Writing by Jon Hemming)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/iran/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111130/wl_nm/us_iran_britain_embassy

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