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Militias in Libya Spawn Protests

Leaders in Libya’s capital city of Tripoli began a three-day strike to protest the country’s freewheeling militias after clashes between pro-government forces and militants from the rival power center of Misrata erupted into deadly violence. In another blow to the government on Sunday, the country’s deputy intelligence chief, Mustapha Noah, was kidnapped at Tripoli’s airport. No one claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, which came a month after a militia briefly kidnapped Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zidan. The militias from Misrata agreed late Sunday to leave Tripoli within 72 hours, according to local news reports, after Mr. Zidan warned militiamen from outside the capital that there would be a “bloodbath” if they tried to enter Tripoli. Public anger toward militants boiled over on Friday, when protesters here demanded that militias from around the country leave Tripoli. The protesters were fired on when they approached the headquarters of the armed group […]

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West Faces Challenge in Moving Syrian Chemical Arms Through Battlefields

WASHINGTON — A plan announced over the weekend for getting the bulk of Syria ’s chemical weapons out of the country in coming weeks has raised major concerns in Washington, because it involves transporting the weapons over roads that are battlegrounds in the country’s civil war and loading them onto a ship that has no place to go. Security for the shipments is being provided entirely by Syrian military units loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, who has surprised American officials with how speedily he has complied with an agreement brokered by Russia to identify and turn over his chemical weapon stockpiles. Intelligence analysts and Pentagon officials say the shipments will be vulnerable to attack as they travel past the ruins of a war that has raged for two and a half years. Asked over the weekend what the backup plan would be if the chemical weapons components were attacked […]

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Bomb at Base Kills at Least 31 Syrian Troops

BEIRUT, Lebanon — At least 31 Syrian troops, including four senior officers, were killed on Sunday in a bombing that collapsed a building on a government military base just north of Damascus, the Syrian capital, an antigovernment monitoring group said. It was one of the deadliest attacks on government soldiers in recent months. The deaths came as a government offensive against rebels continued on three fronts: in the outskirts of Damascus, in the south; outside Aleppo, in the north; and in the Qalamoun mountain region bordering Lebanon, in western Syria. The explosion, at the army’s transport base in the contested suburb of Harasta, appeared to have been set off by a device placed inside the building or in a tunnel, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights , a Britain-based group that tracks the violence in Syria. The blast caused the building to collapse, the group said. There […]

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Libyan Official Abducted Amid Unrest in Capital

CAIRO — The deputy chief of Libya’s intelligence service was abducted from the parking lot of the airport in Tripoli on Sunday afternoon as a standoff between militias and a general strike against militia rule virtually shut down the city. The deputy intelligence chief, Mustafa Noah, was abducted just two days after a militia from the coastal city of Misurata opened fire on a nonviolent demonstration against the domination of Tripoli, Libya’s capital, by such armed brigades. The confrontation degenerated into a shootout that killed at least 43 and wounded hundreds, according to Libyan health officials. Many across Libya called the weekend a watershed for the vexed revolution that ousted Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi two years ago. It brought the first large demonstration by residents of the capital against the freewheeling militias that arrived to help oust Colonel Qaddafi and never left the city, and it posed a major test […]

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U.S. Military Considers a Mission to Train Libyan Security Forces

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The United States military is considering a mission to train Libyan security personnel with the goal of creating a force of 5,000 to 7,000 conventional soldiers and a separate, smaller unit for specialized counterterrorism missions, according to the top officer at the United States Special Operations Command. Speaking on Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library here, the commander, Adm. William H. McRaven, said no final decisions had been made about a training mission to support Libya, where militia violence has increased in recent days. It has not been decided which nations would be involved or where the training would take place, officials said, but the overall mission would be organized by the military’s Africa Command . Admiral McRaven and other officials noted that the Pentagon’s evolving national security strategy calls for building counterterrorism capabilities among local […]

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Fuel removal at Fukushima plant: What's at stake

TOKYO (AP) — Workers started the difficult task Monday of removing nuclear fuel rods from a heavily-damaged reactor building at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant in Japan. It’s the first major step toward decommissioning the plant, a decades-long process fraught with uncertainty and challenges. Q: How many fuel rods are there, and how long will it take? A: There are 3,106 fuel rod assemblies, each holding about 60-80 rods, in four reactors, Units 1-4. The goal is to remove them over the next five years. What started Monday was the removal of the 1,533 assemblies in Unit 4, which is the only one of the four reactors being decommissioned that didn’t melt down. Unit 4, as well as Units 5 and 6, were offline for regular safety checks and maintenance at the time of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Unit 4 had no fuel rods inside it. […]

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Fuel removal at Fukushima plant: What’s at stake

TOKYO (AP) — Workers started the difficult task Monday of removing nuclear fuel rods from a heavily-damaged reactor building at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant in Japan. It’s the first major step toward decommissioning the plant, a decades-long process fraught with uncertainty and challenges. Q: How many fuel rods are there, and how long will it take? A: There are 3,106 fuel rod assemblies, each holding about 60-80 rods, in four reactors, Units 1-4. The goal is to remove them over the next five years. What started Monday was the removal of the 1,533 assemblies in Unit 4, which is the only one of the four reactors being decommissioned that didn’t melt down. Unit 4, as well as Units 5 and 6, were offline for regular safety checks and maintenance at the time of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Unit 4 had no fuel rods inside it. […]

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Japan Starts Removing Fukushima Nuclear Fuel

TOKYO—More than 2½ years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Tokyo Electric Power Co. 9501.TO +0.18% Tokyo Electric Power Co. Inc. Japan: Tokyo ¥ 557 +1 +0.18% Nov. 18, 2013 3:00 pm Volume : 34.96M P/E Ratio 3.87 Market Cap ¥893.50 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee ¥129,550,000 More quote details and news » 9501.TO in Your Value Your Change Short position began Monday the painstaking and potentially dangerous process of removing fuel rods from one of the plant’s damaged reactor units. The operation, expected to take more than a year to complete, is Tepco’s first step toward dismantling the devastated plant and is an important milestone in what is expected to be a 30- to 40-year cleanup process after one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. The removal of the fuel also provides the operator of the plant with an opportunity to regain a measure of public […]

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Analysts wary as reform euphoria sweeps China markets

Trading on a loosening of China ’s one-child policy would seem relatively straightforward: buy all things baby-related. Investors did just that on Monday, sending shares in milk formula producer Yashili up almost 10 per cent and adding more than 4 per cent to crib manufacturer Goodbaby International. After almost a week during which investors lamented the lack of reform detail from China’s gathering of the Communist party leadership, Chinese equities appear to have regained their mojo. A sweeping policy package , announced late on Friday, has lifted China’s post-plenum depression. Though the easing of the one-child policy was the most headline-grabbing change, the Decision – as the document is called – included a wide variety of amendments to economic, social and financial policy, in what Dong Tao, chief regional economist at Credit Suisse, calls “the most comprehensive and ambitious reform plan in the history of the People’s Republic”. Chinese […]

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Analysts Hail China’s Plan to Overhaul Economy

If the initial summary of China’s highly anticipated economic policy plan disappointed analysts last week, the far more detailed plan that was released by the Chinese authorities late on Friday more than made up for it. The reaction among investors and analysts to the more than 21,000-character document that laid out the Chinese Communist Party’s decisions on how to overhaul the Chinese economy was overwhelmingly positive. ‘‘The breadth of the reform plan has certainly exceeded most expectations,’’ commented Wang Tao, chief China economist at UBS. The document, said the China economists at Goldman Sachs, ‘‘showed high reform conviction and lifted reform expectations and targets.’’ And Yao Wei, an economist in the Hong Kong office of Société Générale, said, ‘‘The new leaders really delivered and promised a number of concrete changes. China’s reform boat has finally set sail.’’ The stock markets echoed the overall sentiment: On Monday, the Shanghai composite […]

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Sierra Club official lauds Kentucky for phasing out coal-fired units

WEST PADUCAH, Ky., Nov. 15 (UPI) — Alice Howell, a regional director for the Sierra Club, lauded the planned closing of two coal-fired units at a power plant in western Kentucky. “Kentucky is proving that it can move beyond coal,” she said in a statement Thursday. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned utility and economic development corporation, is retiring the units at the 50-year-old Paradise power-generating facility, the Sierra Club said. The advocacy group said the plant has 13.6 million tons of emissions every year. The TVA will compensate for the loss of power with a 1,000-megawatt natural gas plant, the Sierra Club said. The New York Times reported Thursday the closings are part of the TVA’s strategy to use less coal as a power source. The closings extend to coal-fired plants in Alabama. The TVA offered no deadline for when the plants’ coal units would shut down. […]

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Water Shortages Could Dry Up Shale Gas Craze

Environmentalists won’t stop the shale gas craze. Neither will federal regulators. But a lack of water could possibly do so. And that is why drillers are looking for new ways to find water supplies. The surface of a freshwater lake During the exploration of shale gas, a concoction of sand, water and chemicals is pumped into the ground. Some of the dirty water returns and it must either be treated or re-injected underground , which at least in the northeastern United States involves trucking such tainted water to different locales — something that then upsets the green movement. Treating — or recycling — the “fracking water,” by contrast, optimizes a scarce resource while potentially mitigating any ecological ramifications, albeit at potentially higher costs. “No question: Recycling is the way that the industry is moving,” says Bill Charneski, chief operating officer of Origin Oil , in a telephone interview. “It […]

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EnQuest: $6.4 billion slated to develop Kraken oil field in North Sea

LONDON, Nov. 15 (UPI) — British energy company EnQuest said Friday it would invest $6.4 billion to develop the 137 million-barrel Kraken oil field in the North Sea. EnQuest said its development plan was approved by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It said the investment is the largest in the British portion of the North Sea and one of the biggest industrial investments in the country this year. “Kraken is a transformational project for EnQuest and we are delighted to be able to proceed with it; working with the government and our partners to maximize the extraction … of oil in this field over its 25-year-long life,” EnQuest Chief Executive Officer Amjad Bseisu said in a statement. The Kraken field is about 75 miles east of the Shetland Islands. EnQuest said the field contains 137 million barrels of oil and that gross peak oil production should be […]

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When is the oil going to run out – and should we worry about it?

When is the oil going to run out – and should we worry about it? Page added on November 17, 2013 Energy experts have warned recently that Britain currently stores enough natural gas for only thirteen days of supply. Such a stark reality indicates how little reserve actually exists to fall back on. The news also brings to mind the concept of energy and fossil fuel shortage, depicted in movies such as ‘Mad Max’. But with our entire economy and way of life dependent on one particular fossil fuel, namely crude oil, how long can we expect this commodity to last, and for the present levels of production to be maintained? A study by a German think tank published in September, 2010 , warned of the potential for a dire global economic crisis in the next fifteen years as a result of a peak and irreversible decline in world […]

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Update on Peak Oil

Page added on November 17, 2013 I summarized my attitudes to Peak Oil in an (anonymous) contribution to the Azimuth discussion a couple of years ago, reproduced below. It seems right [except the dubious comment on shale oil was way off]. World economic growth continues to be constrained by the fact that we can only slowly change infrastructure. Fossil fuel use continues to grow as we go to gas and back to coal for many applications. The world peak is different to the peaks we’ve seen in individual countries and fields, because the price can now rise. This should mean that the tail is more stretched out as otherwise uneconomic fields come into play (like tar sands, very heavy oil, coal liquefaction, abandoned fields, and maybe even oil shales). Also it means that there is a lot of pressure to get off oil as much as possible. Even the […]

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