Mr. Siniora's government agreed
Wednesday to a power-sharing deal that many analysts believe significantly
strengthens the power of Hezbollah and other Syrian and Iranian allies inside
Lebanon. Members of Mr. Siniora's government have complained Western support
for Beirut has been inadequate to compete with the military help provided to
Hezbollah by Damascus and Tehran.
Louis Joseph Sheehan, Esquire
The Israelis "don't seem to
understand that our interests and their interests in Lebanon aren't
aligned," one senior U.S official working on the Middle East said.
"In the short-term, the Israelis want to remove a threat on their border.
But they don't care about" the fate of Lebanon's government.
The State Department's point man on
the Middle East, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch, said widening the
Middle East peace dialog could be a "good thing" for the region. But
he also stressed that Washington has "reservations about the foreign-policy
behavior of Syria, and its internal politics as well."
Speaking Thursday, Israeli Foreign
Minister Tzipi Livni reflected the strategy in outlining her government's
requirements for a peace deal. Syria must understand that peace "involves
their complete renunciation of support for terror in Hamas, Hezbollah and
Iran," she said.
Israeli officials say Syria's secular
government is fundamentally averse to its strategic alliance with Iran's
Islamist rulers. They say Damascus needs to be offered economic and diplomatic
incentives to offset the assistance supplied by Iran. The talks will also focus
on Israel giving control of the Golan Heights region back to Damascus.
Israelis officials are fearful of
facing a three-front war involving Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza
Strip and Syria on the Golan Heights. "Maybe it's time to employ the
carrot to remove [Syria] from the axis of evil," then deputy chief of
staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, said in
Washington last fall.
[Points of Contention]
In recent months, Washington has moved
to exact new financial sanctions against many of President Assad's closest
business associates and political allies. And the U.S. has worked with Arab
states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to isolate Damascus diplomatically
in a bid to gain its assistance in stabilizing the region. Saudi Arabia and
Egypt didn't send top leaders to the Arab Summit in Damascus this March, to
snub President Assad.
Divisions between the Bush
administration and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government on Syria may
imperil the peace initiative. President Assad has said that such a deal is
impossible without the active support of Washington. Damascus believes that
American aid and the removal of U.S. sanctions on Syria would have to be part
of any long-term agreement.
Bush administration officials have
offered no indication that the U.S. is preparing to directly broker
Syrian-Israeli talks. Instead, they say, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
will focus her remaining months in office on supporting the Israeli-Palestinian
peace track.
Some Syrian officials have said that a
new U.S. administration that comes to power next January could be more
supportive of such a peace tract. The two leading candidates to replace
President Bush, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, both released statements
saying they supported Israel's position.
The view in the region, by contrast,
is that Israel and the U.S. are still tightly tethered. Suleyman Haddad, the
head of the foreign-affairs committee in Syria's parliament, said Syria won't
agree to any conditions in return for a peace deal, such as giving up support
for Hamas or Hezbollah.
He said if Israel wanted peace with
Syria it "should give up all these unattainable conditions." Talking
about the talks, Mr. Haddad said he didn't believe Israel would do anything
"without instructions from and cooperation with the United States."
Has anyone ever told you that you
resemble the woman in the Parmigianino painting “Madonna of the Long Neck”? I
have a friend who sometimes calls me Bronty, short for brontosaurus, the
dinosaurs with the really long necks. They have a new name now, apatosaurus.
What are you working on now? I will be
doing a play called “Distracted” next season at the Roundabout. I just did a
film called “The Babysitters” with John Leguizamo.
You’ve also appeared as Eleanor
Roosevelt in a much-praised HBO movie. Do you think TV is overtaking film as
the more creative medium? I do, because I think what is happening with films is
happening with Broadway too. It’s got to cost a $100 million. It’s got to be
big, big, big. I think TV is the only place left where you can have a midsize
something.
So TV is the new Off Broadway? No, TV
is the new Broadway the way Broadway used to be in the ’50s.
I hear you were treated for breast
cancer in 2006. I had a lumpectomy. It wasn’t that bad. Six and a half weeks of
radiation.
Did you stop working then? I was in a
play, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” when I was getting radiation. In fact,
they had my surgery on a Sunday so that I would not miss a performance. I’m
able to shelve whatever emotional reaction I might be having in order to get
the job done.
That’s a good definition of a
professional. You may be afraid of flying, but you get on the plane.
The last thing on the minds of some
Playboy Enterprises' investors these days is sex.
When they gather Wednesday for
Playboy's annual meeting, some shareholders are expected to ask why the company
is still selling pornography, however "sophisticated" its brand of
it.
Judging from its dismal first-quarter
results, which showed deteriorating income in its low-margin publishing and TV
and Internet entertainment businesses, Playboy is fast losing its market share
in the porn niche. Online, the skin-flick industry is thriving, with offerings
often free.
Christie Hefner, chief executive, has
prioritized cost slashing in the publishing unit, which she calls "a
legacy business that is not going to turn around to become a growth
business." And she is pursuing high-margin licensing deals that leverage
Playboy's brand, such as a casino-resort project to open in Macau next year.
These location-based licensing deals can boast operating margins projected at
80% versus 60% for its consumer-product licensing deals. Some investors
maintain that Playboy's $191 million market capitalization seriously undersells
its licensing potential.
But they need to see sizzle. Tuesday,
the company's shares sank through their 52-week low.
Willis E. Lamb Jr., who shared the
1955 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of a slight and subtle
discrepancy in the quantum theory describing how electrons behave in the
hydrogen atom, died on Thursday in Tucson. He was 94.
The cause was complications of a
gallstone disorder, according to the University of Arizona, where Dr. Lamb was
an emeritus professor of physics and optical sciences.
Although the discrepancy, which became
known as the Lamb shift, in the hydrogen atom was slight, it was one of the
first direct experimental signs that empty space is not empty. Instead, empty
space roils with “virtual particles” that pop into and out of existence too
quickly to be detected. The Lamb shift results from the virtual particles’
bumping into an electron orbiting in the hydrogen atom and altering its orbit
slightly.
The discovery of the Lamb led to a
rethinking of quantum mechanics and the development of quantum electrodynamics,
which incorporated the virtual particles into the modern theory of electricity
and magnetism.
Dr. Lamb’s research crossed many
subjects in theoretical physics, including lasers, the scattering of neutrons
off crystals and how to make the most precise measurements of objects or
processes, given the intrinsic uncertainties of quantum mechanics.
His laser work, for instance,
predicted another effect that bears his name, the Lamb-Bennett dip. The dip
describes how the intensity of a laser drops under certain circumstances. It
turned out that a colleague, William Bennett, had already observed that effect
experimentally. The Lamb-Bennett dip has been used to set laser frequencies
with great precision.
“Lamb would take the process apart in
his mind,” said William Wing, a professor of physics and optical sciences at
Arizona. “Often he would discover new effects by careful thinking at a very
deep level.”
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was born on
July 12, 1913, in Los Angeles. He received a bachelor’s in chemistry from the
University of California, Berkeley, in 1934 and a doctorate in theoretical
physics, also from Berkeley, in 1938.
He then became an instructor and,
later, a professor at Columbia. At Columbia in the summer of 1946, he came up
with the idea for the experiment that discovered the Lamb shift. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery
Physics of the 20th century revolved
around two theories: quantum mechanics, which described how the smallest bits
of matter behave, and relativity, which describes the odd effects that occur at
speeds close to that of light. In the 1920s, Paul Dirac, an English physicist,
combined the two in a relativistic quantum theory of hydrogen, the simplest of
atoms, with a single electron orbiting a single proton. The theory predicted
much of the observed behavior of hydrogen, in particular the energies that the
orbits of the electron could be pushed into.
One prediction of Dirac’s theory was
that two of the excited orbits would have exactly the same energy. Other
scientists, who were thinking about virtual particles, suspected that there
might be a difference.
To test that theory, a graduate
student, Robert C. Retherford, built the experiment, which used microwave
technology developed in World War II for radar. In April 1947, the experiment
found there was indeed a slight difference in energy between the two orbits
generated by differences in how the electrons interacted with the ephemeral
virtual particles.
Dr. Lamb shifted universities several
times in his career, to Stanford in 1951, to Oxford in 1956, to Yale in 1962
and to the University of Arizona in 1974. He retired in 2002.
He was a member of the National
Academy of Sciences and received the National Medal of Science in 2000.
His first wife, Ursula Schaefer Lamb,
died in 1996. A marriage to Bruria Kaufman, a physicist he met at Columbia in
1941, ended in divorce. He married Elsie Wattson, whom he met 27 years ago, on
Jan. 26. Also surviving is a brother, Perry, of Maine.
It was in November 1955 that an early
morning call from Stockholm announced that Dr. Lamb had won the Nobel. He went
back to bed and slept two more hours.
He shared the prize, and the
accompanying $36,720, with Polykarp Kusch, who discovered other effects of the
virtual particles in a different experiment.
Without warning, 24
foot soldiers of the Pavlodar Oblast Financial Police showed up, carrying AK-47
Kalashnikov automatic rifles. Their target: the Maikuben coal mine in northern
Kazakhstan, owned by the American firm AES Corp. Demanding documents connected
to a tax case in Kazakh courts, the troops brandished their weapons to remove
AES employees and seize the mine's administration building, according to
internal AES e-mails. With no cellular service in the area, AES managers in the
country struggled to communicate with their staff as the occupation dragged
into a second day. They negotiated an end to the standoff with regional
officials, who persuaded the goons to pull back. AES never told investors or
the press about the armed takeover. Operations at the open coal pit continued,
and the company got slapped with a tax fine.
That scary incident
took place in June 2005--hardly the first confrontation with the Kazakhs and
certainly not the last. Still, AES soldiered on. In a 12-year sojourn in the
former Soviet republic, it invested at least $200 million, becoming one of
Kazakhstan's largest providers of electricity. But now, three years after the
Financial Police raid and facing $200 million in potential fines, AES is
largely throwing in the towel. It is closing a deal to sell its main assets in
Kazakhstan for what appears to be a fire-sale price.
A $14 billion (sales)
firm with headquarters in Arlington, Va., AES is in the business of supplying
power, for the most part in developing countries (among them: Cameroon, Brazil,
Colombia and Pakistan). So it has had plenty of experience dealing with nasty
legal regimes and expropriations of foreign capital. But Kazakhstan, where it
had not just contract and regulatory disputes but also the threat of criminal
investigations, was too much for it.
AES' hosing in Kazakhstan
is a distressingly familiar sign of the times for U.S. and European
corporations trying to do business in poor but resource-rich countries.
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador badly need foreign investment and know-how. Yet
they're making it tough for outsiders to make a decent return on investment.
ExxonMobil has been in a tense legal standoff over frozen assets with
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez since last year. Ecuador is using its court
system in an attempt to extort as much as $16 billion from Chevron as
compensation for environmental damage that was caused mostly by the Ecuador
national oil company after Chevron left. Russia has come to rely on
spur-of-the-moment environmental laws and fines as leverage to force Western
partners to sell at depressed prices. Thus was Royal Dutch Shell squeezed out
of its majority stake in the Sakhalin oil bonanza for pennies on the dollar.
Kazakhstan's 30
billion barrels of reserves make it the world's eleventh-largest repository of
oil. This vast Central Asian nation of 15.3 million also has coal, gold and
uranium. It has attracted $15 billion in U.S. money, most of it oil-related.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a former Soviet official, has ruled with a
tempered-steel grip since independence in 1991 by focusing on the
economy--Kazakhstan's GDP last year jumped 8.7%--and opening doors to outside
investors. "It's a lot easier to do business in Kazakhstan than
Russia," says a Western diplomat in the region.
But that official
policy hasn't kept authorities from hassling foreign operations. In November a
regional Kazakh environmental regulator fined Chevron's Tengiz oilfield project
$310 million for alleged violations involving the improper storage of sulfur.
Chevron insists it has dealt with the sulfur safely and legally, and is
contesting the fine.
The Tengiz problem is
a mere puddle next to the troubles at Kashagan in the remote North Caspian Sea,
the world's largest oilfield discovery in the last three decades. Citing
production delays and cost overruns, and threatening new laws and fines to
protect the wilderness, the Kazakh government has extracted critical
concessions from Western companies developing the field. In January the chief
executives of Exxon, Shell, France's Total and Eni of Italy flew to Astana, the
new northern capital decreed in 1997 and built almost from scratch. There, in a
nine-hour meeting at La Rivière restaurant, the oil giants agreed to fork over
$5 billion to compensate Kazakhstan for delays and potential lost revenue, and
let KazMunayGas, the state oil company, double its stake in Kashagan to 17% for
the bargain price of $1.8 billion.
It doesn't stop there.
Foreign firms in Kazakhstan, which pay a maximum tax rate of 30%, plus value
added taxes, have come to expect frequent visits from the regional taxman.
ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steel company, has been fighting $2.5
billion of tax claims associated with its coal- and steel-producing assets in
the country. The Ministry of Finance claimed that ArcelorMittal should, among
other things, be paying Kazakh taxes on the income of a subsidiary in the
United Arab Emirates. ArcelorMittal says it has paid taxes in accordance with
the original privatization agreement and recently won court victories in the
case. (Unrelated to the tax cases, ArcelorMittal has had serious safety issues:
71 Kazakh miners have died in two accidents in the last three years.)
Houston contractor
Parker Drilling has had its share of woes since building Sunkar, a barge
designed to drill in the icy, shallow waters of the Caspian. Parker has spent
five years defending itself against Kazakh accusations that it did not pay
taxes on reimbursements for upgrading the giant barge, even though most of the
modifications were completed outside Kazakhstan. Total fines: $126 million,
most of which Parker passed on to its oil clients. In March Parker itself
finished paying a $51 million tax bill related to Sunkar. That's serious coin
for a company that last year earned $104 million on revenue of $655 million.
Does Kazakhstan really
want to lure U.S. companies? That is its paramount concern, says Galym
Orazbakov, Minister of Industry & Trade. He traveled to the U.S. in
December to raise funds for infrastructure projects. Since then the government
has taken out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to highlight its keen interest
in "deepening economic ties with the U.S."
AES entered Kazakhstan
in 1996, paying $3 million for Ekibastuz gres-I, the nation's biggest power
plant. While that may sound like a steal, the investment required a leap of
faith. A relic of Soviet engineering, the coal-fired plant in northern
Kazakhstan was designed to generate 4 gigawatts. At the time, it was producing
less than a tenth of that. Still, AES embraced the risk, immediately buying
enough coal to ensure that Ekibastuz could produce power through its first
winter. The company ended up investing $200 million to increase capacity at the
plant. It also purchased a nearby coal mine to stoke the plant and concessions
on two hydro power producers in eastern Kazakhstan. At its peak AES produced
25% of Kazakhstan's power.
Sidebar:
It’s Good to Be
President
AES executives like
Dale Perry, regional director in Kazakhstan until last year, were impressed
with miners who dug coal in freezing temperatures, taking quick tea breaks
every other hour to warm up before venturing out for another shift. Kazakh
employees always showed up for work on time, Perry recalls. With their
technical abilities, they could meet any task or challenge. AES supervised
6,500 Kazakhs with only five to seven expat managers. Most customers paid on
time, even in the face of rate increases as high as 20% a year to 3 cents per
kilowatt-hour, still among the lowest energy prices in the world.
But AES had more than
extreme weather and decrepit equipment to tangle with. Work visas for
out-of-country employees were rejected. In the early days the government
reneged on a $150 million electric bill. So, Perry says, AES took the
government to arbitration in London. No decision was reached. But in a
settlement AES won the right to move its power over government-owned
transmission lines to the more lucrative Russian market.
During his time in
Kazakhstan things never went smoothly for Perry, a Dartmouth graduate with
degrees in engineering and Russian and a former U.S. Navy lieutenant. He simply
became accustomed to shakedowns.
Once, he recalls, an
environmental inspector claimed that AES had stored rock and soil it had
removed from its mine without proper authorization. The entire matter could be
cleared up if the company bought some spare parts from the bureaucrat. AES
wound up paying a $2.8 million fine instead of a bribe.
Tax auditors showed
up, looking for documents that might reveal improper expense writeoffs. Perry
says he was forced to show evidence he had landed in Moscow to prove he had
properly expensed a $400 airplane ticket. He reserved a line item on the books
for "ad hoc taxes." A more serious problem arose in 2005 when
Kazakhstan stopped granting AES access to the transmission grid that moved its
electricity to Russia. AES again took the government to arbitration in London
(it won in December 2007; Kazakhstan has paid an undisclosed penalty). Often
Perry felt regional officials were just trying to find ways to meet their
budgets. But sometimes, he says, the visits oddly coincided with calls from
authorities in Astana who demanded increased amounts of power without paying
more for it. He heard rumors that officials in the east were angling for a way
to snatch AES' hydro assets there. Kazakh officials claim that AES has not
always lived up to its contractual obligations to upgrade plants.
In 2004 Kazakh
authorities accused AES of trying to avoid paying $1.5 million in taxes by
transferring funds between its units in eastern and northern Kazakhstan. Perry
tried to explain that the Ekibastuz plant in the north had signed a reserve
contract to guarantee electricity to AES businesses in the east for times when
there was insufficient power--an insurance policy the eastern unit paid for
with a fixed fee, plus variable costs, when it drew down electrons. Convinced
this was a tax scam, the authorities targeted some of AES' general directors
and chief accountants who, under Kazakh law, can be held personally liable for
any wrongdoing of the entities they manage. Business managers can also be
placed in jail while they are under investigation, say people familiar with
Kazakh law.
Three AES executives
who had already left the country for routine career changes--two citizens of
the U.K., one from New Zealand--were placed under investigation in connection
with the tax probe. Kazakh authorities said they were wanted for questioning
and threatened to alert Interpol, according to an internal AES e-mail. Ten
Kazakh workers at AES were interrogated for eight hours a day over several days.
They were grilled about the political affiliations of AES employees, says an
internal company e-mail, and accused of being unpatriotic. "Why do you
work for Americans who steal from us?" they were asked. The harsh
questioning so traumatized one Kazakh accountant, says Perry, that she suffered
a nervous breakdown and checked into a hospital. She and another woman were
convicted in 2005 of tax evasion but were released under an amnesty.
"These are personally distressing things," says Perry, who worked to
get one of the convictions overturned.
AES enlisted the help
of Vice President Dick Cheney, who met in Astana with Nazarbayev in 2006. (At
the press conference then, Nazarbayev commended U.S. commercial interests in
his country, citing AES' contributions.) Separately, Perry reminded Kazakh
officials that AES had lost money during its early years in Kazakhstan, had
paid out at least $300 million in taxes over a decade and had taken out only
$200 million in profits.
Last summer AES was
fined $200 million for allegedly using a trading company to inflate electricity
prices in eastern Kazakhstan, in violation of an antimonoply law. In securities
filings AES says it has done nothing wrong but adds that its assets in the
country could be seized if it loses the appeal process and does not pay. The
company disclosed that Kazakhstan initiated criminal proceedings against two of
its managers, seeking $13 million from them, and that the case had been
settled.
Since the
investigation AES executives have had to bail out of Kazakhstan. Late last year
a U.S. citizen left on holiday but did not return, fearing he'd be slapped in
jail because of the antitrust case. Early this year another AES executive
involved in the same case, a British citizen, fled Kazakhstan after hearing he
was under criminal investigation and potentially faced prison. Both men are
still working for AES--but in the U.K. Perry retired from the company earlier
this year.
Imprisonment is a real
threat. Mark Y. Seidenfeld, a U.S. citizen and telecom executive, served 19
months after being accused of embezzling $43,000 from the Kazakh firm he led.
He had left Kazakhstan and was working in Russia when law enforcement there
honored a Kazakh warrant and shipped him back on a prison train, a trip lasting
32 days. Seidenfeld says he was set up by a vengeful Kazakh minority
shareholder who tried and failed to buy the company Seidenfeld ran at a big
discount. "What is troubling in Kazakhstan and the former Soviet Union is
it used to be taboo to imprison foreigners there on false charges," says
Seidenfeld, who was acquitted by a Kazakh judge and released last summer.
In February AES
announced it was selling the Ekibastuz power plant and its coal mine for $1.1
billion and a $381 million contract to manage the assets for three years. The
buyer is Kazakhmys, a mining powerhouse controlled by Vladimir Kim, a Kazakh
businessman worth $4.7 billion.
Was Kazakhstan worth
the trouble? The company expects to record a $900 million gain on the deal.
"We believe the sale of the coal plant Ekibastuz and the coal mine of
Maikuben is good for AES, Kazakhmys and Kazakhstan," says Paul Hanrahan,
AES chief executive, in a circumspect statement. Wall Street loved the deal.
Merrill Lynch figured it was priced at 16 times operating income (earnings
before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). That looks like a
fantastic price, given that Consolidated Edison trades at 9 times Ebitda. But
New York doesn't have anything like the growth potential of Kazakhstan, where
electricity sales per capita are one-quarter those of the U.S.
In a free market the
Kazakh properties would be worth much more. A November Deutsche Bank report
suggested that Ekibastuz and the mine could be worth more than $2 billion.
UniCredit Aton, a Moscow investment bank, opined in February that AES was
selling at as much as a 50% discount. "We believe the low price could be
due to the strong pressure from the Kazakhstan government on AES," says
its report. No way, says Erlan Idrissov, the Kazakh ambassador to the U.S., who
says his country "strives to provide as beneficial and liberal business
climate as possible" to foreign investors.
As AES packs it in,
other American companies in Kazakhstan brace for more hits. Not long ago
President Nazarbayev declared that his government would take greater control of
energy resources. Soon after, the environmental protection minister announced
new taxes on foreign oil companies.
Sidebar:
Arjun N. Murti remembers the pain of
the oil shocks of the 1970s. But he is bracing for something far worse now: He
foresees a “super spike” — a price surge that will soon drive crude oil to $200
a barrel.
Mr. Murti, who has a bit of a green
streak, is not bothered much by the prospect of even higher oil prices,
figuring it might finally prompt America to become more energy efficient.
An analyst at Goldman Sachs, Mr. Murti
has become the talk of the oil market by issuing one sensational forecast after
another. A few years ago, rivals scoffed when he predicted oil would breach
$100 a barrel. Few are laughing now. Oil shattered yet another record on
Tuesday, touching $129.60 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gas at $4 a
gallon is arriving just in time for those long summer drives.
Mr. Murti, 39, argues that the world’s
seemingly unquenchable thirst for oil means prices will keep rising from here
and stay above $100 into 2011. Others disagree, arguing that prices could
abruptly tumble if speculators in the market rush for the exits. But the grim
calculus of Mr. Murti’s prediction, issued in March and reconfirmed two weeks
ago, is enough to give anyone pause: in an America of $200 oil, gasoline could
cost more than $6 a gallon.
That would be fine with Mr. Murti, who
owns not one but two hybrid cars. “I’m actually fairly anti-oil,” says Mr.
Murti, who grew up in New Jersey. “One of the biggest challenges our country
faces is our addiction to oil.”
Mr. Murti is hardly alone in
predicting higher oil prices. Boone Pickens, the oilman turned corporate
raider, said Tuesday that crude would hit $150 this year. But many analysts are
no longer so sure where oil is going, at least in the short term. Some say
prices will fall as low as $70 a barrel by year-end, according to Thomson
Financial.
Experts disagree over the supply of
oil, the demand for it and whether recent speculation in the commodities
markets has artificially raised prices. As an energy analyst at Citigroup, Tim
Evans, reportedly put it, trading commodities these days is like “sticking your
hand in a blender.”
Whatever the case, oil analysts like
Mr. Murti have suddenly taken on the aura that enveloped technology analysts in
the 1990s.
“It’s become a very fashionable area
to write about,” said Kevin Norrish, a commodity analyst at Barclays Capital,
which began predicting high oil prices around the same time as Goldman. “And to
try to get attention from people, people are coming out with all sorts of
numbers.”
This was not always the case. In the
1990s, oil research was a sleepy area at banks. Many analysts assumed oil
prices would hover near $15 to $20 a barrel forever. If prices rose much above
those levels, they figured, consumers would start conserving, suppliers would
raise production, or both, causing prices to decline.
But around the turn of the century,
oil company after oil company started missing predicted production. Mr. Murti,
who covers oil companies like ConocoPhillips and Valero Energy, decided to
study the oil spikes of the 1970s.
Since starting his career at Petrie
Parkman & Company, a Denver-based investment firm acquired by Merrill Lynch
in 2006, he had been conservative in his calls on oil. But by 2004, he
concluded the world was headed for a long supply shock that would push prices
through the roof. That summer, as oil traded for about $40 a barrel, Mr. Murti
coined what has become his signature phrase: super spike.
The following March, he drew attention
by predicting prices would soar to $105, sending shock waves through the
market. Angry investors questioned whether Goldman’s own oil traders benefited
from the prediction. At Goldman’s annual meeting, Henry M. Paulson Jr., then
the bank’s chief executive and now Treasury secretary, found himself defending
Mr. Murti.
“Our traders were as surprised as
everyone else was,” Mr. Paulson reportedly said. “Our research department is
totally independent. Our trading departments have no say about this.”
Over time, Mr. Murti was proved right
again. Oil crossed $100 in February. Mr. Murti’s forecasts now feed into many
of Goldman’s economic and corporate forecasts, affecting research of companies
like Ford and Procter & Gamble. His research is distributed widely among
investors.
“Even if you disagree with their
views, the problem is that Goldman does carry so much credibility,” said Nauman
Barakat, senior vice president for global energy futures at Macquarie Futures
USA. “There are a lot of traders who are going to buy based on their reports.”
His sudden fame unsettles Mr. Murti.
He rarely grants interviews, citing concerns about privacy, and he declined to
be photographed for this article. He is not the bank’s only gas prognosticator:
Jeffrey R. Currie predicts oil prices out of London.
Mr. Murti, for his part, discounts
suggestions that his reports affect market prices. “Whenever an analyst
upgrades a stock or downgrades a stock, sometimes you get a reaction that day,
but beyond a day, fundamentals win out,” he said.
Mr. Murti falls into the camp of oil
analysts who believe that supply is likely to remain tight because of
geopolitical factors. These analysts predict higher prices because production
is declining in non-OPEC countries like Britain, Norway and Mexico.
The analysts who predict lower prices
say there are supplies of oil that the bullish analysts are missing. “This year
will be a year in which supply will be put into the market by stealth by OPEC
and by countries we call black-hole countries,” said Edward L. Morse, chief
energy economist at Lehman Brothers. China is one example, he said.
But while oil and gas prices have been
rising for a while now, Americans have only just begun to reduce gasoline
consumption, so their efforts to conserve have not dragged down oil prices.
“The fact that the U.S. gasoline
demand can be down and that the U.S. gasoline consumer is no longer driving
world oil prices is a monumental event,” Mr. Murti says. He spends most of his
time talking to money managers and analysts, many of whom keep asking him if
oil prices will stay high if speculators abandon the market, and says he
applauds investors for driving up oil prices, since that will spur investment
in alternative sources of energy.
High prices, he says, “send a message
to consumers that you should try your best to buy fuel-efficient cars or
otherwise conserve on energy.” Washington should create tax incentives to
encourage people to buy hybrid cars and develop more nuclear energy, he said.
Of course, if lawmakers heed his
advice, oil analysts like him might one day be a thing of the past. That’s fine
with Mr. Murti.
“The greatest thing in the world would
be if in 15 years we no longer needed oil analysts,” he says.
The Battle of the Korsun-Cherkassy
Pocket took place in the winter of 1944. The battle was fought on the Eastern
Front between the forces of the German Army Group South and the Soviet 1st
Ukrainian and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts lasting from 24, January 1944 until 16,
February 1944.
The Soviet armies involved were 27th
and 40th Armies, & 6th Tank Army (1st Ukrainian Front), 4th Guards, 52nd,
53rd Armies, 5th Guards Tank Army and 5th Guards Cavalry Corps (2nd Ukrainian).
2nd Tank Army was also committed during the course of the operation. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
In January 1944, the German forces of
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group South including General Otto
Wöhler's 8th Army had fallen back to the Panther-Wotan Line, a defensive
position along the Dniepr river in Ukraine. Two corps, the XI under Gen.
Wilhelm Stemmermann, the XLII Army Corps under Lt.Gen. Theobald Lieb and the
attached Corps Detachment B from the 8th Army were holding a salient into the
Soviet lines extending some 100 kilometers to the Dniepr river settlement of
Kanev, with the town of Korsun roughly in the center of the salient, west of
Cherkassy. Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov realized the potential for
destroying Wöhler’s 8th Army with the Stalingrad model as precedent and using
similar tactics as were applied to defeat Paulus’ encircled 6th Army. Zhukov
recommended to the Soviet Supreme Command (Stavka) to deploy 1st and 2nd
Ukrainian Fronts to form two armored rings of encirclement: an inner ring
around a cauldron and then destroy the forces it contained, and an external
ring to prevent relief formations from reaching the trapped units. Despite
repeated warnings from Manstein and others, Hitler refused to allow the exposed
units to be pulled back to safety.
On 18 January, Manstein was proven
prescient when General Nikolai Vatutin’s 1st and General Ivan Konev’s 2nd
Ukrainian Fronts attacked the edges of the salient and surrounded the two
German corps. The link-up on 28 January of 20th Guards Tank Brigade with 6th
Guards Tank Army of the First Ukrainian Front at the village of Zvenigorodka
completed the encirclement and created the cauldron or kessel that became known
as the Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket. Stalin expected and was promised a second
Stalingrad; Konev wired: "There is no need to worry, Comrade Stalin. The
encircled enemy will not escape."
Trapped in the pocket were under
60,000 men, a total of six German divisions at approximately 55% of their
authorized strength, along with a number of smaller combat units. Among the trapped
German forces were the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking and the SS Sturmbrigade
Wallonien (SS Assault Brigade Wallonien), and 5-6,000 Russian auxiliaries. The
trapped forces were designated Gruppe Stemmermann and the commander of XI
Corps, Gen. Wilhelm Stemmermann was placed in command. Wiking had 43 Panzer
III/IV tanks and assault guns. Two assault gun battalions provided an
additional 27 assault guns.
Manstein moved quickly, and by early
February the III and XLVII Panzerkorps were assembled for a relief effort.
However, Hitler intervened and ordered the rescue attempt to be transformed
into an impossible effort to counter-encircle the two Soviet fronts. http://louisjsheehanesquire100.ning.com
General Hermann Breith, commander of
III Panzerkorps insisted that both the relief formations should unite and
attempt to force a corridor to the trapped Gruppe Stemmermann. Manstein
initially sided with Hitler, although in deceptive fashion, and the attack was
to be an attempt to encircle the massive Red Army force. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
The XLVII Panzerkorps attack by the
11th Panzer Division quickly stalled. The veteran division had only 27 tanks
and 34 assault guns, therefore its contribution was limited. Realizing the
encirclement was going to fail, Manstein ordered III Panzerkorps to attempt to
relieve the beleaguered Gruppe Stemmermann. Led by the 1st SS Panzer Division,
the attack soon encountered heavy resistance from four Soviet Tank Corps and
began to bog down with a change in weather in the thick mud of the rasputitsa.
On 11 February III Panzerkorps renewed
its effort led by the 16th Panzer division. After heavy fighting, the exhausted
force reached the Gniloy Tikich stream and established a small bridgehead on
the eastern bank. The III Panzerkorps could advance no further, Group
Stemmermann would have to fight its way out.
Both antagonists realized that the
Wehrmacht relief efforts had come to a critical stage; yet very few German
soldiers and no Waffen-SS men in the cauldron had surrendered despite heavy
Soviet propaganda inducements to do so. Zhukov thus decided to send
parlementaires under a white flag with surrender demands. A Red Army Lt.Col., translator and
bugler arrived in an American jeep and presented letters for Stemmermann and
Lieb signed by Marshal Zhukov and Generals Konev and Vatutin. The German
officer on headquarters duty, a major at Corps Detachment B and a translator,
received the emissaries. After cordial talks, refreshments and a handshake, the
Soviets departed without an answer–the “answer would be in the form of
continued, bitter resistance.”
The forces of Gruppe Stemmermann had
formed their defense around the town of Korsun, which had a single airstrip –
the besieged unit's supply line. Junkers Ju-52 transports delivered fuel,
ammunition, medical supplies and food – until the airfield was abandoned on 12
February – and flew out the wounded, an all-important morale consideration for
German troops on the Eastern front.
Stemmermann began pulling back troops
from the north of the cauldron, and attacking south to expand towards the
relief forces on the north bank of the Gniloy Tikich. The frenetic maneuvering
within the kessel confused the Soviets, convincing them that they had trapped
the majority of the German 8th Army. The trapped forces, suffering from kessel
fever, were now to capture the villages of Novo-Buda, Komarovka and Shanderovka
to reach a favorable jump-off line for the breakout. The 105th Grenadier
Regiment of the 72nd Infantry Division was to take Novo-Buda and move on to
Komarovka. The understrength regiment would have to attack uphill over an area
with no cover, and with the Soviets well entrenched. Major Robert Kästner, the
105th commander decided upon a night assault. With fixed bayonets, wearing
white camouflage suits over their winter anoraks and white-washed helmets, the
men moved silently forward, getting within meters of the Soviet trench before
being challenged by a sentry. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
In fierce hand-to-hand combat, the
105th took the ridge in a matter of minutes. The following night the 105th
captured Komarovka in similar fashion.
By 15 February, the pocket had
“wandered” south and half-way towards its rescuers and rested on the village of
Shanderovka; now it needed the rescuers, III Panzerkorps, to finish their drive
and relieve the encircled formations. Shanderovka was heavily defended by the
Soviets; had been captured by 72nd Infantry troops, was retaken by the Soviet
27th Army and recaptured by the Germania regiment of Wiking.
The northward thrust towards the
pocket by III Panzerkorps had been halted by Red Army determination, the
landscape and fuel shortages. After several failed attempts by German armored
formations to seize and hold Hill 239 and advance on Shanderovka, Soviet
counter attacks by 5th Guards Tank Army forced III Panzerkorps into costly
defensive fighting. 8th Army radioed Stemmermann:
Capacity for action by III Panzerkorps limited
by weather and supply situation. Gruppe Stemmermann must perform breakthrough
as far as the line Zhurzintsy-Hill 239 by its own effort. There link up with
III Panzerkorps.
The message did not specify that
Zhurzintsy and the hill were still firmly in Soviet hands. 8th Army appointed
Lt.Gen. Theobald Lieb to lead the breakout. Only 12 kilometers lay between Group
Stemmermann and III Panzerkorps, but in between were also elements of three
Soviet tank armies. General Stemmermann elected to stay behind with a rearguard
of 6,500 men, the remaining, combined strength of 57th and 88th Infantry
Divisions.[14] The cauldron was now a mere 5 kilometers in diameter, depriving
Stemmermann of room to maneuver. Shanderovka, once seen as a gate to freedom,
now became known as Hell’s Gate. The Red Army poured intense artillery and
rocket fire on the area around the encircled troops, nearly every round finding
a target. Sturmoviks of the Red Air Force bombed and strafed, only infrequently
challenged by Luftwaffe fighters. Various unit diaries described a scene of
gloom, with fires burning, destroyed or abandoned vehicles everywhere and
wounded men and disorganized units on muddy roads. Ukrainian civilians were
caught between the combatants. During the 16th of February 1944, Field Marshal
von Manstein, without waiting for a decision by Hitler, sent a radio message to
Stemmermann to authorize the breakout. It said simply:
With extreme reluctance, Stemmermann
and Lieb decided to leave two thousand non-ambulatory wounded at Shanderovka
attended by doctors and orderlies.The troops then began to assemble at dusk
into three assault columns with 72nd Infantry Division, Division Group 112 and
Wiking leading. “By 2300 the [105th] regiment–two battalions abreast–started
moving ahead, silently and with bayonets fixed. One-half hour later the force
broke through the first and soon thereafter the second [Soviet] defense
line.”All went well for several battalions and regiments who reached the German
lines at Oktyabr by 0410. Major Kästner and his 105th grenadiers reached
friendly lines by cautiously approaching the forward position of Panthers of
III Panzerkorps, bringing their wounded along and their heavy weapons, but
losing the trailing, horse drawn supply column to Soviet artillery. The 105th
entered Lysyanka at 0630. On the opposite front of the cauldron, General
Stemmermann and his rear guard held fast and thus assured the success of the
initial breakout.
At the left flank column, a reconnaissance
patrol returned bearing grim news. The geographic feature Hill 239 was occupied
by Soviet T-34's of the 5th Guards Tank Army. Despite energetic efforts to
capture Hill 239 now from the inside of the cauldron, the high ground remained
in Soviet hands and had to be bypassed. "As more and more units ran up
against the impregnable tank barrier atop the ridge dominated by Hill
239,"the German escape direction was pushed to the south, thus ending for
the bulk of troops at the wrong position of the Gniloy Tikich stream with
disastrous consequences to come. When daylight arrived, the German escape plan
began to unravel. Very few armored vehicles and other heavy equipment could
climb the slippery, thawing hillsides and the weapons had to be destroyed and
abandoned "after the last round of ammunition had been fired."
General Konev, now realizing that the
Germans were escaping, was enraged and then resolved to keep his promise to
Stalin not to let any “Hitlerites” or “Fascists” escape unichtozhenie (total annihilation).
Soviet intelligence, however, at this stage vastly overestimated the armored
strength of III Panzerkorps, and Konev therefore proceeded in force. At this
time the 20th Tank Corps brought its brigade of the new Joseph Stalin-II’s to
the Korsun battlefield. Konev ordered all available armor and artillery to
attack the escaping units, cut them into isolated groups and then destroy them
piecemeal. The two blocking Soviet infantry divisions, 206th Rifle and 5th
Guards Airborne, had been smashed by the German assault forces; without
infantry support Soviet tanks then fired into the escaping formations from a
distance. Sensing that no anti-tank weapons were in the field, T-34s commenced
to wade into unprotected support troops, headquarters units, stragglers and
red-cross identified medical columns with their wounded charges. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
By mid-day, the majority of the now
intermingled divisions had reached the Gniloy Tikich stream, turbulent and
swollen by the melting snow. Despite the fact that 1st Panzer Division had
captured a bridge, and engineers had erected another, the panicking men saw the
river as their only escape from the rampaging T-34s. Since the main body was
away and south of the bridgeheads, the last tanks, trucks and wagons were
driven into the icy water, trees were felled to form make-shift bridges and the
troops floundered across as best as they could, with hundreds of exhausted men
drowning, being swept downstream with horses and military debris. Many others
succumbed to shock or hypothermia. Groups of men were brought across on
lifelines fashioned from belts and harnesses. Others formed rafts of planks and
other debris to tow the wounded to the German side, at all times under Soviet
artillery and T-34 fire. Gen. Lieb, after establishing a semblance of order at
the banks, crossed the Gniloy Tikich swimming alongside his horse.[26] When
Wiking commander Herbert Otto Gille attempted to form a human chain across the
river, alternating between those who could swim and those who could not, scores
of men died when someone’s hand slipped and the chain broke. Several hundred
Soviet prisoners of war, a troupe of Russian women auxiliaries and Ukrainian
civilians who feared reprisals by the Red Army, also crossed the icy waters.
That so many reached the German lines
at Lysyanka was due in great measure to the exertions of III Panzerkorps as it
drove in relief of Group Stemmermann. The cutting edge was provided by Heavy
Armored Regiment Bäke (Schweres Panzer Regiment Bäke), named for its commander
Lt.Col. Dr. Franz Bäke (a dentist in civilian life). The unit was equipped with
Tigers and Panthers and an engineer battalion with specialist bridging skills.
The Red Army encirclement of
Cherkassy-Korsun inflicted serious damage on six German divisions, including
Wiking; these units were nearly decimated and had to be withdrawn, requiring
complete re-equipping after this military disaster. Most escaped troops were
eventually shipped from collection points near Uman to rehabilitation areas and
hospitals in Poland, or were sent on leave to their home towns. The Soviet
forces continued their steamroller drive westward with massive tank armies of
T-34's, Joseph Stalin-II’s, and trucks and Shermans supplied by their American
allies under Lend-Lease.
Controversy exists to this day over
casualties and losses. Soviet historian Vladimir Telpukhovsky claims that the
Red Army inflicted 52,000 casualties on the Germans and took 11,000 prisoners,
other Soviet sources claim 57,000 casualties and 18,000 prisoners - with Soviet
casualty numbers officially unpublished. The high numbers given are attributed
by sources to the erroneous Soviet belief that all German units were at their
full establishment and that most of the German 8th Army was trapped - so that a
second Stalingrad could be presented to the Soviet dictator. German accounts
state that the under 60,000 men originally inside the cauldron had shrunk in
heavy fighting to less than 50,000 by 16 February, that 45,000 took part in the
breakout and that 35,000 got through, with a total of 19,000 dead, captured or
missing. Douglas E. Nash’s Appendix 7 “German Present for Battle Unit Strengths
after the Breakout” in Hell’s Gate lists per unit survivors, with total
survivors of 40,423, including wounded flown out of the pocket and evacuated
from Lysyanka.
General Stemmermann died fighting
among his rear guard. Gen. Lieb survived the war and died in 1981. The
commander of 2nd Ukrainian Front, Gen. Konev, was made a Marshal of the Soviet
Union for his great victory. Gen. Vatutin was shot by Ukrainian Nationalist UPA
insurgents on 28 February 1944 and died on 15 April 1944.
“Cherkassy was no military victory –
but was not our salvation from certain destruction a kind of victory?” Wiking
Division Veterans Association, 1963.
The League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania filed a federal
lawsuit Monday alleging that former Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ralph J. Cappy
negotiated a ruling in favor of legalized gambling in the state in exchange for
legislative approval for a judicial pay raise.
The suit in U.S. Middle District Court
cites unnamed legislators as providing information that former Chief Justice
Cappy entered into "secret negotiations" with "various
legislative leaders in the Pennsylvania General Assembly."
The league, which was a plaintiff in a
suit opposing the law that legalized slots gambling in the state, has asked the
federal court to rule that its Constitutional rights were violated and to
"grant such other and further relief to plaintiff as shall appear just and
proper."
Chief Justice Cappy did not
immediately return messages left at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, the law
firm he joined after leaving the court in January. http://louis1j1sheehan.us/ He served on the
Supreme Court for 17 years, becoming chief justice in 2003.
The court upheld the state law legalizing
slots gambling on June 22, 2005, about two weeks before the General Assembly
passed a bill raising legislative and statewide judicial salaries. The General
Assembly, faced with a public outcry, later rescinded the raises. But the
Supreme Court upheld the judicial raises in 2006. Chief Justice Cappy abstained
from the 2006 case because he had lobbied in favor of an increase in pay for
judges.
In 1964 NBC's “Today” show suddenly
needed a new girl. The programme always had a glamorous “girl” to handle the
weather and lighter stories, but the previous one was addicted to prescription
drugs and the one before her had a drink problem. “Why not Barbara?” asked Hugh
Downs, the show's host, referring to Barbara Walters, the programme's lone
female writer. She wasn't beautiful or well known, but she knew the ropes and
would “work cheap”.
“Well, like the ingénue in a corny
movie, there I was: the patient and long overlooked understudy,” writes Ms
Walters in her candid new memoir, “Audition”. Having toiled in the shadows for
years, writing scripts and making coffee, she finally got her big on-air break.
Don Hewitt, a TV producer, had assured her she would never make it because she
had the wrong looks and couldn't pronounce her “r”s properly. Ms Walters duly
avoided sentences with a lot of “r”s in them.
NBC's 13-week contract turned into 13
years at “Today” and nearly half a century in front of the camera, breaking
gender barriers and securing interviews when other journalists were turned
down. Her genial, empathetic style won fans and friends. “Barbara, are you
hungry?” Fidel Castro asked after a marathon interview in Cuba before whipping
up a sandwich.
Anwar Sadat's grieving widow admitted,
“you were the only one I was ever jealous of because Anwar liked you so much.”
Ms Walters earned a reputation for finding something soft in her subjects.
“Asking the right questions has always been less important than listening to
the answers,” she explains.
She helped support her family (her
father was an unlucky nightclub impresario), and she remains haunted by her
impatience with her disabled sister. Her insecurities—some of them
financial—pushed her to work harder. “Make no mistake: television is a
demanding business...it is hell on your social and romantic life,” she writes. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
Indeed, Ms Walters's entertaining
tome, which picks up considerably after the first 75 pages, describes three
failed marriages, many complicated love affairs (including with Alan Greenspan
and Edward W. Brooke, a senator) and a tough stretch with her adopted daughter.
But the author seems reconciled with her many memories, and proud of her
stories. It is for good reason that she now owns a ring inscribed with the
words, “I did that already”.
Mortgage craters, ropy disclosure,
bloated costs, a newish boss desperately trying to stop the haemorrhaging amid
calls for radical surgery, even a break-up. Citigroup? Aptly though this
describes America's biggest bank, it could just as easily apply to its biggest
insurer, American International Group (AIG).
AIG's place in the credit crunch's
hall of shame is now assured thanks to its record $7.8 billion loss in the
latest quarter, bringing the red ink over the past six months to $13 billion. http://louis1j1sheehan.us/ The main culprit is
its book of credit-default swaps, much of it tied to subprime mortgages, which
has been written down by $20 billion. A chastened AIG has joined the rush for
fresh capital.
Disgruntled shareholders have a
flag-waver in Hank Greenberg, who ran AIG imperiously for 37 years before being
booted out in 2005 amid an accounting probe. Still the biggest individual
shareholder, the 83-year-old lashed out at his former fief this week, averring
that it had suffered a “complete loss of credibility”.
There is restiveness within, too.
Executives at International Lease Finance Corporation, the world's biggest
buyer of commercial aircraft and part of AIG since 1990, are reportedly
agitating for a spin-off. They worry that AIG's woes will drag down ILFC: its
credit rating was cut along with its parent's following the latest loss.
Such huffing is a trifle disingenuous.
ILFC has benefited from being under AIG's wing, for instance amid the turmoil
for aviation after September 11th 2001. And most of the dodgy default swaps
were written on Mr Greenberg's watch—indeed, AIG stopped selling them at the
end of 2005, a few months after he had been replaced by Martin Sullivan, a
former protégé.
But AIG has played its hand badly. It
insisted until this year that it had $15 billion-20 billion of excess capital
and that actual (as opposed to mark-to-market) losses were unlikely. It has
since retreated from that position and modified its internal models (ie, made
them less optimistic). But uncertainty still abounds. AIG estimates its
ultimate derivatives losses will be up to $2.4 billion. Unnervingly, an
independent assessor hired by AIG puts the potential cost as high as $11
billion. AIG thinks much of the current damage will be reversed, thanks to the
vagaries of fair-value accounting. But why trust its judgment rather than the
market's? And any such gains won't come at least until 2009, says Thomas
Cholnoky of Goldman Sachs.
Softening insurance markets may
compound AIG's woes. With pricing power ebbing and catastrophe pay-outs set to
rise after an unusually calm couple of years, America's property and casualty
industry—dominated by AIG and Berkshire Hathaway—seems to be entering another
of its periodic downturns (see chart). Premium rates in casualty will fall by
10-15% this year, predicts Lockton, a broker.
With the bull run in stocks over, life
insurance and annuities could suffer, too. And insurers face lower returns on
investments in alternative assets, such as hedge funds and private equity.
“Yellow lights are blinking all over the industry,” says Donald Light of
Celent, a consultancy. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
All of which means AIG faces a double
whammy of credit-market missteps and a deteriorating core business. Time is not
on the affable Mr Sullivan's side. At the annual meeting this week, the
directors reiterated their support for him, though some have privately begun to
express doubts. Who said insurance was dull?
EVERY ecosystem has a cast of
characters playing similar roles. The bison, moose and elk of North America do
much the same thing as antelope and wildebeest do on the African savannah.
Jackals and hyenas are the scavengers of the land whereas vultures are the
undisputed scavengers of the air. The same is even true of carnivores.
Crocodiles, cheetahs, great white sharks and peregrine falcons all come at
their prey with great speed, using a combination of momentum and strength to
stun and kill. Now research has put up a surprising candidate to join this
high-speed predatory club: the short-finned pilot whale.
Whales, like all mammals, have lungs
and must rise to the surface once in a while to breathe. The problem for many
whale species is that their sources of food are usually at depth, forcing them
to hold their breath as they descend to feed. Researchers have long assumed
that deep-diving whales conserve their oxygen supply by moving slowly, not more
than 2 metres per second, during their long descents. But that is not the way
of the short-finned pilot whale.
Natacha Aguilar of La Laguna
University on the Spanish Canary Islands and her colleagues fitted special
suction-cupped electronic tags to 23 short-finned pilot whales near Tenerife.
The tags were designed by Mark Johnson of the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution to record whale sounds while monitoring both their depth and
position. The aim of the study, which will appear in a forthcoming edition of
Animal Ecology, was to understand the foraging strategies that the whales used
in deep-water.
The tags revealed that the maximum
depth and time of the whales' dives was 1,018 metres and 21 minutes, which was
in line with expectations. However, during most dives below 540 metres during
the day, the whales broke into a sprint of up to 9 metres per second, which in
deep water is the cetacean equivalent of a world record. http://louis1j1sheehan.us/
During these sprints the tags also
picked up sonar buzzes and clicks from the whales which are known to be associated
with the capture of prey. So the whales were chasing something at high speed,
like a cheetah would on land. The researchers are not sure what is being
hunted, but they suspect that it is large and worth the exertion in terms of
the number of calories it could provide. One possibility is that the prey are
giant squid: a chase of Titanic proportions.
In this remote corner of the former
Soviet Union, life has shrunk to the size of the basics: tomatoes; corn;
apricot trees; baby goats.
That is what grows in the garden of
Toktokan Tileberdaeva, a mother of six who has lived almost 40 years in this
small village in Kyrgyzstan, a claw-shaped country covered in mountains that
once formed part of the Soviet Union’s long border with China.
Like a settler on the frontier, she
lives off the land, hauling water from a turquoise-colored river and washing
her clothes in the same bucket she washes her grandchildren. Her pension, $33 a
month, is enough to buy one giant sack of flour — bread for the month.
Life was not always like this. Before
Communism fell and Kyrgyzstan became its own country, Ms. Tileberdaeva had a
job in a toothbrush factory. Her husband, now deceased, worked building giant
hydroelectric plants, and a bus came to take their children to school.
But after 1991 the factory closed, all
public services stopped and an economic collapse tore painful holes in the
lives of families here, turning them into immigrants in their own country.
Their skills were no longer needed. Their past was a mistake. Louis J. Sheehan
Esquire
“I really miss the Soviet Union,” she
said, standing in a small blue trailer where she and her children sleep on soft
rugs. “We lived well. I worked. I earned a salary.”
The Soviet Union collapsed almost 17
years ago, but for many on the outer edges of the empire it feels like
yesterday. They enjoy reminiscing about the time when they were young and their
factories were working full steam. Now the toothbrush factory stands empty with
blank windows, a painful reminder of their lost past.
Change is coming. Engineers from
China, Turkey and Iran, though not from Russia, have rebuilt the long ribbon of
road that cuts through the mountains to connect the south of the country to the
north. Ms. Tileberdaeva’s younger children are taught in Kyrgyz, not Russian.
Goods and trade have begun to flow from China in the east, instead of from
Russia in the west.
But none of that is any consolation to
Ms. Tileberdaeva, who spends every waking hour scratching a living out of her
land.
Sometimes her oldest daughter, a
cafeteria worker in Bishkek, the country’s capital, sends her money. The rest
comes from her goats and her garden.
Her life is solitary. She is content
with the company of her children and grandchildren, and says she does not seek other
adults for support or friendship.
Most people in this small town are
drunks, she said. Chinese merchants, sullenly despised for their wealth and
success, provide fleeting entertainment: Locals throw rocks at them when they
drive by.
The past is not always something she
wants to remember. Her husband stole her when she was 19, as she walked home
from class at a technical college, a local custom that she feels is heartlessly
unfair. She cried, kicking and screaming, as they reached his home. She tried —
and failed — three times to escape.
“I wanted to die,” she said looking at
the remains of the first house she was brought to, also on the property, but
now a grassy playground with walls but no roof.
Family life improved, but only a
little. Her husband was a drinker, and was mean when drunk, sometimes throwing
her and the children out of the house in a rage. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
He died in 2003 (the Soviet military
sent him to clean up Chernobyl, and he was never quite the same when he
returned), but she grimaced when asked if she had married again.
“If I had had a second one, he would
have been the same,” she said.
Her current concern is a roof, not a
man. On a snowy night in December, a pan on her small wood stove caught fire
during dinner, setting the roof on fire. She fled through a window with the
children, wading out into the snow in pajamas and running for help.
The winter was unusually snowy, but
there was no money for a roof, so she and her family crammed into a donated
trailer, a single dark room coated in quilts.
Things could be worse. Kyrgyzstan is
relatively liberal compared with its authoritarian neighbors, Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan. A clean river flows through her backyard, and the soil is rich.
Her goats recently had a litter. Their soft babies wobbled in spring grass.
She asked about America, as water for
laundry heated on a hotplate. Did everyone live in a high-rise building? Was
everyone rich? She watched as her small grandson, wearing a cast-off New York
Yankees hat, teetered in, holding a tiny yellow flower.
“Our garden is free,” she said
smiling. “The earth is good. That’s how I live.”
Then she invited visitors to tear
pieces from a round, coarse loaf of bread. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
Volunteers with the Capital Area Chris
tian Church in Hamp den Twp. have been busy this week constructing the
Adventure Zone Playground, the first playground of its kind on the West Shore
and only the second in the Harrisburg area.
Don Hamilton, senior pastor at the
church on Lamb's Gap Road, said volunteers have worked until after sundown each
day. Hamilton said about 1,200 volunteers have participated.
"You don't have to be skilled.
Anyone can work on this playground," Hamilton said of the community
project.
Building stops Sunday, Hamilton said.
"This has been a very, very
exciting week for us," Hamilton said.
"We've been planning this
playground for a little over a year now, and it's coming to fruition."
Hamilton said the completed Adventure
Zone Playground will be part of Adventure Park, a fully accessible 53-acre recreation
area for children of all ages and abilities.
When complete, Adventure Park will
include public rest rooms, parking and a pavilion for picnics.
"So any kid can play on this
playground, and it's just going to be a beautiful, beautiful playground,"
Hamilton said.
Local nonprofits, organizations and
people have provided $370,000, but Hamilton said $120,000 is still needed for
special rubber flooring to make the playground entirely accessible.
The only other local all-accessible
park is Possibility Place in Lower Paxton Twp., in the new George Park at Nyes
Road and Heatherfield Way.
U.S. spent $197,000 to sell plan
GSA faced community resistance to
sites
The highly publicized releases of
"UFO files" from France and Britain provide more puzzling tales about
anomalous aerial objects over the years. But the stories behind some of the
most spectacular sightings in UFO history will come to light only when the Russian
Ministry of Defense opens up its files. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
Consider one of the most sensational
UFO stories in Soviet history — a story that has been enshrined in world
"ufology" as a classic that cannot be explained in any prosaic terms.
The tale of the Minsk UFO sighting can
teach a lesson about the vigor of unidentified flying objects as a cultural
phenomenon.
A passenger jet is flying north on
Sept. 7, 1984, near Minsk, in present-day Belarus. Suddenly, at 4:10 a.m., the
flight crew notices a glowing object out their forward right window. In the 10
minutes that follow, the object changes shape, zooms in on the aircraft, plays
searchlights on the ground beneath it, and envelops the airliner in a
mysterious ray of light that fatally injures one of the pilots. Other aircraft
in the area, alerted by air traffic control operators who are watching the UFO
on radar, also see it.
The incident figures prominently in
"UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union," a 1992 book by Jacques Vallee,
who was the real-life inspiration for the fictional ufologist in the movie
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
“No natural explanation [is] possible,
given the evidence,” Vallee wrote.
A leading Russian UFO expert, Vladimir
Azhazha, reported that as a result of the encounter the co-pilot “had a serious
mental derangement — the encephalogram of his brain was not of an ‘earthly’
character, as he lost memory for long periods of time.”
This combination of perceptions from
multiple witnesses and sensors, together with the serious physiological
effects, makes for a dramatic event that on the face of it defies any earthly
explanation. It was just as amazing that the official Soviet news media, long
averse to discussing UFO subjects, disclosed the story in the first place. So
it was no mystery that over the years that followed, the story was never
actually checked out. It was only retold again and again. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/
However much we are comfortable in
entrusting our lives to airline pilots, a blind trust in their abilities as
trained observers of aerial phenomena is sometimes a stretch. For a number of
excellent and honorable reasons, pilots have often been known to overinterpret
unusual visual phenomena, particularly when it comes to underestimating the
distance from what look like other aircraft.
Think of it this way: You want the
person at the front of the plane to be hair-trigger alert for visual cues to
potential collisions, so avoidance maneuvers can be performed in time. The
worst-case interpretation of perceptions is actually a plus.
So it’s no surprise that pilots have
sent their planes into a dive to duck under a fireball meteor that was really
50 miles away, or have dodged a flaming falling satellite passing 60 miles
overhead. Even celestial objects are misperceived by pilots more frequently
than by any other category of witness, UFO investigator J. Allen Hynek concluded
30 years ago. Since the outcome of a false-negative assessment (that is, being
closer than assumed) could be death, and the cost of a false positive (being
much farther away) is mere embarrassment, the bias of these reactions makes
perfect sense.
Was there anything else in the sky
that morning that the Soviet pilots might have seen? This wasn’t an easy
question, since the Moscow press reports neglected to give the exact date of
the event, but I could figure it out by checking Aeroflot airline schedules.
It turned out that early risers in
Sweden and Finland had also seen an astonishing apparition in the sky that
morning. According to reports collected by Claus Svahn of UFO-Sweden, people
called in accounts of seeing "a very strong globe of light," sometimes
"with a skirt under it." The light's glow was reflected off the
ground and lasted for several minutes. In Finland, a UFO research club's annual
report later cataloged 15 similar sightings from that country.
The immediate disconnect that I found
was that the Scandinavian witnesses were not looking southeast, toward Minsk
and the nearby airliner with its terrified crew. Nor were they looking
eastward, toward the top-secret Russian space base at Plesetsk, where launchings
sparked UFO reports starting in the mid-1960s. They were looking to the
northeast, across Karelia and perhaps farther. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
The direction of the apparition being
seen simultaneously near Minsk provided another "look angle." If the
vectors of the eyewitnesses are plotted on a map, they tend to converge out
over the Barents Sea, far from land. This made the triggering mechanism for the
sightings — assuming they were all of the same phenomenon — even more
extraordinary.
Whatever the stimulus behind the 1984
Minsk airliner story turned out to be, I already knew that many famous Soviet
UFO reports were connected with secret military aerospace activities that were misperceived
by ordinary citizens. I’ve posted several decades of such research results on
my Web site.
In 1967, waves of UFO reports from
southern Russia and a temporary period of official permission for public
discussion created a "perfect storm" of Soviet UFO enthusiasm. But it
was short-lived — the topic was soon forbidden again, possibly because the
government realized that what was being seen and publicized was actually a
series of top-secret space-to-ground nuclear warhead tests, a weapon Moscow had
just signed an international space treaty to outlaw.
Once the Plesetsk Cosmodrome (south of
Arkhangelsk) began launching satellites in 1966, skywatchers throughout the
northwestern Soviet Union began seeing vast glowing clouds and lights moving
through the skies. These were officially non-existent rocket launchings.
"Not ours!” the officials seemed to be saying. "Must be
Martians."
Other space events that sparked UFO
reports included orbital rocket firings timed to occur while in direct radio
contact with the main Soviet tracking site in the Crimea. Such firings and the
subsequent expanding clouds of jettisoned surplus fuel weren't confined to
Soviet airspace. One particular category of Soviet communications satellites
performed the maneuver over the Andes Mountains, subjecting the southern tip of
South America to UFO panics every year or two for decades.
As the Soviet Union lurched toward
collapse in the 1980s, its rigid control over the press decayed. This allowed
local newspapers, especially in the area of the Plesetsk space base, to begin
publishing eyewitness accounts of correctly identified rocket launchings. The
newspapers sometimes printed detailed drawings of the shifting shapes of the
light show caused by the sequence of rocket stage firings and equipment
ejections.
Still, I wasn't willing to wave off
the elaborate extra dimensions of the Minsk UFO case as mere misperception and
exaggerated coincidences. Even though none of the most exciting stories, such
as one pilot's death half a year later from cancer, could ever be traced to any
original firsthand sources, they made for a compelling narrative. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
Fortunately, the Soviet collapse
provided the opening for the collapse of the UFO story. The May-June 1991 issue
of the magazine Science in the USSR contained an article that reprised the
story with one stunning addendum from the co-pilot’s flight log. He had
sketched the apparition, minute by minute, as it changed shape out his side of
the cockpit window, and 14 of the drawings were published for the first (and as
far as I can tell, only) time.
The graphic sequence of bright light,
rays, expanding halos, misty cloudiness, tadpole tail and sudden linear
streamers may have looked bizarre to the magazine’s readers. But they looked
very familiar to me.
I dug out the clippings from
Arkhangelsk newspapers that had been mailed to me by an associate there. I
looked up the other articles from recent Moscow science magazines that showed
how beautiful these rocket launches looked. I also found the set of sketches
made by a witness in Sweden of what was immediately recognized as a rocket
launch. I laid the separate sketches out on a table.
They all clearly showed the same
sequence of shape-shifting visions, as viewed from different angles to the rear
of the object’s flight. The more recent accounts were of nighttime missile
launches — and the impression was overwhelming that the Minsk UFO, as drawn in
real time by one of the primary witnesses, looked and changed just like them.
Without the detailed minute-by-minute
drawings, any claim for solving the case would have been tentative, and
circumstantial at best. Even now, the case isn't quite closed. Until the Russians
release the records for the test launch of a submarine-based missile — as we
now know often happened from that region of the ocean, but without official
acknowledgement — the answer to the mystery will remain technically unproven.
But the answer is strong enough to
remind us of wider principles of investigating — and evaluating — similar
stories from around the world: There are more potential prosaic stimuli out
there than we usually expect. Precise times and locations and viewing directions
are critical to an investigation. The temptation to fall into excitable
overinterpretation is almost irresistible. Myriads of weird but meaningless
coincidences can be combined to embellish a good story. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com/
The most important factors for cutting
through the misperceptions would be having the good fortune to come across
enough original evidence, and having enough time to make sense of that evidence.
That’s one of the biggest lessons to be learned from the Minsk UFO case: As
long as those factors are in short supply, it’s no mystery why there are so
many amazing UFO stories — and so many enthusiasts willing to endorse them.
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