US Delays Rocket Launch/Danger of Hitting Canadian Oil Rigs

[Gloria]

Full links and excerpts up at http://www.zianet.com/insightanalytical
World Media Watch
Tomorrow at Buzzflash.com


WORLD MEDIA WATCH FOR APRIL 8, 2005



1//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong--The Roving Eye: WHAT’S BEHIND THE NEW IRAQ (. … It's emerging that the real meaty matters in Iraq - federalism, who gets oil-rich Kirkuk, and, crucially, what happens to the oil industry overall - will be settled by the constituent assembly. But two developments are ominous. The attribution of ministries for the "new" government once again will be sectarian. And every faction will remain armed to their teeth. The Kurds keep their independent peshmerga militia, and financed by Baghdad. The SCIRI keeps its Badr Brigades. The Da'wa Party also keeps its own militia. None of these will answer to Baghdad - which mobilizes its own, US-trained Iraqi security forces. Cynically, one might add that outside the political process, the Sunni resistance will also keep its thousands of fighters. . … . The big question now is how the Shi'ites and Kurds will deal with marginalized Sunni Arabs - paying close attention to their political grievances or clobbering them with peshmergas, Badr Brigades and Iraqi security forces. It's politics or civil war.)



2//Inter Press Service News Agency, Italy--NEW IRAQI GOV’T TO CONFRONT FUTURE WITH U.S. MILITARY (One of the first orders of business for the new Iraqi government under Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani and Shi'ite Islamist Ibrahim Jaafari will be to strike a deal with the United States military over the terms and conditions of the 150,000-troop-strong U.S. military presence.
A United Nations Security Council resolution authorising the occupation ends in December. After that, the occupation will be technically illegal. Chris Toensing of the Washington-based Middle East Research and Information Project says the Shi'ite United Iraqi Alliance, which won the most votes in January's election, has already abandoned its election promise to demand a timeline for U.S. withdrawal. . … . Toensing expects the U.S. military to become tightly linked to both the armed wings of Shi'ite religious parties and Kurdish peshmerga under the new government, since both support large-scale crackdowns on the largely Sunni insurgency, taking more prisoners and secretly locking them up in prisons like Abu Ghraib with minimal oversight. . … . Ken Livingstone is the CEO of the consulting company Global Options Inc and a leading neo-conservative thinker. . … . Livingstone says he doesn't trust the Shi'ite religious leaders who placed first in January's election in Iraq. He likened their election to Adolph Hitler's in Germany, telling IPS sometimes people come to power through legitimate elections who later need to be ”dealt with.”)



3//The Moscow Times, Russia--A STRING OF AUCTIONS GET CANCELED (A string of auctions for oil and gas development licenses have been canceled to prevent foreign companies from bidding, an official in the Natural Resources Ministry said. The cancellations appear to constitute a de facto widening of the ban on bids by non-Russian-controlled companies, contradicting recent assurances from Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev and other ministers. The latest cases also highlight uncertainties faced by foreign natural resource companies as the State Duma prepares to debate a long-anticipated bill on restricting foreigners' access to subsoil resources. . … . Auctions for the Trebs and Titov oil fields in the Barents Sea, originally scheduled for March 30, did not take place "because there were bids from TNK-BP," a 50-50 Russian-British venture, Ledovskikh said. The three fields could yield up to 200 million tons of oil, according to the Natural Resources Ministry's web site.)



4//Inter Press Service News Agency, Italy--U.S. PURSUES DISRUPTIVE ANTI-ABORTION AGENDA (As expected, the United States has once again raised the politically divisive issue of abortion at a crucial U.N. meeting here, refusing to reaffirm the landmark Programme of Action unanimously adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. According to an amendment introduced by the United States, Washington has indicated its willingness to support the ICPD programme of action only ”with the understanding that nothing therein creates a right to abortion.” ”As everyone knows, the Cairo conference made it clear that abortion was a national matter, not an international matter,” a Third World delegate told IPS. ”The
5//The Toronto Star, Canada--U.S. DELAYS ROCKET AMID CONCERN OVER NFLD. OIL RIGS(The U.S. Defence Department's plans to launch a rocket over the North Atlantic were postponed indefinitely today amid concerns in Newfoundland that falling debris could hit offshore oil platforms. Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams said he was stunned when he learned spent booster rockets from a Titan IV rocket, which was to be launched early Monday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., were expected to fall within 25 kilometres of the Hibernia platform. . … . Exxon-Mobil Corp. informed federal officials that the boosters, which are typically jettisoned from the main rocket, posed a threat to its operations. As a result, federal Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan called U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney. . … . "I don't think the Americans were aware, or had really thought it through, as to how close this was to the Hibernia platform," Williams said following two urgent phone conversations with McLellan and a call to Frank McKenna, Canada's ambassador to the United States. "Why would they drop a piece of space debris out of the sky and take a chance that it happens to be 15 miles in the right spot? If it's off, it could obviously have very serious consequences.")

[applegrove]

1. Oh I like Frank McKenna. I hope he hates Kool-Aid. Such a plain

speaker.