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(AP, 4/27/2008)
STRIKE IN SCOTLAND CLOSES MAJOR NORTH SEA OIL PIPELINE.
Hundreds of workers at Scotland’s only oil refinery on sunday began a 48-hour strike that has forced BP PLC to shut a pipeline system that delivers almost a third of Britain’s North Sea oil.
BP said it had completed the closure of the Forties Pipeline System by 6 a.m., when 1,200 workers at the Granger refinery in central Scotland walked off the job. The pipeline brings in 700,000 barrels of oil a day from the North Sea to BP’s Kinneil plant, which is powered from the Grangemouth site.
Energy industry group Oil & Gas U.K. said the strike, over pension issues, could cost $100 million a day in lost production.
The main effect of the walkout was likely to be felt by the British Treasury – which relies heavily on taxes from oil production — and at gas stations in Scotland, some of which limited purchases in anticipation of the strike.
The government urged motorists not to hoard fuel, saying there would be enough to go around. It wants to avoid a repeat of scenes in 2000 when motorists were forced to line up at gas stations as truckers angry at heavily taxed fuel brought Britain to a standstill by blockading refineries.
“There is plenty of petrol and diesel in Scotland to meet demand during this period of time,” the government’s business secretary, John Hutton, told the British Broadcasting Corp. “But of course there is going to be a challenge if people change the way that they consume fuel.”
Gas stations in and around Edinburgh were limiting purchases to 20 pounds — equivalent to $40 — per visit Saturday, and lines of cars formed bside some pumps. A number of stations reported they had run out of gas and diesel.
Some Scottish gas stations were charging 1.25 pounds ($2.47) Saturday for a liter of unleaded, up from about 1.08 pounds ($2.14) on Monday.
The Scottish government said 72,000 tons of extra fuel was being imported from Europe to help keep the country going.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the strike was unnecessary and called for new negotiations between Grangemouth’s owner, the chemical company Ineos, and the workers’ union, Unite. Talks to avert a strike broke down earlier this week.
The refinery strike is one of a series of labor disputes to hit Britain as the global economy weakens.
A nationwide teachers’ strike over pay issues shut down about a third of schools across Britain on Thursday as the government had to clamp down on public sector wage increases due to inflation fears.
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(Reuters, 4/24/08)
HOPES OF FINDING BALLOONING BRAZILIAN PRIEST FADE.
Rescue workers were losing hope on Thursday of finding a priest who disappeared off the southern coast of Brazil after drifting out to sea four days ago suspended from hundreds of helium-filled party balloons.
Father Adelir Antonio de Carli went missing on Sunday night after he called friends from his mobile phone to say he his contraption made of some thousand balloons would soon crash into the Atlantic Ocean.
The chaplain staged the stunt to help raise money for a chapel for truckers in his highway parish.
Brazil’s air force suspended its search for de Carli on Thursday, a spokesman said. The navy continued to patrol waters off the coast of Satan Catarina state but was considering halting operations.
“The chances (of survival) are increasingly slim and we are considering when to end the search efford,” Lieutenant Jose Cavalcante of the navy’s southern search unit in Rio Grande do Sul state told Reuters.
“It’s difficult to talk about survival. There have been cases of shipwrecked people having lived for four or five days at sea, ” Cavalcante said.
De Carli had left from the southern port of Paranagua and wanted to fly 20 hours due west but winds unexpectedly carried him out to sea in the opposite direction…
Firefighters continued to search beaches and islands off the coast of Santa Catarina state, where they thought the Roman Catholic priest may have washed up…
Newspapers and television networks have shown images of bits of balloons floating at sea. Some were found as far south as the city of Florianopolis, roughly 150 km (121 miles) south of de Carli’s last phone contact, firefighters said…
Video footage showed a confident de Carli taking off into cloudy skies on Sunday.
Critics said the adventurous clergyman was reckless in underestimating the regions’s complex wind petterns.
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(AP, 4/24/08)
SPIDER PLAGUE CLOSES AUSTRALIAN HOSPITAL.
SYDNEY, Australia – A tiny Australian hospital is closing temporarily because of a plague of poisonous spiders.
The Baralaba Multi Purpose Health Service will close for 24 hours starting Thursday morning so officials can fumigate the building to get rid of redback spiders that have been found in large numbers in the main part of the hospital.
Three or four patients will need to be moved to another hospital while the building is closed, according to a statement from Queensland state health officials.
Redback spiders, common throughout most of the country, have a painful bite and a toxic venom, although an anti-venom is available.
The statement said warm weather had caused more redback spider eggs to hatch.
“We believe the best way to deal with them, and the safest option for staff and patients is to have the whole building fumigated so both the spiders and their eggs are killed,” the rural director of nursing said in the the statement Wednesday…
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(Reuters, 4/22/08)
AUSTRALIA APOLOGY TO ABORIGINES PUT TO SONG.
CANBERRA – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to Aborigines for past injustices has been turned into a song, with rights activists on Monday saying the apology was a defining national moment.
“Some moments in a nation’s history are so significant, so uplifting and so unifying they become the inspiration for artists, thinkers and dreamers,” said Brett Solomon, for the political activist group GetUP.
“They turn those moments into the food which nourishes the nation’s soul,” Solomon said.
Rudd’s words feature at the start of the song, which adapts a hit ballad “From Little seeds Big Things Grow” by singer Paul Kelly, which told of an eight-year strike by Aboriginal stockmen that led to formal recognition of indigenous land rights…
The singers include some of Australia’s biggest music stars including Kelly, Missy, and Hip-Hop artist Tim Levinson, known in Australia as “Urthboy.”
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(Reuters, 4/22/08)
LYNCHINGS IN CONGO AS PENIS THEFT PANIC HITS CAPITAL.
KINSHASA – Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings were triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.
Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advise4d to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.
Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their penises shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with no promise of a cure.
“You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings….You see them covered in marks after being beaten,” Kinshsa police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday…
I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said. “But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you they’ve become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it,’ ” he said…
