A subsidiary of the Venezuelan national oil company will ship 12 million gallons of discounted home-heating oil to local charities and 45,000 low-income families in Massachusetts next month under a deal arranged by US Representative William D. Delahunt, a local nonprofit energy corporation, and Venezuela’s president, White House critic Hugo Chávez.

The approximately $9 million deal will bring nine million gallons of oil to families and three million gallons to institutions that serve the poor, such as homeless shelters, said officials from Citizens Energy Corp., which is signing the contract. Families would pay about $276 for a 200-gallon shipment, a savings of about $184 and enough to last about three weeks.

The contract is to be signed Tuesday by officials from Citizens Energy, based in Boston, and CITGO, a Houston-based subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela SA. The contract was arranged after months of talks between Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat active in Latin American affairs, and Chávez, a leftist former paratrooper and fierce critic of the Bush administration.

”We recognized that we had an opportunity,” Delahunt’s spokesman, Steve Schwadron, said yesterday.

Chávez showed ”an inclination to do a humanitarian distribution” of oil, and poor families in Massachusetts had a ”desperate need” for relief from high home-heating prices, Schwadron said. He characterized the deal as one between ”a US company and two nonprofits to help them do more of what they already do, with terms that mean the price is good.”

…’Fuel assistance is woefully underfunded, so this is a major shot in the arm for people who otherwise wouldn’t get through the winter,” Chretien said. He said he hoped the deal would present ”a friendly challenge” to US oil companies — which recently reported record quarterly profits — to use their windfall to help poor families survive the winter.
boston.com

In 1995, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope produced “The Pillars of Creation,” an image of stars emerging from biblical-looking clouds of dust that has become an icon of the space age.

Now astronomers operating NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have made their own version. The new image, appropriately called “Mountains of Creation,” shows star-forming pillars in a region known as W5 in the constellation Cassiopeia. These pillars, at heights up to 40 light-years, are 10 times as large as those in the famous Hubble image.

The astronomers, led by Lori E. Allen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, say the towering mountains of the new image probably represent the densest, most fecund remnants of a larger, cloud. It is being eroded by radiation and winds of particles from a ferociously bright star just out of the top of the picture.

Nestled within the dusty pillars are hundreds of embryonic stars. But Spitzer’s detectors are designed to see infrared, or “heat,” radiation right through the dust, allowing astronomers to study the cloaked stars, which Dr. Allen described as “offspring” of the big star.

“The Sun could have formed in such a cluster, since many stars form in clusters,” Dr. Allen said in an e-mail message, explaining that pressure created by the star could compress gas in the cloud, bringing about the formation of new stars.
nytimes.com

stunning…

His most recent film, featuring flayings and floggings and with dialogue in Aramaic and Latin, was a worldwide hit. Now Mel Gibson has announced his next project will be set against the bloodthirsty backdrop of the Mayan empire – this time in an ancient dialect called Yucatec.
guardian.co.uk

blood rites is blood rites, baby

Spain is suffering from collective amnesia about the rule of fascist dictator General Francisco Franco, according to the makers of a controversial documentary released last week.

The film, Between The Dictator and Me, will fuel demands that something be done to compensate Franco’s victims and recognise the full horrors of the 40-year regime. Almost all those who were in Spain during the regime who were interviewed in the films retreated into silence or denial. ‘They are things that should not really be spoken about,’ said one.

Yesterday, left and right-wing protesters marched through Madrid on the eve of the 30th anniversary of Franco’s death, showing old rivalries from Spain’s civil war are still deeply felt.

As a toddler, film-maker Sandra Ruesga, was taken by her parents to visit the tomb of the man whose bloody and vengeful rule still haunts Spain.

But nobody had ever spoken to her about life under the man whose regime dominated the lives of her parents and her grandparents. Like most of her generation, she had never really been taught about him. ‘I inherited a falsified history imposed by silences,’ says Ruesga, whose generation is now questioning the silence that has surrounded the man they call El Caudillo since his death from natural causes 30 years ago.
guardian.co.uk

DENVER, Nov. 19 – Private companies and individuals would be able to buy large tracts of federal land, from sagebrush basins to high-peak hiking trails around the West, under the terms of the spending bill passed Friday by a two-vote margin in the House of Representatives.

On the surface, the bill reads like the mundane nip and tuck of federal mining law its authors say it is. But lawyers who have parsed its language say the real beneficiaries could be real estate developers, whose business has become a more potent economic engine in the West than mining.

Under the existing law, a mining claim is the vehicle that allows for the extraction of so-called hard-rock metals like gold or silver.

Under the House bill passed Friday, for the first time in the history of the 133-year-old mining law individuals or companies can file and expand claims even if the land at the heart of a claim has already been stripped of its minerals or could never support a profitable mine. The measure would also lift an 11-year moratorium on the passing of claims into full ownership.

The provisions have struck fear through the West, from the resort areas of the Rockies like Aspen and Vail here in Colorado, to Park City in Utah, which are all laced with old mining claims. Critics say it could open the door for developers to use the claims to assemble large land parcels for projects like houses, hotels, ski resorts, spas or retirement communities.

And some experts on public land use say it is possible that energy companies could use the provision to buy land in the energy-rich fields of Wyoming and Montana on the pretext of mining, but then drill for oil and gas.
nytimes.com

…Ghat was destroyed when a lake, high in the Himalayas, burst its banks. Swollen with glacier meltwaters, its walls of rock and ice had suddenly disintegrated. Several million cubic metres of water crashed down the mountain.

When Ghat was destroyed, in 1985, such incidents were rare – but not any more. Last week, scientists revealed that there has been a tenfold jump in such catastrophes in the past two decades, the result of global warming. Himalayan glacier lakes are filling up with more and more melted ice and 24 of them are now poised to burst their banks in Bhutan, with a similar number at risk in Nepal.

But that is just the beginning, a report in Nature said last week. Future disasters around the Himalayas will include ‘floods, droughts, land erosion, biodiversity loss and changes in rainfall and the monsoon’.

The roof of the world is changing, as can be seen by Nepal’s Khumbu glacier, where Hillary and Tenzing began their 1953 Everest expedition. It has retreated three miles since their ascent. Almost 95 per cent of Himalayan glaciers are also shrinking – and that kind of ice loss has profound implications, not just for Nepal and Bhutan, but for surrounding nations, including China, India and Pakistan.

Eventually, the Himalayan glaciers will shrink so much their meltwaters will dry up, say scientists. Catastrophes like Ghat will die out. At the same time, rivers fed by these melted glaciers – such as the Indus, Yellow River and Mekong – will turn to trickles. Drinking and irrigation water will disappear. Hundreds of millions of people will be affected.
guardian.co.uk

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — President Robert Mugabe has said Zimbabwe will process recently discovered uranium deposits in order to resolve its chronic electrical power shortage, state radio said Sunday.

Mugabe, who has close ties with two countries with controversial nuclear programs, Iran and North Korea, made the announcement Saturday, the radio station reported.

It was not clear how Mugabe intended to use any uranium deposits since the country does not have a nuclear power plant.

The president announced plans in the 1990s to acquire a reactor from Argentina, but nothing else was ever heard about the proposal.

”Zimbabwe will develop power by processing uranium, which has recently been found in the country,” the radio quoted Mugabe as saying.

”The discovery of uranium will go a long way in further enhancing the government rural electrification program,” he was quoted as saying.

Zimbabwe was not previously known to have any workable deposits of uranium.
nytimes.com

Their own mothers did not wear the veil but in the post 9/11 era, many young Muslim women in Europe see covering themselves as an act not of self-erasure but of power and freedom. But how do others in the West feel about this sign of radical Islamic identity: does it raise uncomfortable questions for all of us?
observor.co.uk