#3
Pity that the Home Minister had to be shamed into this.
During the last reunion for surviving VCs, the then Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine was driving along Hyde Park when he saw Umrao Singh (the last Indian VC, now deceased) waiting patiently to cross the road. He spotted the bronze VC medal and stopped his car, halting traffic. He got out and saluted "VC first, Sir!", allowing him to cross.
Posted by: John Frum ||
06/03/2007 7:45 Comments ||
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#4
After all the Paki terrorists who are brought in, they have to keep someone out.
Posted by: Gary and the Samoyeds ||
06/03/2007 8:59 Comments ||
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Muslims must get their "act together" and reform Islam to avoid a bloody future, Somali author Ayaan Hirsi Ali says. Ali, 37, who has renounced her Islamic faith and considers herself an atheist, was speaking in Sydney as part of the Writers Festival.
She says Muslims must examine their religion and "review the example of the prophet Muhammad. Muslims are not used to criticising Islam, they are not used to criticising the prophet Muhammad", she told a sell-out audience at the Sydney Theatre. "That's what this century has opened up with September 11 - it was an attack on the West but it was also an attack on Islam itself," she said. "Because if we who were born into Islam do not get our act together and reform our faith, our future might be that we tend to clash even more. It will only get more bloody.
"If Islam is reformed I think the people who will gain the most are women. As a woman after I left the circumstances where the rule was Islam, I gained my personal freedom. Reforming Islam, changing it from what it is now, will benefit women and as women benefit from it they will become educated, become owners of their own bodies and their own destinies."
But, she said mothers must also take responsibility for the way they raise boys, to teach them to have respect for women. "As woman we make men, we bear the boys. It's really important how you bring them up. If we encourage the mentality that they are wild dogs and that we are raw meat, that's how they will behave."
Peabody Energy has announced it has entered into agreements with Rentech to fund up to $10 million of engineering and development costs for Rentech's planned coal-to-liquids project in Illinois and to supply the facility with nearly 1 million tons of coal annually. As part of the agreement, Peabody has an option to acquire a 20 percent equity interest in the project through increased funding.
Rentech is converting its existing fertilizer production facility in East Dubuque into a coal gasification complex that would produce ultra-clean transportation fuels using Rentech's patented processes that are based on widely recognized Fischer-Tropsch technology. The facility also would continue to produce nitrogen fertilizer products. Converting the plant from expensive natural gas to affordable coal is expected to significantly reduce operating costs. The project would be the first commercial coal-to-liquids facility developed in the United States.
"Oil prices have increased more than 70 percent in the past five years, and the United States continues to depend on expensive oil imports from unstable regions to meet our needs," said Peabody President and Chief Executive Officer Gregory H. Boyce. "Transforming America's abundant coal reserves into clean transportation fuels is an important step for strengthening U.S. energy security. Our Rentech partnership demonstrates the synergies we can achieve by fueling clean energy solutions using our large reserve base."
The Rentech plant is expected to produce approximately 400,000 barrels per year of clean Fischer-Tropsch fuels. It will also produce approximately 545,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer products per year. The project is under development, and the plant conversion is scheduled to be complete by 2010.
"We are very pleased that Peabody is supporting the development of this coal conversion project," said D. Hunt Ramsbottom, Rentech's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Both companies have a tremendous commitment to providing clean energy solutions and to moving the United States toward energy security."
Fischer-Tropsch fuels are cleaner than conventional diesel because sulfur and other oil byproducts are removed. The facility also would be carbon- capture ready, designed with a process unit that would capture pure carbon dioxide (CO2) and separate it from the gas stream. Rentech is evaluating CO2 marketing opportunities with bottling companies and sequestration opportunities including potential use for enhanced oil recovery.
Separately, Peabody has entered into a long-term agreement with Rentech to supply nearly 1 million tons of coal annually to the coal conversion facility from its Illinois operations, providing a reliable source of fuel for the project.
Development of coal-to-liquids facilities is gaining increasing interest around the nation and has strong bipartisan support. The Southern States Energy Board, in its 2006 American Energy Security Study, is calling for producing 5.6 million barrels of diesel per day from coal to achieve energy independence. This would require about 1 billion tons of U.S. coal annually.
Rentech develops technologies that transform domestic resources into valuable and clean alternative fuels and chemicals. The company has developed an advanced derivative of the well-established Fischer-Tropsch process for manufacturing ultra-clean diesel fuel and other fuel products.
#1
Fischer-Tropsch technology---Making synthetic liquid fuels for Germany in WW2 after the Allies pounded the sh*t out of Ploesti. I hope that Peabody and Rentech can make an economic go of this.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
06/03/2007 14:30 Comments ||
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An Iranian cabinet minister said young people should be encouraged to get temporarily married to avoid illicit extramarital sex, newspapers reported on Saturday. We should expect violations and repercussions if we do not practically respond to young peoples sexual needs, the Kargozaran daily quoted Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi as saying. Islam has solutions for all human problems and temporary marriage is a solution to this kind of problem, the minister was quoted as telling a conference in Irans clerical capital of Qom. He said Iran should seek to promote the practice with boldness and urged seminary scholars to study the matter and come up with ways to execute Gods command in society.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/03/2007 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[6 views]
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#1
Things are really starting to get weird over there.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
06/03/2007 0:15 Comments ||
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#3
The ugly side of Mu'tah marriages. Fred, you rang
a bell about this practice in Islam. I had seen articles comparing this practice to legalized prostitution under the guise of religion previously.
Doing some checking around, I found this article from last year about this practice.
See more about this at Link
According to an official source in Tehran, there has been a 635 percent increase in the number of teenage girls in prostitution, or rather, Mutah. The magnitude of this statistic conveys how rapidly this form of abuse has grown. In Tehran, there are an estimated 84,000 women and girls in prostitution, many of them are on the streets, others are in the 250 brothels that reportedly operate in the city. The trade is also international: thousands of Iranian women and girls have been been "contracted in Mutah" to foreigners abroad. The head of Iranâs Interpol bureau believes that the Mutah trade is one of the most profitable activities in Iran today.
#7
So, does that mean that the government of Iran pays for the offspring and upbringing of the children conceived in temporary marriage and that their mothers are also put on public support while they raise the child as unwed mothers? Temporary marriage may solve the problem of pent up sexuality, but for half of Iranian society, it only sells a big, impoverished, ostracizing lie.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
An Iranian cabinet minister said young people should be encouraged to get temporarily married to avoid illicit extramarital sex, newspapers reported on Saturday. We should expect violations and repercussions if we do not practically respond to young peoples sexual needs, the Kargozaran daily quoted Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi as saying. Islam has solutions for all human problems and temporary marriage is a solution to this kind of problem, the minister was quoted as telling a conference in Irans clerical capital of Qom. He said Iran should seek to promote the practice with boldness and urged seminary scholars to study the matter and come up with ways to execute Gods command in society.
