www.detnews.com By Rebecca Gomez / AP Business Writer

NEW YORK -- A massive explosion at an ExxonMobil Corp. oil storage facility sent shock waves through an energy market already roiled by fears of war, pushing crude oil prices up more than a dollar in trading Friday. Heating oil and gasoline futures also surged. The explosion occurred midmorning when a barge stocked with 100,000 barrels of unleaded gasoline was being unloaded at the Port Mobil terminal, a storage facility that holds 2 million barrels of oil products, on the tip of Staten Island. The cause was under investigation. Prices eased somewhat after analysts and traders realized the loss of gas supplies on the barge and thousands of barrels of heating oil at the terminal in Staten Island would pose only a short-term problem for the Northeast. "This is two million barrels and that's an important size for Staten Island and the region," said Ed Silliere, vice president of risk management at Energy Merchant LLC in New York. "Heating oil is extremely tight right now in the East. We can't be losing this quantity at this time." Even though the barge was carrying gas only, the fire damage makes it nearly impossible to retrieve the heating oil from the facility, hurting regional supplies. "It could have an effect for a couple of weeks, a little more tightness in heating oil," said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst with the oil price information service. "Much more significant is whether it's cold in the Northeast in the next few weeks." The national oil market is not likely to suffer as a result of the fire, analysts said. Still, crude oil for April delivery rose $1.15 to $35.95 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after news reports of the fire. It finished the day at $35.58 a barrel, up 84 cents for the day. Earlier, in London trading, Brent crude from the North Sea finished at $32.27, up 71 cents. The fire broke out as U.S. crude supplies are already at their lowest level since 1975 and crude, gasoline and heating oil inventories are all below what the industry considers essential for smooth operation, the government reported last week. The United States has not been getting the massive supplies of imported crude oil from Venezuela because of political turmoil and a nationwide strike there that began in December. Prices also have been sensitive to worries about a war with Iraq and Middle East oil supplies. As a result, analysts said, any news about the oil markets will cause rumbles, regardless of the long-term impact. "There's this heightened effect on the market," Silliere said. "Everybody is ready to jump on the latest news. Elsewhere on the Nymex, March heating oil contract rose 4.98 cents, or 5 percent, to $1.10 a gallon, while the March unleaded gasoline gained 4.7 cents, or about 5 percent, to trade at $1.01 a gallon. Natural gas for March delivery surged nearly 7 percent, or 44.4 cents, to $6.606 per 1,000 cubic feet. "The market shot up when they thought it was a refinery fire and perhaps there was some other concerns that it could have been terrorist related," said Kloza. A fire at an oil refinery, rather than a storage facility, would have had a far greater impact, analysts said. Refineries contain much more oil than terminal facilities, such as the Port Mobil, and they house expensive manufacturing equipment. One person was killed in the explosion, another was critically injured and a third was missing, officials said. The destruction of the facility quickly affected wholesale oil prices in local New York markets. In Albany, independent heating oil distributors increased their prices by 7 cents to $1.20 a gallon, said Silliere, who tracks the spot market. Small businesses getting supplies of heating oil Friday morning would have seen a quick pop in prices. The Port Mobil facility is a vital link to oil supplies for the Northeast. It stores oil products taken off the Colonial pipeline, which brings supplies to the region from refinery centers in Louisiana and Texas. The Port Mobil stores the oil product in tanks, then it is loaded into barges that ferry the gas and heating oil to regional distributors. The fire knocked the Port Mobil out of commission. "Oil products are trapped there for some time because the only way out is barge and barging capabilities are destroyed," Silliere said.

thestar.com.my Saturday, February 22, 2003

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Cuba has been chosen to host the next summit of the 114-member Non-Aligned Movement, officials said Saturday.

That means that Havana will receive the movement's presidency when it hosts the next summit in 2006, said Milos Alcalay, Venezuela's representative to the United Nations.

Cuba last hosted the summit in 1979.

The presidency is rotated every few years among the group's major regions: Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The decision to appoint Cuba was made by the movement's Caribbean and Latin American bloc during preparations for Non-Aligned Movement leaders summit Monday and Tuesday in Kuala Lumpur.

No other countries challenged Havana's bid, Alcalay said.

The communist island has spoken out against any U.S.-led attack on Iraq, which has been the focus of this year's summit.

South Africa is handing the presidency to Malaysia this year.

The movement was created in 1955 to pave a neutral path between the United States and the Soviet bloc during the Cold War.

It is trying to reinvent itself as a forum for developing countries facing the onslaught of globalization. - AP

books.guardian.co.uk Saturday February 22, 2003 The Guardian

Terry Eagleton argues that fundamentalism is characterised by a dangerous reverence for words

There are two things desirable for fighting fundamentalists. The first is not to be one yourself. The US government's war on the movement is somewhat compromised by the fact that it is run by scripture-spouting fanatics for whom the sanctity of human life ends at the moment of birth. This is rather like using the British National party to run ex-Nazis to earth, or hiring Henry Kissinger to investigate mass murder, as George Bush recently did by nominating him to inquire into the background to September 11. Fundamentalists of the Texan stripe are not best placed to hunt down the Taliban variety.

The second desirable thing is to know what fundamentalism is. The answer to this is less obvious than it might seem. Fundamentalism doesn't just mean people with fundamental beliefs, since that covers everyone. Being a person means being constituted by certain basic convictions, even if they are largely unconscious. What you are, in the end, is what you cannot walk away from. These convictions do not need to be burning or eye-catching or even true; they just have to go all the way down, like believing that Caracas is in Venezuela or that torturing babies is wrong. They are the kind of beliefs that choose us more than we choose them. Sceptics who doubt you can know anything for sure have at least one fundamental conviction. "Fundamental" doesn't necessarily mean "worth dying for". You may be passionately convinced that the quality of life in San Francisco is superior to that in Strabane, but reluctant to go to the gallows for it.

Fundamentalists are not always the type who seize you by the throat with one fist while thumping the table with the other. There are plenty of soft-spoken, self-effacing examples of the species. It isn't a question of style. Nor is the opposite of fundamentalism lukewarmness, or the tiresome liberal prejudice that the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. Tolerance and partisanship are not incompatible. Anti-fundamentalists are not people without passionate beliefs; they are people who number among their passionate beliefs the conviction that you have as much right to your opinion as they have. And for this, some of them are certainly prepared to die. The historian AJP Taylor was once asked at an interview for an Oxford fellowship whether it was true that he held extreme political beliefs, to which he replied that it was, but that he held them moderately. He may have been hinting that he was a secret sceptic, but he probably just meant that he did not agree with forcing his beliefs on others.

The word "fundamentalism" was first used in the early years of the last century by anti-liberal US Christians, who singled out seven supposed fundamentals of their faith. The word, then, is not one of those derogatory terms that only other people use about you, like "fatso". It began life as a proud self-description. The first of the seven fundamentals was a belief in the literal truth of the Bible; and this is probably the best definition of fundamentalism there is. It is basically a textual affair. Fundamentalists are those who believe that our linguistic currency is trustworthy only if it is backed by the gold standard of the Word of Words. They see God as copperfastening human meaning. Fundamentalism means sticking strictly to the script, which in turn means being deeply fearful of the improvised, ambiguous or indeterminate.

Fundamentalists, however, fail to realise that the phrase "sacred text" is self-contradictory. Since writing is meaning that can be handled by anybody, any time, it is always profane and promiscuous. Meaning that has been written down is bound to be unhygienic. Words that could only ever mean one thing would not be words. Fundamentalism is the paranoid condition of those who do not see that roughness is not a defect of human existence, but what makes it work. For them, it is as though we have to measure Everest down to the last millimetre if we are not to be completely stumped about how high it is. It is not surprising that fundamentalism abhors sexuality and the body, since in one sense all flesh is rough, and all sex is rough trade.

The New Testament author known as Luke is presumably aware that Jesus was actually born in Galilee. But he needs to have him born in Judea, since the Messiah is to spring from the Judea-based house of David. A Messiah born in bumpkinish Galilee would be like one born in Gary, Indiana. So Luke coolly invents a Roman census, for which there is no independent evidence, which requires everyone to return to their place of birth to be registered. Since Jesus's father Joseph comes from Bethlehem in Judea, he and his wife Mary obediently trudge off to the town, where Jesus is conveniently born.

It would be hard to think up a more ludicrous way of registering the population of the entire Roman empire than having them all return to their birthplaces. Why not just register them on the spot? The result of such a madcap scheme would have been total chaos. The traffic jams would have made Ken Livingstone's job look positively cushy. And we would almost certainly have heard about this international gridlocking from rather more disinterested witnesses than Luke. Yet fundamentalists must take Luke at his word.

Fundamentalists are really necrophiliacs, in love with a dead letter. The letter of the sacred text must be rigidly embalmed if it is to imbue life with the certitude and finality of death. Matthew's gospel, in a moment of carelessness, presents Jesus as riding into Jerusalem on both a colt and an ass - in which case, for the fundamentalist, the Son of God must indeed have had one leg thrown over each.

The fundamentalist is a more diseased version of the argument-from-the-floodgates type of conservative. Once you allow one motorist to throw up out of the car window without imposing a lengthy prison sentence, then before you know where you are, every motorist will be throwing up out of the window all the time, and the roads will become impassable. It is this kind of pathological anxiety, pressed to an extreme, which drove the religious police in Mecca early last year to send fleeing schoolgirls back into their burning school because they were not wearing their robes and head dresses, and which inspires family-loving US pro-lifers eager to incinerate Iraq to gun down doctors who terminate pregnancies. To read the world literally is a kind of insanity.

www.tnr.com by Robert Lane Greene Only at TNR Online | Post date 10.29.02

Rarely does a candidate for high office in a major democracy enjoy simultaneous billing as both a moderate and a radical. Never does it happen as often as it did to the Brazilian president-elect, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, during his recent campaign. Often within the same article commentators would seize on various physical attributes and use them to make conflicting points. On one side, there was the finger Lula lost in an industrial accident, a symbol of his years of activism within the country's labor movement. On the other side, there was the trimming of Lula's beard, which was supposed to symbolize his transformation from radical union agitator to statesman. (Not since Jimmy Carter reversed his part in 1979 has a candidate's hair seemed to portend so much.)

In truth, Lula is neither the market-embracing moderate some say he has become nor the unapologetic hard-leftist who previously made three unsuccessful bids for the Brazilian presidency. He has renounced a pledge to "renegotiate" (that is, stop paying) Brazil's huge debt, promised to honor the terms of an IMF deal that requires Brazil to run budget surpluses, and has, in principle, agreed to aim for low inflation. But his party is hostile to many aspects of orthodox economics. Free trade is one: The Workers' Party has sworn to prevent the "annexation" of Brazil in the American-inspired Free Trade Area of the Americas. Using higher interest rates to control inflation is another: Lula has simplistically argued that America lowered rates during its recession, so why not Brazil? And while he has said he will spend responsibly, his campaign promise to double the minimum wage would be costly, driving up public wages and the pensions that are indexed to them.

Taken together, Lula gives the impression of a leftist, but in a mold familiar to moderate social democrats in Europe and America. And that's what makes his victory so comforting.

Latin America's history with democracy has been an unruly one, to say the least. The region's strong illiberal tendencies have come in various forms over the years--whether military autocracy (Brazil 1964-85, Chile 1973-90, Argentina 1976-83), populist quasi-democracy (Mexico under the 71-year rule of the PRI), or the rule of corrupt upper-class elites (take your pick in Central America). Though there has been progress recently--witness Chile since Pinochet and Mexico since President Vincente Fox's victory in 2000--it has come only in fits and starts. Ecuador faces a choice between a hard-left former colonel and the country's richest businessman in its upcoming presidential poll; Peru is desperately trying to put the trauma of Alberto Fujimori's staggering corruption behind it. And in Brazil's neighbor, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, a leftist and former paratrooper who was elected after spending time in jail for a failed coup, has polarized his country, shamelessly altering the constitution and driving the economy into the ground. Needless to say, the march of liberal democracy and free economies is not inevitable.

In this context the Brazilian system, chaotic though it can be (there are 19 parties in congress), stands out as a refreshing example. The military plays no role in politics. A lively press keeps politicians on their toes (aggressive journalism led to the resignation of a corrupt president in 1992). And this year's election was technically smooth, with electronic voting machines used across the vast country that would put Florida to shame.

In fact, the peaceful shift from moderate right to moderate left is something to be cherished politically even if it is less than perfect economically. Lula's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso stabilized the economy with sometimes-painful orthodox measures after his election in 1994. But the electorate proved patient and resilient enough to renew his mandate in 1998--rebuffing a left-wing populist named Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva along the way. The upshot was that the experience brought Lula to the center, where he could draw attention to the ill effects of inflation-fighting and budget austerity in ways that resonated with Brazilians without scaring them. So when the government's handpicked candidate, José Serra, offered more of Cardoso's increasingly unpopular neoliberal policies, he was greeted with a polite "thanks, but no thanks" from voters, giving the reconstructed Lula his long-awaited presidential term. For his part, Lula, in a gesture most Americans demanded (and received) from their own president-elect in 2000, graciously accepted his victory by promising to govern "for all Brazilians."

Of course, all this goes out the window if the markets don't believe Lula is sincere. Pre-election fears of this scenario battered Brazil's currency and bonds, as nervous investors pulled out of the country for fear of a debt default or runaway inflation. The governing party played on the fear that Lula would cost Brazil its hard-won stability, and he had to respond with a campaign ad denying that he was "the bogeyman." Since Sunday's election the markets have been quiet but expectant, hoping that Lula will appoint a cabinet and central bank chief investors can trust.

But in the end markets are most at ease when democracy is sturdiest. After all, it does little good for a country to follow a strict liberalization regimen if that regimen promptly undermines political stability. Thankfully, this year's election proved that Brazilian voters can repudiate those policies without demanding a radical lurch in the opposite direction. If Lula can live up to his promises and govern from the middle-of-the-road left, he may do as much to satisfy the markets as his neoliberal predecessor.

Robert Lane Greene is countries editor at Economist.com

www.upi.com By Bradley Brooks UPI Business Correspondent From the Business & Economics Desk Published 2/20/2003 6:19 PM

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Feb. 20 (UPI) -- Less than two months in office, Brazil's new government is beginning to show the strains of trying to push one of the world's largest emerging markets out of the doldrums.

On Thursday, officials close to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were split over the previous day's decision to raise interest rates to 26.5 percent from 25.5 percent.

Some argue that the move will only stifle credit and choke the economy. Others say the hike was needed to help keep inflation at bay.

Adding to the schism, parts of the base of Lula's Workers' Party -- the largest and best-organized leftist party in Latin America -- have been taking to the streets of the capital Brasilia to register their discontent with reforms.

Hundreds of public sector workers -- an integral part of the Workers' Party -- protested in front of the presidential palace on Wednesday.

They voiced opposition to the government's push for pension reforms and a plan to give the central bank more autonomy -- both moves investors are hoping to see passed this year, but which are looking quite unlikely.

Analysts had been optimistic that Lula's entrance into power would help push through reforms to the pension system for public workers.

Many label the pension plan an inefficient scheme that does little more than add to the country's $240 billion debt.

But the problem is reform means taking money out of the recipients' pockets, which is never an easy task for politicians, let alone if it affects their political base.

As for the increased interest rates, Lula's chief of Cabinet on Thursday said they were "incompatible" with economic growth.

"The country cannot survive with these levels of rates," Jose Dirceu told reporters after meeting with Lula on Thursday. "High interest rates and economic growth are incompatible."

Dirceu conceded that the external situation -- a potential war in Iraq -- is keeping inflation at a dangerously high level and making it difficult for the central bank to bring rates down.

"It's a moment of transition. The country needs to halt inflation and prepare itself for a more dangerous internal situation," he said.

But Finance Minister Antonio Palocci stands by the central bank's moves.

Palocci on Thursday discounted the short-term negative effects of high interest rates and the increased reserve requirement for banks -- which jumped from 45 percent to 60 percent.

The government, Palocci said, has been and will continue to take aggressive steps to both dampen inflation and at the same time try to increase investor confidence.

But Dirceu opined that it shouldn't be the job of the central bank to stimulate economic growth.

"It's the government that has to solve the problem of economic growth."

It is tax and pension reforms, as well as some smart funding to production sectors, that will spark a turnaround in Brazil, Dirceu said.

Richard Feinberg, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, and the former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, agrees that high interest rates are needed to battle inflation, but called them a double-edged sword.

The level of interest rates are "brutal," Feinberg said. "They've got to get them down -- that's very critical."

But with 12-month inflation sitting at 14.5 percent in January -- the highest level in six years -- other economists argue that bringing prices down has to be the first priority.

The fallout over Lula's initial economic moves may simply be a signal of healthy and vigorous debate within a party that finds itself in charge of the country for the first time, analysts say.

Or it may be indicative that Lula's base support will leave him, resulting in gridlock and little headway being made in the next four years.

The history of the Workers' Party, though, does tend to point to the sunnier scenario.

Since its founding in February 1980, the party -- made up of far-flung elements of the left and center, each with their own political axes to grind -- has encountered moments of paralyzing internal debate.

The Workers' Party was founded with the notion that democracy should be practiced in the most direct manner possible, with a plethora of voices equaling more political freedom.

The party is structured with several different levels that begin at the grass-roots in nearly every community and lead vertically up to Lula himself. The party hopes this makes it more democratic and responsive.

This at times has led to what is more cacophony than symphony, but as the party's undisputed leader since its inception, Lula has managed to stay mostly above the fray and eventually to push the party in a common direction.

Yet now that the Workers' Party finds itself at the pinnacle of Brazilian politics, many wonder whether the stakes are too high for certain sectors of the organization to acquiesce for the sake of the greater good.