Cheney Observer
China's CNPC H1 oil exploration discoveries at 300 mln tons - report
08.23.2005, 11:13 PM
BEIJING (AFX) - China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the parent company of Hong Kong-listed PetroChina, discovered oil reserves of 300 mln tons and gas reserves of at least 150 bln cubic meters in the first half of this year, the China Daily reported, citing a company official.
The official, who did not want to be identified, added that CNPC plans to invest some 153.5 bln yuan this year in domestic oil and gas exploitation.
He said discoveries included 200 mln tons of oil in the Jidong field of Bohai Bay Basin and 100 mln cu m of natural gas in the Songliao Basin in northeast China.
CNPC also expects oil reserves in Zhoufeng in the Ordos Basin in northwestern China to jump by some 100 mln tons by the end of this year, the official said.
http://www.forbes.com/business/feeds/afx/2005/08/23/afx2189877.html
Venezuela's Chavez Squeezes Oil Companies With Taxes
Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- On July 14 in the western city of Maracaibo, Venezuelan government tax auditors and a prosecutor went to the offices of Chevron Corp., the second-largest U.S. oil company.
They seized boxes of records to build a case that San Ramon, California-based Chevron and 21 other energy companies owe Venezuela $3 billion in back taxes. The raid is part of President Hugo Chavez's push to squeeze more money out of foreign companies that want to pump oil from the world's fifth-largest petroleum exporter.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nifea&&sid=a3z63_HrIvtc
Ecuador oil protesters see Wednesday settlement
24 Aug 2005 04:34:13 GMT
Source: Reuters
(Updates with deal expected on Wednesday)
By Hugh Bronstein
QUITO, Ecuador, Aug 23 (Reuters) - Ecuador oil protesters, whose attacks choked off petroleum exports from the country, said they expect to sign a deal with private energy companies on Wednesday, bringing the crisis to an end.
The activists crippled Ecuador's oil industry last week and helped jack up global petroleum prices by dynamiting pipelines and vandalizing pumping equipment at installations of state oil firm Petroecuador in the eastern part of the country.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N23560705.htm
Oil prices above 66 usd in Asian trading ahead of US petroleum stocks report
08.24.2005, 12:33 AM
SINGAPORE (AFX) - Oil prices surged above 66 usd a barrel in Asian trade as the market awaited the weekly petroleum inventory report from the US.
At 10.40 am (0240 GMT), New York's main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in October, was trading at 66.18 usd a barrel, up 47 cents from its close of 65.71 usd in the US overnight.
The US Department of Energy is expected to release the weekly inventory report later today amid expectations it would show a rise in crude stocks.
http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2005/08/23/afx2189900.html
'Oil derivatives export fetches $2.4 bln for Iran'
Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - ©2005 IranMania.com
LONDON, August 24 (IranMania) - Iran earned an estimated $2 bln and 400 mln in the five months from March 21 by exporting 8 mln and 2 thousand tons of oil derivatives, said a senior official.
Deputy Head of the International Affairs Department at National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) Hojatollah Ghanimifard told IRNA that the increase in revenue was due to higher crude prices on the international markets in the said period.
Ghanimifard said diesel, kerosene, kiln oil, naphtha and gas condensates were among the items exported in the period under study. He added that during this period, kiln oil followed by gas condensates were the two top exported items in this category, while kerosene was at the bottom of the list.
http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=34699&NewsKind=Current%20Affairs
PetroChina, China's biggest state-owned oil firm, says first-half profit up 36%
Canadian Press
August 24, 2005
HONG KONG (AP) - PetroChina Co., China's biggest state-owned oil firm, said Wednesday its first-half net profit rose 36 per cent, spurred by higher oil prices.
The Chinese company - whose parent firm recently reached an agreement to buy a major Canadian oil producer in Kazakhstan - said net profit for the six months that ended June 30 totalled 61.6 billion yuan ($7.6 billion US), up from 45.28 billion yuan ($5.58 billion US) in the same period last year.
First-half revenue rose to 252.5 billion yuan from 178.4 billion yuan in the first six months of 2004, the firm said.
http://www.canada.com/businesscentre/story.html?id=edf38bc3-7f2b-496e-b912-710e8976765b
Crude Oil Reaches $68 as Storm Threatens Gulf of Mexico Output
Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil rose to a record $68 a barrel in New York on concern that a storm may disrupt output in the Gulf of Mexico, where 30 percent of U.S. oil is produced.
Tropical Storm Katrina is forecast to reach hurricane strength before crossing Florida on Aug. 26 and moving into the U.S. Gulf, according to the Miami-based National Hurricane Center. Last year prices jumped at least $10 a barrel, or 22 percent, in the month after Ivan, a category-4 hurricane, swept through the area, cutting production and damaging rigs.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000006&sid=a7.dQRqYS6Ws&refer=home
Ecuador oil protesters threaten hunger strike
Thu Aug 25, 2005 1:55 AM BST
By Hugh Bronstein
QUITO, Ecuador (Reuters) - Protesters whose attacks have choked off Ecuadorean oil exports threatened on Wednesday to launch a hunger strike to pressure the government to grant them immunity, marking a setback in settlement talks.
The activists, who want private energy companies to invest more in the poor Amazon communities where they operate, crippled Ecuador's oil industry last week and helped push up global petroleum prices by dynamiting pipelines and vandalising pumping equipment belonging to the state oil firm Petroecuador.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-08-25T005524Z_01_ROB503266_RTRUKOC_0_UK-ECUADOR.xml
Oil: Prices hit record on storm, petrol supply
25.08.05 8.40am
NEW YORK - Oil prices surged more than 2 per cent to break a record on Wednesday after an unexpected drop in US petrol stocks added to worries that a gathering Caribbean storm could damage US oil production platforms.
News Iran's parliament had thrown out the new president's choice for oil minister added to the market's uncertainty and drew a big question mark over oil policy in Opec's second-biggest producer.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=3&ObjectID=10342392
U.S. Stocks Fall on Record Oil; S&P 500 Erases 2005 Advance
Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. stocks dropped to six-week lows, erasing the Standard & Poor's 500 Index's gain for the year, as crude-oil prices rose above $67 a barrel to a record.
Oil's advance wiped out a rally sparked by an unexpected increase in new home sales. Caterpillar Inc. and United Technologies Corp. fell after the government reported the biggest decline in durable-goods orders in 18 months.
``It's not oil at new records by itself any more, it's oil with economic numbers substantiating the impact that oil's having on the economy,'' said John Twomey, head of trading at Merriman Curhan Ford & Co. in an interview in New York. ``That's creating some nervousness'' in the market.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aho0giB.T2ss&refer=news_index
Kyrgyz Finance Ministry to receive 247 thousand US dollars from Islamic Development Bank as a grant
- Islamic Development Bank approved allocation of 247 thousand US dollars as the annual technical help (grant) to Kyrgyz Finance Ministry for the strengthening of potential, the press-service of Kyrgyz Finance Ministry reported.
Project of the strengthening of potential of Kyrgyz Finance Ministry is directed on strengthening of management and coordination of activity concerning the future and current investments to Kyrgyz economy.
http://www.akipress.com/_en_news.php?id=13913
Uzbek prosecutors say Uzbek refugees in Romania include terrorists
- Terrorists are among the Uzbek refugees a UN body sent to Romania from Kyrgyzstan in late July after bloodshed in their homeland, the Prosecutor General's Office of Uzbekistan said Thursday.
According to prosecutors, some of the 439 refugees the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) sent from the neighboring Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan to Europe were involved in the May 13 uprising in the border city Andijan, which officially claimed 176 lives.
Prosecutors said they were suspected terrorists and criminals who were thought to have attacked police and security offices, a military unit and a prison in Andijan, freed the inmates and seized the building of the regional administration in the disturbances.
The statement cited the Uzbek police as saying that although the majority of weapons and ammunition used in the disturbances had been recovered, 26 automatic rifles, 50 pistols, three machineguns, 106 grenades, 47 knives-bayonets and thousands of cartridges were still missing.
"There is no guarantee that these 'peaceful refugees,' who are so passionately defended by some Western countries and international organizations, will not commit new terrorist attacks not only in Central Asia but in other parts of the world, now that they have such a large arsenal, which would be enough to organize several 'peaceful protests' like the one in Andijan," the statement said.
The prosecutors also said the Uzbek citizens had been sent from Kyrgyzstan to Romania as refugees under pressure from the West and some international organizations.
http://www.akipress.com/_en_news.php?id=13917
Pennsylvania Candidate Lies Low in Race
By KIMBERLY HEFLING
Associated Press Writer
August 24, 2005, 10:57 PM EDT
ASPINWALL, Pa. -- Determined to take down conservative Sen. Rick Santorum, Democrats recruited a candidate who resembles him in many ways.
Like Santorum, Bob Casey Jr. is Roman Catholic, fortysomething and opposed to abortion.
But Casey is nowhere near as outspoken as Santorum, and that appears to be helping him the most in a race that is sure to be one of the most expensive and hard-fought elections in 2006.
Casey has produced better early poll numbers by largely remaining out of the spotlight this summer, leaving Santorum to do the talking -- and writing.
http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-pennsylvania-senate,0,239674.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines
The Gas-Guzzler Relief Act
Jonathan Fahey, 08.24.05, 7:56 AM ET
NEW YORK - The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's elaborate proposal to update the 30-year-old regulations that govern the fuel economy of U.S. pickups, minivans and SUVs released yesterday may or may not end up make the United States less thirsty for oil. But it was clearly designed to help out the automakers most thirsty for profits, the struggling General Motors and Ford Motor.
http://www.forbes.com/business/2005/08/24/autos-fuel-cafe-cz_jf_0824fuel.html
Hatfield are Bush-wacked
24 August 2005
Herts Senior County League
Bushey Rangers 4 Hatfield Town 1
HATFIELD'S league campaign got off to an abysmal start with a 4-1 hammering at the hands of Bushey Rangers.
Saturday's dismal performance at the Moatfield has left them second from bottom in the Herts Senior County Premier League.
It's very early days but Hatfield will have to bounce straight back if they don't want to find themselves in a losing rut.
http://www.herts24.co.uk/content/whtimes/sport/story.aspx?brand=WHTOnline&category=sportfootball&tBrand=herts24&tCategory=sportwhtnew&itemid=WEED24%20Aug%202005%2010%3A42%3A37%3A053
Ex-Halliburton worker pleads guilty to bribes
Mon Aug 22, 4:24 PM ET
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A former Halliburton Co. worker pleaded guilty late last week to taking more than $110,000 in bribes from an Iraqi company in 2004 and defrauding the United States, court documents showed.
The man, Glenn Allen Powell, is facing up to 20 years in prison plus a $1.25 million fine for the crimes, which he committed while working for Halliburton's KBR engineering and construction unit, the U.S. government's largest private contractor in
Iraq.
According to his plea agreement filed on Friday in U.S. District Court in Rock Island, Illinois, Powell admitted to taking a kickback from the company, which was not named, in exchange for securing a $609,000 contract for it to renovate a warehouse in Iraq.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050822/pl_nm/energy_halliburton_dc
Teams seeking LANL job set for interviews
By ANDY LENDERMAN The New Mexican
August 24, 2005
Both teams seeking to take over management of Los Alamos National Laboratory are scheduled to meet next week with government officials for a series of interviews .
Rod Geer, a spokesman for the team led by Lockheed Martin Corp. and the University of Texas system, said his team is preparing to answer questions by the National Nuclear Security Administration's Source Evaluation Board.
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/31656.html
Backing for Jeb Bush Stable in Florida
CREDIT: Flag courtesy of ITA’s Flags of All Countries used
(Angus Reid Global Scan) – Many adults in Florida are satisfied with Jeb Bush, according to a poll by Strategic Vision. 55 per cent of respondents in the Sunshine State approve of the governor’s performance.
Bush—a Republican—was first elected in November 1998. In 2002, he defeated Democrat Bill McBride with 56 per cent of the vote. Bush cannot seek a third consecutive term in office.
The number of Floridians who think their governor should launch a bid for the White House decreased for the second consecutive month. 33 per cent of respondents say they would like to see Jeb Bush run for president, down seven points since June.
http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/8664
BUSH REGIME ROTTEN TO THE CORE
By Bill Gallagher
DETROIT -- A storm of anti-war protests and sentiment is sweeping across the nation. Finally, reality and truth are trumping President George W. Bush's lies. Even the perpetual propaganda machine of the corporate media can no longer manufacture consent for Bush's monstrously bad policies and decisions.
A storm of anti-war protests and sentiment is sweeping While most Americans work and struggle with lower wages, a sputtering economy and rising gas prices, Bush still basks in the Texas sun in his long summer of content. He prefers isolation and deliberate disconnection from
the grim evidence of his wholesale failures.
Cindy Sheehan has left the vigil outside Bush's ranch to care for her ailing mother. But others are in her place, reminding the world that Bush will never admit his responsibility for the war in Iraq, its failure and the death of Sheehan's son Casey and more than 1,800 other Americans.
The Busheviks consider Sheehan's witness to the tragedy of the senseless war as an irritant, a PR problem that will fade in time. They've used the usual suspects of right-wing indecency -- Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity -- to do their dirty work. Those who question the war must be silenced at best, or at least discredited and vilified.
http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher227.html
Rove behavior: Could it be Bush's Watergate?
Thomas Pauken. Smirking Chimp
August 22, 2005
KARL Rove's favorite president is Richard Nixon. What a twist of fate it would be if Rove were driven from power as Nixon was over what both men would consider trivial matters — the leaking of a CIA employee's name to reporters by Rove in 2004, and the Watergate break-in of the Democratic headquarters at the instigation of Nixon campaign officials in 1972.
Just as it was not the Watergate break-in per se (but the subsequent cover-up) that brought Nixon down, so it may be that what Rove said and did after the fact will prove his undoing.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m14962&l=i&size=1&hd=0
White House Week
You Know, You Can't Keep A Good Boy Genius Down
The recent controversy swirling around Karl Rove hasn't slowed him a bit. That's according to White House insiders who say Bush's political boy genius is as engaged as ever in high-level decision making despite all the attacks by angry Democrats alleging he improperly--and possibly illegally--outed a covert CIA operative. Rove was a key player behind the recently passed transportation and energy bills, and now he's planning Bush's fall agenda, which will include a renewed push for Social Security overhaul, changes in immigration law, and tax restructuring. Says a White House insider who talks to Rove regularly, "He is as instrumental as he ever was."
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050829/29whitehouse.htm
Plame in the Courtroom
Rumors and leaks continue to swirl around the case of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame and the various journalists and Bush "senior administration officials" believed to be involved in some fashion in her outing. Whole forests have undoubtedly been pulped for the endless flood of summer stories about the Plame case and yet something has been missing. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, the law against outing a CIA operative under which Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was, in essence, called into existence, is rarely discussed in any serious way -- and then at best only in a passing paragraph or two deep in any story. And yet a media/punditry consensus has formed that it is a law so specifically, even quirkily, written as to be almost impossible to use in a prosecution (hopeless, in fact, against a figure like Karl Rove or Vice President Cheney's right-hand man I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby); and that Special Counsel Fitzgerald has already turned away from the law, moving on to more conceivable avenues of prosecution -- like obstruction of justice.
http://www.nowpublic.com/node/16782
What Now, Karl?
Rove and Ashcroft face new allegations in the Valerie Plame affair
by Murray Waas
August 13th, 2005 2:39 PM
Rove consulted on three of Ashcroft’s political campaigns, earning $746,000.
photo: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
Murray Waas will be writing more about the latest in the Plame affair at www.whateveralready.blogspot.com.
Justice Department officials made the crucial decision in late 2003 to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leak of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame in large part because investigators had begun to specifically question the veracity of accounts provided to them by White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, according to senior law enforcement officials.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/index.php?issue=0533&page=waasweb1&id=66861&cid=2
continued ...
