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Friday, April 23, 2010

The oil rig Deepwater Horizon sank yesterday after an explosion Tuesday night that left eleven people missing.

According to an officer from the US Coast Guard, the rig sank sometime in the morning. The rig had caught fire after an explosion of unknown origin occurred two days ago. 115 of the 126 workers on board the time of the explosion have been rescued after evacuating in lifeboats, either by the Coast Guard or from other ships in the area.

The remaining eleven have not been located, although Coast Guard officials have expressed optimism that they are still alive.

The environmental impacts of the explosion and subsequent sinking of the rig are unclear. While up to 13,000 gallons of crude oil per hour has been released from the rig, until now, the effects have been considered minimal, as it had been burned off in the fire. That does have the potential to change, though, according to David Rainey, vice president of the lessor of the rig, BP. The rig, built in 2001 by Hyundai Heavy Industries was owned and operated by Transocean.

The rig was located roughly 50 miles southeast of the coast of Louisiana, and was under lease to BP since 2007. It was completing the construction of a new oil well, and was constructing a layer of cement in the well to reinforce it. This is considered dangerous, as it has the potential to produce an uncontrolled release of case, called a blowout. While the cause of the explosion has yet to be determined, a blowout is considered a possibility.

One survivor of the explosion, who declined to give his name, told the The New York Times that he was laying in bed when the explosion happened. “It caught me by surprise. I’ve been in offshore 25 years, and I’ve never seen anything like that,” he recalled.

Stanley Murray, the father of another survivor named Chad, an electrician, said: “My son had just walked off the drill floor.” However, Murray said that a neighbor did not make it in time, adding that his son told him that the missing eleven workers could not have made it out alive. “The eleven that’s [sic] missing, they won’t find them,” Murray said.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

India is the latest of the countries where the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) experiment has started. Children from the village of Khairat were given the opportunity to learn how to use the XO laptop. During the last year XO was distributed to children from Arahuay in Peru, Ban Samkha in Thailand, Cardal in Uruguay and Galadima in Nigeria. The OLPC team are, in their reports on the startup of the trials, delighted with how the laptop has improved access to information and ability to carry out educational activities. Thailand’s The Nation has praised the project, describing the children as “enthusiastic” and keen to attend school with their laptops.

Recent good news for the project sees Uruguay having ordered 100,000 of the machines which are to be given to children aged six to twelve. Should all go according to plan a further 300,000 machines will be purchased by 2009 to give one to every child in the country. As the first to order, Uruguay chose the OLPC XO laptop over its rival from Intel, the Classmate PC. In parallel with the delivery of the laptops network connectivity will be provided to schools involved in the project.

The remainder of this article is based on Carla G. Munroy’s Khairat Chronicle, which is available from the OLPC Wiki. Additional sources are listed at the end.

Sunday, April 2, 2006

Claims in the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph that senior military officers of the United Kingdom will meet with government officials on Monday to discuss a US-led assault on Iran have been denied by the Ministry of Defence.

However, the Defence Correspondent for the BBC Paul Wood said that “US plans for a possible strike are thought to be at an advanced stage.” This echoes reports made in December by the influential German magazine Der Spiegel that, according to a report by intelligence expert Udo Ulfkotte, during a December 2005 visit to Ankara, Turkey, CIA Director Porter Goss asked Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for support in a potential air strike against the Iran’s recently infamous nuclear facilities, including the enrichment facility at Natanz. Der Spiegel goes on to say that, “More specifically, Goss is said to have asked Turkey to provide unfettered exchange of intelligence that could help with a mission.”

While speaking on British television channel ITV1 during her recent visit to the UK, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “We believe that diplomacy has a chance to work but we are going to work with whomever we can, in whatever form we can, diplomatically, to try and bring the Iranians around. Iran is not Iraq. I know that’s what’s on people’s minds. The circumstances are different.” However, she then added, “The president of the United States doesn’t take his options off the table.”

Also on the programme with Rice was Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary. After admitting that UN Security Council member Russia was uneasy regarding the Iran issue, he said, “They are worried about the possibility of the Iranians stirring up trouble for them, but they also share our high suspicions that Iran may be using its civil nuclear capability to develop a nuclear weapon and they do not want that.”

In the initial article, The Sunday Telegraph stated that “a high-level meeting will take place on Monday in the Ministry of Defence at which senior defence chiefs and government officials will consider the consequences of an attack on Iran.” The Ministry of Defence, (often abbreviated to MoD), later denied all the claims, and made it clear that there were absolutely no plans for a meeting of the kind described in the newspaper.

However, the article also went on to claim that an attack centred around removing Iran’s nuclear capabilities was inevitable if Tehran failed to accept the demands of the United Nations. Somewhat surprisingly, the MoD failed to comment on this point, merely stressing the false nature of the claims regarding the meeting supposedly set for tomorrow (Monday, April 3).

Regarding his country’s nuclear program, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is maintaining his defiant stance, alluding to the fact that Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was reaffirmed by the United Nations Security Council in its March 29, 2006 presidential statement, implies that Iran has as much right to press on with such technologies as any other nation which is party to the NPT.