If we have any readers that live near the cape please keep us updated on response from the Feds. We’re interested if they over re act and treat this as a “lab test” for martial law. I have a suspicion they may.

A huge traffic jam stretching at least 120 kilometres (75 miles) reappeared in northern China Thursday, with thousands of cargo trucks stuck in a bottleneck, state media said.

State television broadcast images of a long line of mostly cargo trucks inching slowly through Inner Mongolia on a major highway leading toward Beijing that has come to symbolise China’s serious traffic problem.

“You could say the highway has become a big parking lot,” a CCTV reporter at the scene said, estimating the number of vehicles stuck in the congestion at more than 10,000.

However, CCTV later said the congestion began to clear in the afternoon.

The stretch of highway linking Inner Mongolia and the northern province of Hebei with Beijing is among the nation’s busiest as the capital of more than 20 million people sucks in huge shipments of goods.

Gridlock has become a feature of the route recently, with blame falling on highway maintenance projects and accidents.

Traffic slowed to a snail’s pace in June and July for nearly a month, according to earlier press reports. In August, state media said some drivers were stuck in a huge traffic jam on the route for nine days.

The traffic subsequently cleared but has worsened again due to accidents and traffic restrictions imposed by authorities, CCTV said.

China has embarked in recent years on a huge expansion of its national road system but the volume traffic periodically overwhelms the grid.

According to government data, Beijing is on track to have five million cars on its roads by year’s end. The four-million mark was passed in December.

VERMILION BAY, LA (WAFB/AP) – The Coast Guard is on the scene of another oil rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Coklough said Mariner Energy, Inc., the Houston company that owns the rig, had deployed three firefighting vessels to the site and one already was in place fighting the blaze. The Coast Guard had reported that a 100-foot-wide oil sheen had been spotted near the platform, but now says there is no sign of an oil leak.

According to the Coast Guard, 13 people were on the platform when it caught fire Thursday morning. All 13 are accounted for and one injury was reported.

The workers will be taken to Terrebonne General Medical Center in Houma by helicopter to be fully checked out. Their conditions are unknown.

The rig is located about 90 miles south of Vermilion Bay and was still burning as of 12:45 p.m.

The Coast Guard said it received a call at 9:19 a.m. from a neighboring rig that Vermilion 380 was on fire. A helicopter pilot then reported at about 10 a.m. he saw 13 people floating in the water in special suits near a burning oil rig platform.

Rescue helicopters and Coast Guard cutters were immediately sent to the scene. The rig is in water about 340 feet deep. Mariner said this is a platform rig, not a drilling rig.

The company reported there were seven active wells on the platform and one caught fire, but all are now shut in. Mariner also reported the platform produced an average of 1,400 barrels of oil per day, as well as 1,800 barrels of natural gas each day.

Mariner says stored barrels were the ones that caught fire and that dispersants are on standby if needed.

United Steelworkers (USW) International Vice President Gary Beevers issued a statement concerning the fire.

“We are thankful that no one was killed in the explosion today of an offshore petroleum platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, one person was injured and that is one person too many,” he said.

“This latest explosion shows that we need to make sure all these rigs in the Gulf are safe to operate before we put personnel back to work on them. I would hate to see a worker killed in our haste to reopen the Gulf to drilling. We need to give the government adequate time to do its inspections and ensure adequate health and safety provisions are in place,” he explained.

“Meanwhile, adequate assistance needs to be given to offshore workers and the businesses impacted by the moratorium that resulted from the BP explosion and oil spill,” he added.

This recent explosion is west of the one that happened on April 20 which caused a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

(Reuters) – North Korea vowed to strengthen military ties with China on Wednesday, days after the North’s leader Kim Jong-il finished a visit aimed at bolstering the bond with his isolated country’s sole major supporter.

Comments from Kim Yong-nam, the second-ranked official in North Korea, highlighted the recent efforts of Pyongyang and Beijing to shore up their relationship in the face of regional tensions and possible succession moves in the North.

China confirmed on Monday that Kim Jong-il, who rarely leaves his country, visited for five days and told President Hu Jintao that he was willing to return to negotiations about scrapping the North’s nuclear weapons.

Kim Yong-nam told a visiting commander of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that the bond between the two neighbors has “shown great vitality,” China’s Xinhua news agency reported from Pyongyang.

Beijing has recently fretted about military exercises between the United States and South Korea, saying they threaten China’s security interests and could destabilize the region.

On Wednesday, the PLA navy was due to start artillery exercises in the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean peninsula.

Washington and Seoul plan to hold their own military exercise in international waters off the west coast of the Korean peninsula, a move the Pentagon has said is meant to show North Korea that Washington is committed to defending ally South Korea.

The September 5-9 naval drills are aimed largely at detecting and repelling North Korean submarines from infiltrating the South’s waters, a government official said.

The latest exercises follow Seoul’s pledge to take tough action against the North in the event of further provocations, after it accused Pyongyang of a submarine attack against one of its navy ships in March, killing 46 sailors.

Kim Yong-nam told visiting PLA commander Zhang Youxia that their two countries’ military forces should grow closer.

“In the future, North Korea will consolidate and develop exchanges and cooperation with China in every sphere, and make increasing efforts to strengthen friendly cooperation between our two militaries,” he told Zhang, commander of the PLA’s Shenyang military region, which adjoins North Korea, according to Xinhua.

Some foreign analysts believe Kim Jong-il may be seeking to line up China behind plans to install an heir apparent, possibly his son Kim Jong-un, at a rare political congress this month.

The bond between the two neighbors dates back to China’s support for North Korean communists and its support for the North in the Korean War of 1950-1953.

Kim said their “traditional friendship has withstood the test of history and shown great vitality.” Zhang met senior North Korean military leaders on Tuesday, said the report.

In 1961, Beijing and Pyongyang signed a treaty which calls for either to aid the other if attacked. It remains in force, but its potential application is ambiguous.

This was the big reason that the globalist’s had the conflict in Osetia on 8/8/08. It was because the pipeline runs through Osetia…a globalist puppet state. They knew if they could defeat the Russians there, or at least give them pause, they could stop this pipeline…they could not stop this pipeline…and now China has unlimited oil without going through any middle east country. A major coup.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, on Sunday opened a new pipeline to export east Siberian oil to China that will help Russia reorientate its oil trade towards the east.

The pipeline, running 67km from Skovorodino in east Siberia to China’s north-eastern frontier, is an offshoot of a new oil export route Russia is building to the Pacific Ocean, providing a strategic window on the fast-growing energy markets of Asia.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Russia’s ‘green oligarchs’ struggle – Aug-04
Russian energy industry facing fresh tax blow – Jul-15
Hayward reassures Russia after spill – Jun-28
Editorial: Caveat investor – Jun-25
Analysis: Russia: The third man – Jun-21
Medvedev rules out gas deal with Ukraine – May-17

“This is a vital project for us as we begin to diversify our sales of strategic raw materials,” Mr Putin said. “So far we have delivered most oil to Europe … The Asia-Pacific region has received insubstantial volumes.”

Russia began exporting oil this year from a new export terminal on the Pacific Ocean built to serve fields in east Siberia, one of the world’s last untapped oil provinces. Some Kremlin-friendly oil companies have been granted tax breaks to speed development of east Siberian reserves and offset a decline in production in other regions.

Transneft, the Russian oil pipeline monopoly, completed the construction of a pipeline from Taishet in the Irkutsk region to Skovorodino last year, the first stretch of a planned 2,757km pipeline to the Pacific. On completion in 2012, the pipeline will be capable of carrying up to 1.6m barrels of oil a day, about one-third of Russia’s current exports.

Russia Kozmino pipeline mapJulia Nanay, senior director at PFC Energy, the Washington-based oil consultancy, said the pipeline would give Russia flexibility to focus oil trade on premium markets. “There is more money to be made by exporting to Asia than to Europe. By building the spur to China, Russia is acknowledging commercial realities,” she said.

Russia accepted a $25bn (€19.6bn, £16bn) loan from China in exchange for future oil deliveries last year, cementing its energy-trading relations with the world’s fastest growing oil consumer. The deal entitles China to import 300,000 barrels a day of Russian oil for 20 years starting in 2011.

Transneft said last year that Russia would boost its daily oil production by 1m barrels to 11m b/d after 2012, providing enough oil for exports both ways.

But analysts have warned that Russian oil production, after rising to an all-time record of 10.2m b/d this month, will begin to fall next year as a decline accelerates at mature fields.

Fidel Castro has more reason than most to believe conspiracy theories involving dark forces in Washington. After all, the CIA tried to blow his head off with an exploding cigar.

But the ageing Cuban revolutionary may have gone too far for all but the most ardent believer in the reach and competence of America’s intelligence agency. He has claimed that Osama bin Laden is in the pay of the CIA and that President George Bush summoned up the al-Qaida leader whenever he needed to increase the fear quotient. The former Cuban president said he knows it because he has read WikiLeaks.

Castro told a visiting Lithuanian writer, who is known as a font of intriguing conspiracy theories about plots for world domination, that Bin Laden was working for the White House.

“Bush never lacked for Bin Laden’s support. He was a subordinate,” Castro said, according to the Communist party daily, Granma. “Any time Bush would stir up fear and make a big speech, Bin Laden would appear, threatening people with a story about what he was going to do.”

He said that thousands of pages of American classified documents made public by WikiLeaks pointed to who the al-Qaida leader is really working for.

“Who showed that he [Bin Laden] is indeed a CIA agent was WikiLeaks. It proved it with documents,” he said, but did not explain exactly how.

He made his comments during a meeting with Daniel Estulin, the author of three books about the secretive Bilderberg Club which includes men such as Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, leading European officials and business executives. Estulin says that the club is form of secret world government, manipulating economies and political systems.

Estulin offered his own views on Bin Laden: that the man seen in videos since 9/11 is not him at all but a “bad actor”.

However the two men did find something to disagree on.

Estulin has long argued that the human race will need to find another planet to live on because of overcrowding.

Castro was not keen. He observed that man had only made it to the moon, which is entirely unsuitable as a new home, and what lay beyond that was not much better. Better to fix things on earth.

“Humanity ought to take care of itself if it wants to live thousands more years,” he said.

RICHMOND, Calif.—California officials are outfitting preschoolers in Contra Costa County with tracking devices they say will save staff time and money.

The system was introduced Tuesday. When at the school, students will wear a jersey that has a small radio frequency tag. The tag will send signals to sensors that help track children’s whereabouts, attendance and even whether they’ve eaten or not.

School officials say it will free up teachers and administrators who previously had to note on paper files when a child was absent or had eaten.

Sung Kim of the county’s employment and human services department said the system could save thousands of hours of staff time and pay for itself within a year.

It cost $50,000 and was paid by a federal grant.

The US warned Lebanon that if it did not prevent any recurrence of the border-fire incident that occurred earlier this month, the IDF would destroy the Lebanese Armed Forces within four hours, Israel Radio cited a report by Lebanese newspaper A-Liwaa on Friday.

According to the report, Frederick Hoff, assistant to US Middle East Peace Envoy George Mitchell, told Lebanese Army chief of staff Jean Kahwaji that Israel was ready to implement a plan to destroy within four hours all Lebanese military infrastructure, including army bases and offices, should a similar confrontation occur in the future.

While Obama on vacation travels in a 20 armored car convoy. Putin’s driving himself cross country.

He has been pictured fighting fires, shooting whales with a crossbow and piloting a fire fighting plane

His latest endeavour is a slight departure from his usual macho pursuits.

The Russian Prime Minister is undertaking a 1,300-mile road trip across Russia’s far east in a humble Lada.

His journey is designed to showcase the completion of the country’s first ever continuous east to west road.

The trip is being chronicled by state media and comes after a blizzard of publicity for Mr Putin who in recent months has been filmed shooting whales with a crossbow, piloting an amphibious fire fighting plane, and riding a Harley-Davidson trike with a gang of leather-clad bikers.

His schedule has fuelled speculation that the 57-year old former KGB spy is out to boost his action man image ahead of a presidential election in 2012 though he has yet to confirm whether he will run for what would be his third term in the Kremlin.

Mr Putin got behind the wheel of a bright yellow Lada Kalina to drive from the far eastern city of Khabarovsk through a sparsely populated part of the country to Chita in Siberia.

Construction of a brand new 1,300 mile road between the two cities was recently completed almost five decades after construction first begun meaning it is now theoretically possible to drive across Russia on a continuous joined up network of roads.

Dressed in a casual polo shirt and wearing sunglasses, Mr Putin said he was keen to test the new road which he hailed as a “historic” moment in Russia’s history. “Our country, the largest in the world, has never in its history – never – been completely joined up by highways. Finally we have done it,” he said.

Mr Putin repeatedly praised the quality of the Lada car he was driving, giving valuable free publicity to the car’s struggling Russian manufacturer Avtovaz. However, he admitted he would not be personally driving the vehicle for the entire journey and would sometimes travel in his convoy of expensive foreign-made Jeeps.