Mayor to end Venezuelan oil deal
The mayor said there were better ways of benefiting Londoners
Boris Johnson will not renew an oil deal with Venezuela which provides cheap fuel for London’s buses once the agreement ends later this year.

The mayor of London said half-price bus and tram fares for 250,000 Londoners on income support, which was also funded by the deal, would still be honoured.

Mr Johnson said he thought many Londoners were uncomfortable with how the scheme was funded.

Former mayor Ken Livingstone signed the deal at City Hall in February.

In return, a team of officials from the Greater London Authority agreed to work in Venezuela advising on recycling, waste management, traffic and on reducing carbon emissions.

‘Extreme poverty’

Mr Johnson said: “I think many Londoners felt uncomfortable about the bus operation of one of the world’s financial powerhouses being funded by the people of a country where many people live in extreme poverty.

“I simply think there are better ways of benefiting Londoners and better ways of benefiting Venezuelans.”

He added: We will continue to offer the half-priced travel concession to Londoners on income support for the duration for which the deal was originally planned, and will continue to improve the capital’s transport system and ensure that it is accessible and able to meet the needs of all those who rely on it.”

The current deal is due to conclude on 20 August.

Mr Johnson also said the office set up in Caracas to oversee the deal would be closed, saving an estimated £67,000 per year in running and staff costs.

Oil reserves

Mr Livingstone said up to quarter of a million Londoners on low incomes would save at least £280 a year from the half-price fare scheme when he signed the deal.

London Assembly Conservatives attacked the agreement at the time saying the city should not be dealing with “third-rate South American dictators”.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the Americas, and its socialist president is the Bush administration’s fiercest critic in Latin America.

But in November 2005, it signed a deal with the US state of Massachusetts to provide cheap heating oil to poor households. Similar deals were also signed in Boston and New York.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england

Interesting post.

Adam

Chavez’s family protecting farc terrorist Ivan Marquez in Barinas State Venezuela.

I regret to inform you, when two nations clash, their is seldom any level of innocence on either side. I am also here to inform you the interpol has all of the technology needed to determine, when and what was put on that laptop, and normally that will indicate who.

I am so tired of you morally self-righteous hypocrites, you enjoy freedoms that others do not have, and you have the audacity to vocally support the tyrant that has taken those freedoms away, only because you have not seen it first hand, therefore it must not exist.

I remember well the look on my grandfathers face as he talked about liberating Europe and the horrid things we discovered only after we had beaten the Nazi’s

I can still smell the blood in the air from non-combatants being hit by haphazardly placed IED’s. I can still see in my mind the literally hundreds of mass graves mapped in the area’s saddam had butchered the kurds. I can hear the crying of the children in the aftermath of suicide bombers hitting soccer games on my last tour. I can still see the looks on the faces of the women and children as we passed through on patrol, the smiles and waves and the telling glances towards the cowards hiding in their midst that would do us harm.

Jodi, there is evil in the world, and you have obviously been fortunate enough to not witness it first hand, but that does not mean it does not exist.

War is horrible, that I can attest to, but it is not the most horrible. The degraded state of moral being that allows you to believe nothing is worth fighting for is.

I really paraphrased that last one.

My mother kept is simple, she was the daughter of a warrior, the wife of a warrior and the mother of a future warrior. she was washing the dishes and listening to the news, when I questioned the necessity of war.

she looked me straight in the eye and said “son, peace is simple really, all you have to do is sit down, shut up, and take what is given to you”

I then understood that some things are worth war.

Did we bomb Venezuela? if we did, i am disappointed we didn’t smart bomb chavez while we were at it.

Thank you, and if you would care for having a third party dismantle the posting of 19.May at 11:44pm point-by-point, I would be more than happy to do so.

I trust also that a message (e-mail) I had forwarded to you did get to you, yes?

I made some more comments in this thread and also posted a new TECH TUESDAY. FYI.

Adam

You need to step back and look at yourself. I have done nothing to promote a so-called Bush agenda. We have spent considerable time under difficult circumstances in Venezuela in recent months and what we have reported is exactly what we have seen, not what anyone has told us to report. To insinuate that the U.S. did the bombing and that Ecuador and Venezuela are innocent bystanders is ludicrous. You are blind to the obvious and I hope one day you will see the truth that is clearly staring you in the face.

Adam

I love abalone and on a more serious note, am still closely following the warden situation.

Adam

By the way, calling them “crazy”, or “stupid”, does you a greater disservice than it does to them. Almost without exception, the leadership of such groups is neither by anything but the most modern definitions. I would agree that what makes a good gang leader, (or business CEO, or presidential candidate) includes a number of features that taken out of context could be considered mental disorders in modern day. They were even grounds for accusations in the near-modern era…

Here’s an unsettling example: American President A. Lincoln is considered “…supremely capable of enduring the criticism of others, and even of society” (paraphrase), yet even in his time he was accused of being everything from “powerhungry” to having “authoritarian contempt for the rule of law” to even being called variations on “insane”.

There *is* a reason: Gangsterism is one of the most successful (if anti-social) forms of human organization, you know. You might want to look up “Autocracy” as a leadership form, too.

(to those of you quick to note this is an oversimplification, yes, I know most factions/gangs are oligarchies by structure)

oh, and check your e-mail, please.

I just looked at Karina’s picture because when I looked at it earlier today, some one kept just going through my head- voila! Angela Davis– she sort of looks like her but with shorter hair!

My thoughts to FARC, Al Qaeda, Taliban, et al– they have the mentality of gang members but with more ammo! And of course, the main man as gangs have!

These are not crazy– they are just plain stupid! LOL

well there is one of the FARC women we were talking about months ago!

this house of cards is going down!!!

I found the story behind the abalone to be interesting– never knew abalone had a history! Or I had never even thought about abalone!

the things I learn here!

xxx

Another FARC high-level leader has given up. “Karina” has surrendered, according to the BBC. Here is the AP version, via FOXNews:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,356550,00.html

that was an interesting article! very…

off topic- James Swan– Murder in the First— That was a great movie!!!!! One of the best movies I have seen– forgot about that movie (James Swan was mentioned in your post)

In the meantime, I am running some errands. I know you care.

Adam
————————————————————————————————————

I care but you forgot to say hi to Rebeca! (From Venezuela) Where are your manners?

Updated: May 15, 2008, 11:54 AM ET

If you walk into a sushi bar and order awabi, chances are you are going to shell out some coin, as awabi is sushi made from a dinner plate-sized sea snail — the abalone, or “sea ear” — a distant relative of octopus, clams and squid, that has a “foot” about an inch thick and the size of your hand, and is worth as much as $60–$100 each.

Abalone are in the family Haliotidae and the Haliotis genus. The most primitive of mollusks, they originated in Cambrian Period 500 million years ago. On the West Coast they are found from the Aleutian Islands to Pt. Conception north of Santa Barbara.

Abalone is prized for the unique flavor of its edible gray, tan, or even blue “foot,” which in the Orient is believed to have aphrodisiac powers, and for its mother-of-pearl inner shell. Species are found around the world, but most prefer cold ocean waters — off New Zealand, South Africa, North American Pacific coast, Tasmania and Australia — along a rocky shoreline out to depths of 300 feet.

West Coast Indians were harvesting abalone when the Spanish arrived. Recreational fishery regulations began in 1911. Up until the 1970s, Californians enjoyed no annual limits on several species of abalone: red, pink, green, white (endangered species), black, flat, pinto and threaded. Picking was allowed south of San Francisco, no tags were required and there was a thriving commercial fishery along the coast. Today only red abalone is legal.

Red abalone reach sexual maturity in 2–3 years and legal size (7 inches) in 6–12 years. They can live up to 15 years. The shell has several respiratory holes for breathing. Big shells go 9 inches across, and the largest ever caught was said to be a foot across.

Abalone are very prolific broadcast spawners, producing 3 million eggs at a time. Twenty-four hours after fertilization, a trophophore larva develops, which hides among the rocks.

Along the California coast, regulation of commercial fishery began in 1901. The commercial fishery peaked in 1950s and ’60s, when 4–5 million pounds a year were harvested.

All commercial harvesting for wild abalone closed in 1997.

In Japan, abalone are cultivated commercially and over 16,000 metric tons are harvested annually. Commercial abalone for restaurants is produced via mariculture in the US.

Abalone fishing south of San Francisco was closed in 1997. California’s Sonoma-Mendocino County coast has one of the last viable populations of red abalone in the world, but continued poaching has put great pressure on these dinner-plate- sized mollusks. Pickers look for red abalone in rocky coastal areas with abundant kelp, which is what the big sea snails feed on.

James Swan

Harvesters display their catch of abalone at a checkpoint.
The abalone sport season, open only north of San Francisco Bay, runs from April 1 through June 30 and from Aug. 1 through Nov. 30. The minimum legal size is a shell 7 inches across. There is no commercial fishery for abs, no scuba diving for abs, and the limits have dropped from 10 to three per day, down from 100 per year to 24 — and only red abalone are legal.

You must also pry the abs off a rock with a metal abalone iron as you either walk among rocks or swim offshore and free dive, placing your catch in a float tube, or an ocean kayak.

As soon as you climb out of the water you must attach a tag on each abalone through a respiration hole in the shell and mark the date and place on your report card accordingly.

When the tides are low, pickers and divers swarm the coast, competing with octopus, crabs, lobster, sea stars, wolf eel, bat ray, mink and sea otters for abalone.

One reason for a decline in abalone south of San Francisco is the return of the sea otter: For some reason, probably the abundance of great white sharks, sea otters have never come back north of the Golden Gate, resulting in an abnormal abundance of abalone in those waters. In 2006, 32,500 licensed fishermen took 264,000 abs and spent $10 million along the north coast.

Boats, planes, surveillance, citizen volunteer watchers and abalone checkpoints are all used by the Department of Fish and Game to control human poachers. The coast is large, wardens are scarce, and when the tides are minus, pickers are everywhere. Sonoma County has a very active citizen volunteer watch network, SCAN, a model of citizens working with wardens to control poaching.

On May 8, 2008, working on a documentary, my son and I videoed wardens manning a checkpoint at Boonville in Mendocino County. High tide was about 9 a.m., and by 9:30 the parking lot of the County Fairgrounds was jumping with carloads of abalone pickers and divers on their way home, letting wardens see their abalone, sea urchins, periwinkles, and rockfish.

James Swan

Abalone isn’t always the only thing intercepted at the checkpoints. This man has 47 pounds of kelp in a garbage bag, when the limit is 10.
According to Lt. Dennis McKiver, about 100 cars were checked in a three-hour period, resulting in 33 citations issued for limit overages, undersized abalone, prematurely removing abs from the shell and not tagging abs in possession.

Probably the strangest violation of the day was a guy with some kelp. It is legal to harvest kelp, but only 10 pounds a day. This guy had 47 pounds, stuffed into a plastic garbage bag.

And this was a weekday.

On one weekend in 2007, DFG operated two vehicle checkpoints in Boonville and Highway 1 in Sonoma County, inspecting a total of 552 vehicles. Wardens issued a total of 107 citations and confiscated 144 illegal abalone. Around the same time, two poachers south of the Golden Gate were nabbed with 122 black abs — an illegal place and protected species. At Fort Bragg, a commercial fishing boat was found with over 400 abalone stashed in the hold.

Wild abalone cannot be sold commercially in California, yet they can fetch between $60 and $100 each on the black market, depending on the size. Because abalone are so valuable, abalone poachers are increasingly organized, and often combine dealing illegal abs with dealing drugs.

“Operation Hat Trick,” nabbed a ring of seven poachers working the Sonoma coast: Divers had several changes of gear; buddies and friends all bought fishing licenses. The purloined abalone were being sold out of a San Jose beauty parlor. One of California Fish and Game Wardens Special Operations Undercover Unit posed as a customer having her hair done during a time when a fresh shipment came in, to be able to get the goods on the sellers.

Sitting in on the briefing for the takedown, the SOU leader for “Operation Hat Trick,” said, “When you go in, look for money — because these guys have not made a deposit in months. They should be loaded. Look everywhere, even in their underwear drawers.”

And guess where the piggy bank containing $11,000 in cash was stashed?

Penalties for exceeding the bag limit on abalone, etc. are not huge, but by taking the time to get the goods on a group of people working together to sell abalone, you have a felony conspiracy case which translates into thousands of dollars of fines, confiscated gear, loss of fishing licenses for years, and jail time.

In June of 2006, Bob’s Sushi House at San Francisco’s Fishermen’s Wharf area was caught by SOU buying illegal wild abalone. Today Bob’s is closed and bums sleep on the steps of what was once an upscale eatery where awabi was a house special.

James Swan — who has appeared in more than a dozen feature films, including “Murder in the First” and “Star Trek: First Contact,” as well as the television series “Nash Bridges,” “Midnight Caller” and “Modern Marvels” — is the author of the book “In Defense of Hunting.” Click to purchase a copy. To learn more about Swan, visit his Web site.

http://sports.

Be well and safe, All
((departs))

I went back through this thread and made some comments. I am going to post a cool ‘Sports on Sunday’ post later today (tonight for some). I was at a cool fundraiser yesterday and I will pass along the info. In the meantime, I am running some errands. I know you care.

Adam

Keep em coming. I haven’t given up on this story…promise!

Adam

Well I guess with that reporter, better late then never. We’ve been talking about the drug subs and the story for nearly two years.

Adam