

















Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Suspected Taliban militants have executed a 7-year-old boy, accusing him of spying for the government, officials in southern Afghanistan said Thursday.
The execution took place Tuesday in the Sangin district of Helmand province, said Dawoud Ahmadi -- the provincial governor's spokesman.
In the past, militants have carried out similar killings of those accused of spying, Ahmadi said.
Three years ago, a 70-year-old woman and a child in the Musa Qala district of the province were executed following the same allegations, he said.
During a news conference Thursday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said officials were looking into reports of the execution and said he condemned the act if it is confirmed to be true.
"I don't think there's a crime bigger than that that even the most inhuman forces on earth can commit," Karzai said. "A 7-year-old boy cannot be a spy. A 7-year-old boy cannot be anything but a 7-year-old boy, and therefore hanging or shooting to kill a 7-year-old boy ... is a crime against humanity."







HOUSTON — Oil giant BP PLC is floating a financial lifeline to the owners, operators and suppliers of the gas stations around America that bear its name and have been struggling because of boycotts prompted by the Gulf spill.
The head of a trade group that represents distributors of BP gasoline in the U.S. told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the company is informing outlets that they will be getting cash in their pockets, reductions in credit card fees and help with more national advertising.
The cash component will be based on distributors' volume and will be higher for outlets along the Gulf Coast than for those elsewhere in the country, said John Kleine of the BP Amoco Marketers Association.
"They are going to get a check," Kleine said. "They're being given these dollars for use in their business."
He estimates the total package BP is offering at roughly $50 million to $70 million.
Some BP-branded gas stations have reported sales declines of 10 percent to 40 percent from Florida to Illinois since the April 20 rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.
BP owns just a fraction of the more than 11,000 stations across the U.S. that sell its fuel under the BP, Amoco and ARCO banners. Most are owned by local businessmen whose primary connection to the oil company is the logo and a contract to buy gasoline.
Distributors would still be free to sue BP and seek compensation from the $20 billion compensation fund if they choose, Kleine said.
BP spokesman Scott Dean confirmed in an e-mail to the AP that the package includes volume allowances and reductions in credit card fees that merchants pay when customers use their credit cards to buy gasoline and items in station stores.
"Teams of BP staff are also being deployed to help these independent businesspeople activate consumer loyalty programs at their sites to help retain consumers and to educate them on BP's response plan in the Gulf of Mexico," Dean said. "BP will continue to evaluate the programs and offers as the situation and environment evolves."
Dean added that BP is rolling out a marketing and advertising package that includes "Locally Owned, Locally Operated" media and marketing support such as point of purchase signage, radio, flyers, posters and postcards.
As to the compensation fund, BP spokeswoman Debra Reed said previously that the overseer of the fund has stated that anyone is welcome to file a claim.
Whether or not it is valid is up to the administrator.
Kleine said the 475 BP distributors in the U.S., many of whom own or operate BP-branded gas stations, were being notified directly by the company. Calls began Monday and would likely continue through Wednesday, Kleine said.
The cash will be used by the distributors how they see fit, according to Kleine, who said the money could result in discounts to consumers at BP-branded pumps. Some distributors may use the money to bolster their bottom lines, which have been affected because of the boycotts.
"There's a lot of variance in terms of the business effect of this incident," Kleine said. "To try to manage this nationally, it's just too big of an elephant. They recognized that the people that have the best knowledge and can apply the resources best are the local distributors."
Ready for this one? We may have Kevin Costner to thank for solving the Gulf Coast's oil spill crisis. Of course, Mr. Dances With Wolves isn't working alone. James Cameron and Robert Redford are also lending some much needed (albeit curiously qualified) hands to the cause…
Here's the deal: Earlier this month, Costner unveiled an oil-cleaning device to which he has devoted 15 years and $24 million to a mightily impressed and, let's be honest, somewhat flabbergasted, public. Costner came up with the device, which basically filters oil out of water—novel idea, huh?—while filming Waterworld.
(He purchased the technology, first developed by the Department of Energy after the disastrous Exxon Valdez spill.)
This week, since it has no other ideas, BP OK'd preliminary testing on "the Costner solution." The company and the U.S. Coast Guard will test six of the oil separators next week.
"It's not anymore about talk," Costner said this month while unveiling the project his team of scientists have spent the better part of two decades finessing. "It's about doing the walk, and that phrase was probably invented down here."
And lest you think Costner is just the bizarrely-chosen face of this project, think again.
"Yes, Kevin is a star, but he took his stardom and wrote all the checks for this project out of his own pocket," business partner and Louisiana attorney John Houghtaling told the Los Angeles Times .
Still confused? You're in good company. Well, company.
"It certainly is an odd thing to see a 'Kevin Costner' and a 'centrifugal oil separator' together in a place like the Gulf of Mexico," Stephen Baldwin, who himself is making a documentary about the oil spill, told the paper.
Yeah, almost as odd as seeing a "Stephen Baldwin" and a "documentary about the oil spill" together in one place. His funding alone boggles the mind .
"But, hey, some of the best ideas sometimes come from the strangest places."
Like, say, the biggest movie of all time?
Cameron has also offered up the use of his underwater vessels should they prove helpful in cleaning up the environmental disaster, while Redford has pitched in to help, too, appearing in a commercial for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is hoping to use the horrific disaster as a wake-up call for the government to get real on finding and using clean energy sources.
BP OK's test of Costner's oil-cleaning device
Kevin Costner's water cleansing machine.
wwltv.com
Posted on May 18, 2010 at 3:32 PM
Updated Wednesday, May 19 at 11:27 AM
NEW ORLEANS ? Kevin Costner's oil cleaning device is in the wilderness no more.
Workers contracted by BP cleaned oil from the beach Thursday on Grand Isle, La.
The government has been harshly criticized by scientists for underestimating the rate of the flow and for what appears to be its reluctance to force BP, the oil giant that owned the lease on the well, to more precisely measure the rate at which oil was gushing from the pipe into the gulf. The company’s liability is in part determined by the extent of the spill.
President Obama, speaking at a White House news conference on Thursday, admitted that his administration, in dealing with BP officials, “should have pushed them sooner,” to release images that would have helped in estimating the flow rate.
“There was a lag of several weeks that I think — that I think shouldn’t have happened,” Mr. Obama said.
But he also stressed that the lower estimates “didn’t change what our response was.”
“As I said from the start, we understood that this could be really bad,” he said.
If the new estimate is accurate, as much as 30 million gallons of oil may already have poured into the gulf over 37 days — nearly triple the amount spilled when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989. But that amount is still smaller than the nearly 140 million gallons of oil spilled into the gulf over nine months by the Mexican rig Ixtoc I in 1979, the world’s largest accidental release of oil. That fact, however, will do little to allay fears that a massive cloud of oil swirling below the surface of the gulf will continue to wreak environmental and economic damage for months, if not years to come.
The National Incident Command’s Flow Rate Technical Group, a collection of government and independent researchers formed last week in response to criticism of the lower estimates, based its new figures on an analysis of surface oil, undersea video of the leaks, computer modeling and other data.
Outside scientists said Thursday that the new estimate did not surprise them. “That range is an interval that many people have long been thinking the magnitude really is,” said Jeffrey Short, a former scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who now works for the environmental group Oceana.
He said the continuing fallout from the spill, which has already begun fouling beaches along the Louisiana coast and devastated the local fishing industry — will depend on the extent and behavior of giant plumes of oil and water that appear to be suspended deep below the surface.
A team of scientists from the University of South Florida, which has been studying the underwater plume, said Thursday that they had identified dissolved oil throughout a wide area of the deepwater of the gulf and suggested that a “limb” of an undersea plume was spreading northeast toward the continental shelf.
In the worst case, scientists say, the cloud could threaten precious coral reefs along the Florida Keys, contaminate the food web and affect a variety of species forced to migrate through it.
“Much depends on where the oil goes,” said Dr. Short, who added that there was meager data on how such plumes behaved. “This is pretty new territory,” he said.
Criticism of the official estimates began within a week of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. For several days, government and BP officials claimed that the leak from the well was about 1,000 barrels a day.
On April 27, the group SkyTruth, which uses satellite images to monitor environmental problems, estimated the flow rate to be at least 5,000 barrels a day — and probably much higher.
Over objections from BP, the government quickly raised its own estimate to 5,000 barrels a day — but based the measurement on techniques that other scientists said were not suitable for measuring large undersea spills. Both the government and BP have since said that the early figures were just estimates.
In Washington, Congressional investigators said Thursday that an internal BP document suggested that the company had used the lower-end estimate of 1,000 barrels a day when the upper end was 14,000 barrels per day — roughly the flow rate federal researchers have now arrived at more than a month later.
At a hearing of a house subcommittee, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, asked BP America’s chairman, Lamar McKay, if the company had a financial interest in maintaining the impression of a smaller leak.
Mr. McKay said that he did not know, but that it did not matter, and that BP would pay for all legitimate claims and clean up all the oil it could, no matter what the flow had been.
In a telephone interview after the hearing, Mr. Markey noted that under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, companies face fines of up to $1,000 per barrel, or up to $3,000 per barrel in the case of gross negligence. For BP, he said, the potential fine for 1,000 barrels per day over 37 days of spillage would be on the order of $37 million at $1,000 a barrel, compared with $1.5 billion in fines for the upper estimate of 14,000 barrels per day at $3,000 a barrel.
Hey, LMers. ( edit: LMers refers to Local Motors Members) As promised, here is a first in a series of interviews with Detroiters. Today we hone in on Peter Archer, aka stingraysstudios to you.
I
asked Peter questions that definitely spurred inspiring answers; we owe
him a debt of gratitude for his willingness to share! I also asked
questions that may have hit a few nerves, but he answered eloquently
and passionately, and I find that his opinion mirrors a few other
Detroiters that I know (see question #6). I know many who would
disagree as well. But, our objective is to gain perspective; a
Detroiter's perspective. So read on :
This
is a single Detroit point of view, and we will have more to come!
Tomorrow we will interview Larry Edsall; he is a prolific auto writer
who was an editor at Auto Week, and the writer of several fantastic
design books.
^ Local Motors Rallye Fighter - designed by SANGHO KIM & the Open Source Design Community at localmotors.com
^ CLICK ON THE ARTWORK ABOVE & GO TO LOCAL MOTORS WEBSITE & SEE STINGRAYSSTUDIOS WORK THERE !
1.) AF: Hi,
Peter! Thank you for taking the time to share your vision of Detroit
with the community. Can you tell us how much time you spent in Detroit,
and whether you still consider it to be home?
PA: I
was born in Detroit, so it will always be "home" for me, Growing up
there ( in the 1960's) was a great place for a "kid" of my interests in
Auto Design, Motor Racing & Music...or perhaps it was Because of
Detroit that I grew into these interests as they are all "native" to
the Detroit area. The area I grew up in was Franklin Village, an
"upscale community" in that time, which was home to many of the Big 3
auto executives & I lived there until I was 16, when my family then
moved to Ft; Lauderdale, Fl... which is where I live today.
Franklin
was a very unique "village" as it has a center street where there was a
Cider Mill, Meat Market, Church, Kindergarten School, Hardware store
& that was it !.The Cider Mill was built in the 1800's had a giant
wooden wheel that turned water from the stream behind up into the mill
mashing the apples into make Cider, they also made fresh donuts every
Sunday & people drove from miles around to come there after Church.
It was a very close little community & a good place for a kid to
grow up.





