Danish Entrepreneurship Growing

From the Copenhagen Post, some encouraging news about entrepreneurship!
http://denmark.dk/portal/page?_pageid=374,502337&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL&ic_itemid=918571

Programme encourages students to become their own boss

A pilot project is to help university students start their own company while studying

Helping young entrepreneurs start their own company is the goal of 'Student Company', a pilot project that gives university students practical experience in running their own business.

In addition to earning money and supplementing their CV, students who have their own company focus their studies better, said project leader Martin B. Justesen to daily newspaper Urban.

'You transfer your knowledge while you study and make wiser decisions. Students can use their time at school to study what customers are asking for,' he said. 'We've also established a formal network for student companies. We've recruited 120 members in one month.'
The project kicks off on 1 March at Copenhagen Business School, supported by the Danish Entrepreneurial Society, the International Danish Entrepreneurship Academy, and Selvstaendighedsfonden, a foundation supporting new entrepreneurs.

Similar inspirational meetings are planned throughout spring at Copenhagen University, Denmark's Technical University, Roskilde University, and the IT University of Copenhagen.

Michael Clausen, who studies computer science at Copenhagen Business School, has already begun his own company, Contentcube, together with two fellow students. Clausen, 21, felt the time was ripe to start the company, which provides a system for maintaining websites.

'University is a good time to start a company, because you hands aren't tied by family responsibilities,' said Clausen. 'In reality I have two full-time jobs. When my classmates are watching the news on TV, I'm working on my project."

Behind the cartoon war: radical clerics competing for followers | csmonitor.com

Most times, waiting things out can help you gain proper perspective on a hot situation or issue. Such is the case with the violence and bloodshed being committed by Muslims across Europe, Asia and the Middle East, allegedly over 12 satirical cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper 6 months ago.

As it turns out, it is a cover for radical European Muslim leaders who want to force moderate Muslims into coming under their authority. Read it here in the Christian Science Monitor:

Behind the cartoon war: radical clerics competing for followers csmonitor.com

Why I Published Those Cartoons

Why I Published Those Cartoons
By Flemming Rose
Sunday, February 19, 2006

Childish. Irresponsible. Hate speech. A provocation just for the sake of provocation. A PR stunt. Critics of 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad I decided to publish in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten have not minced their words. They say that freedom of expression does not imply an endorsement of insulting people's religious feelings, and besides, they add, the media censor themselves every day. So, please do not teach us a lesson about limitless freedom of speech.

I agree that the freedom to publish things doesn't mean you publish everything. Jyllands-Posten would not publish pornographic images or graphic details of dead bodies; swear words rarely make it into our pages. So we are not fundamentalists in our support for freedom of expression.

But the cartoon story is different.

Those examples have to do with exercising restraint because of ethical standards and taste; call it editing. By contrast, I commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam. And I still believe that this is a topic that we Europeans must confront, challenging moderate Muslims to speak out. The idea wasn't to provoke gratuitously -- and we certainly didn't intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.

At the end of September, a Danish standup comedian said in an interview with Jyllands-Posten that he had no problem urinating on the Bible in front of a camera, but he dared not do the same thing with the Koran.

This was the culmination of a series of disturbing instances of self-censorship. Last September, a Danish children's writer had trouble finding an illustrator for a book about the life of Muhammad. Three people turned down the job for fear of consequences. The person who finally accepted insisted on anonymity, which in my book is a form of self-censorship. European translators of a critical book about Islam also did not want their names to appear on the book cover beside the name of the author, a Somalia-born Dutch politician who has herself been in hiding.

Around the same time, the Tate gallery in London withdrew an installation by the avant-garde artist John Latham depicting the Koran, Bible and Talmud torn to pieces. The museum explained that it did not want to stir things up after the London bombings. (A few months earlier, to avoid offending Muslims, a museum in Goteborg, Sweden, had removed a painting with a sexual motif and a quotation from the Koran.)

Finally, at the end of September, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen met with a group of imams, one of whom called on the prime minister to interfere with the press in order to get more positive coverage of Islam.

So, over two weeks we witnessed a half-dozen cases of self-censorship, pitting freedom of speech against the fear of confronting issues about Islam. This was a legitimate news story to cover, and Jyllands-Posten decided to do it by adopting the well-known journalistic principle: Show, don't tell. I wrote to members of the association of Danish cartoonists asking them "to draw Muhammad as you see him." We certainly did not ask them to make fun of the prophet. Twelve out of 25 active members responded.

We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.

The cartoons do not in any way demonize or stereotype Muslims. In fact, they differ from one another both in the way they depict the prophet and in whom they target. One cartoon makes fun of Jyllands-Posten, portraying its cultural editors as a bunch of reactionary provocateurs. Another suggests that the children's writer who could not find an illustrator for his book went public just to get cheap publicity. A third puts the head of the anti-immigration Danish People's Party in a lineup, as if she is a suspected criminal.

One cartoon -- depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban -- has drawn the harshest criticism. Angry voices claim the cartoon is saying that the prophet is a terrorist or that every Muslim is a terrorist. I read it differently: Some individuals have taken the religion of Islam hostage by committing terrorist acts in the name of the prophet. They are the ones who have given the religion a bad name. The cartoon also plays into the fairy tale about Aladdin and the orange that fell into his turban and made his fortune. This suggests that the bomb comes from the outside world and is not an inherent characteristic of the prophet.

On occasion, Jyllands-Posten has refused to print satirical cartoons of Jesus, but not because it applies a double standard. In fact, the same cartoonist who drew the image of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban drew a cartoon with Jesus on the cross having dollar notes in his eyes and another with the star of David attached to a bomb fuse. There were, however, no embassy burnings or death threats when we published those.

Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn't intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

This is exactly why Karl Popper, in his seminal work "The Open Society and Its Enemies," insisted that one should not be tolerant with the intolerant. Nowhere do so many religions coexist peacefully as in a democracy where freedom of expression is a fundamental right. In Saudi Arabia, you can get arrested for wearing a cross or having a Bible in your suitcase, while Muslims in secular Denmark can have their own mosques, cemeteries, schools, TV and radio stations.

I acknowledge that some people have been offended by the publication of the cartoons, and Jyllands-Posten has apologized for that. But we cannot apologize for our right to publish material, even offensive material. You cannot edit a newspaper if you are paralyzed by worries about every possible insult.

I am offended by things in the paper every day: transcripts of speeches by Osama bin Laden, photos from Abu Ghraib, people insisting that Israel should be erased from the face of the Earth, people saying the Holocaust never happened. But that does not mean that I would refrain from printing them as long as they fell within the limits of the law and of the newspaper's ethical code. That other editors would make different choices is the essence of pluralism.

As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders. That is what happened to human rights activists and writers such as Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, Boris Pasternak. The regime accused them of anti-Soviet propaganda, just as some Muslims are labeling 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper anti-Islamic.

The lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow. The West prevailed in the Cold War because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease totalitarian tyrants.

Since the Sept. 30 publication of the cartoons, we have had a constructive debate in Denmark and Europe about freedom of expression, freedom of religion and respect for immigrants and people's beliefs. Never before have so many Danish Muslims participated in a public dialogue -- in town hall meetings, letters to editors, opinion columns and debates on radio and TV. We have had no anti-Muslim riots, no Muslims fleeing the country and no Muslims committing violence. The radical imams who misinformed their counterparts in the Middle East about the situation for Muslims in Denmark have been marginalized. They no longer speak for the Muslim community in Denmark because moderate Muslims have had the courage to speak out against them.

In January, Jyllands-Posten ran three full pages of interviews and photos of moderate Muslims saying no to being represented by the imams. They insist that their faith is compatible with a modern secular democracy. A network of moderate Muslims committed to the constitution has been established, and the anti-immigration People's Party called on its members to differentiate between radical and moderate Muslims, i.e. between Muslims propagating sharia law and Muslims accepting the rule of secular law. The Muslim face of Denmark has changed, and it is becoming clear that this is not a debate between "them" and "us," but between those committed to democracy in Denmark and those who are not.

This is the sort of debate that Jyllands-Posten had hoped to generate when it chose to test the limits of self-censorship by calling on cartoonists to challenge a Muslim taboo. Did we achieve our purpose? Yes and no. Some of the spirited defenses of our freedom of expression have been inspiring. But tragic demonstrations throughout the Middle East and Asia were not what we anticipated, much less desired. Moreover, the newspaper has received 104 registered threats, 10 people have been arrested, cartoonists have been forced into hiding because of threats against their lives and Jyllands-Posten's headquarters have been evacuated several times due to bomb threats. This is hardly a climate for easing self-censorship.

Still, I think the cartoons now have a place in two separate narratives, one in Europe and one in the Middle East. In the words of the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the integration of Muslims into European societies has been sped up by 300 years due to the cartoons; perhaps we do not need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again in Europe. The narrative in the Middle East is more complex, but that has very little to do with the cartoons.

flemming.rose@jp.dk

Flemming Rose is the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Not All Muslims Shun Depictions of Mohammed

Some clarification on the issue of images of the prophet Mohammed:

Assyrian International News Agency

In the aftermath of Jyllands-Posten's cartoons, as the Danish government and European media face death and mayhem designed to undercut freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion, we should rid ourselves of certain misconceptions. One is that Islam forbids any visual portrayal of Mohammed; another is that such depictions of Mohammed are extremely unusual. There is a strong tradition within Islam that making portraits of Mohammed is wrong, but it is by no means universal. Some, especially Shiites, believe it is legitimate. Others believe that it is legitimate to portray him when he was young, before becoming a prophet.

Despite its rulers' current fulminations, Iran itself is full of pictures of Mohammed. While devout Shiites more often wear a pendant bearing a picture of Ali, a Companion of the Prophet central to the development of Shiism, it is not uncommon for them to wear one bearing Mohammed's face. Depictions of the Prophet also appear on major buildings, including mosques, and even on small kiosks selling cigarettes. For believers, they are certainly a real sign of devotion, but at the same time they are an implicit subversion of the regime. Like Stalin or Saddam Hussein have done, Iran's dictators demand that those they rule subject themselves to the idolatrous image of the Supreme Leader, whether the Ayatollah Khomeini or current Ayatollah Khamenei, by putting their stern visages in their homes, offices, and shops. In the face of this repression, a picture of the Prophet is a rebuke to those who put themselves in his place.

You can also find numerous portrayals of Mohammed in medieval Afghan, Uzbek, Ottoman, and, especially, Persian Islamic art. In some of these, especially the Ottoman ones, Mohammed's face is hidden or blank, but there are also many detailed, and often quite exquisite, full portraits illustrating his life. The University of Edinburgh has a miniature of "Mohammed re-dedicating the Black Stone at the Kaaba," which is taken from the Jami Al-Tawarikh, "The Universal History," written by Rashid Al-Din and illustrated c. 1315, as well as a "Birth of the Prophet Muhammad," taken from the Jami' al-tavarikh, "Compendium of Chronicles," dated c. 1314-15 (Edinburgh University Library). France's Bibliotheque Nationale has a "Mohammed meets the prophets Ismail, Is-hak and Lot in paradise" and a "Mohammed arrives on the shores of the White Sea," both taken from the Apocalypse of Muhammad, written in 1436 in Herat, Afghanistan.

If you don't want to travel so far, then visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see "The Night Journey of Muhammad on His Steed, Buraq," a leaf from a copy of the Bustan of Sacdi, dated 1514, Bukhara, Uzbekistan, or "Muhammad's Call to Prophecy and the First Revelation" and the "Journey of the Prophet Muhammad," both leaves from the Majmac al-tawarikh, "Compendium of Histories," from Herat, Afghanistan c 1425. Or you can look at them in the catalog here and here).

Portrayals of Mohammed are also common in Western art, especially in book illustrations, especially in France. William Blake, Auguste Rodin, and Salvador Dali produced such paintings, and shocking ones at that, since they illustrate the most famous Western depiction of Mohammed, a literary one -- the description in Dante's Inferno XXVIII, 19-24, of Mohammed in the 8th circle of hell, with his entrails drawn out.

There are also media depictions. Time and Newsweek have both run pictures of Mohammed in recent years, for which they faced some demonstrations and had issues banned in some countries, but nothing on the scale of the Jyllands-Posten attacks. On July 4, 2001, South Park aired an episode, "Super Best Friends", depicting Mohammed, along with other founders of major religions, as super heroes who join forces to fight evil (episode online here).

Further afield, many Shriners' halls have such pictures, and, perhaps of most interest to Americans, the north frieze on the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., features a bas-relief where Mohammed is shown as a law-giver. He holds a book and a scimitar and stands between Charlemagne and Justinian, and along the way from Hugo Grotius, William Blackstone, and John Marshall (pdf of Supreme Court friezes here). (By the way, Michael Newdow, who had challenged the constitutionality of the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance also launched a lawsuit against the constitutionality of the friezes.)

Some media outlets, such as the Boston Globe and CNN, have hesitated to show the cartoons since they do in fact offend Muslims, while the BBC has apologized for the distant image it did show. Of course, these outlets are outstandingly hypocritical since, in the past, they have shown no qualms about displaying images offensive to Christians and others. But, hypocrisy aside, their current position is defensible. In itself, it is good not to offend others' religious beliefs.

The situation we now face is a grave one. Remember that Jyllands-Posten first ran the cartoons to accompany an article asking "Do we still have press freedom?" after Danish children's writer, Kåre Bluitgen, could not find an illustrator for a book on Mohammed of the type published countless times previously in the West. Authoritarian regimes such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Libya, as well as radical Islamists, are currently seeking by violence to impose their press restrictions on the rest of the world. The way the West responds will give our answer to Jyllands-Posten's question.

If these countries succeed in exporting their repression on this issue, what will be the next step? Will governments be attacked if their media give internet links to cartoons of Mohammed, so that those who wish can see them? Will South Park be censored for the sake of international amity? Will there be attacks on publications featuring more positive images of Mohammed? Will U.S. embassies suffer violence if the Met continues to allow images of Mohammed in their catalog online? Will the Met be attacked if it shows those paintings? If Americans overseas are threatened or held hostage until the friezes on the Supreme Court are sandblasted, what will we do?

These questions sound outlandish even as I write them, but they are very real, they are not new, and they do follow an inexorable logic. The Danish cartoonists now live in hiding for fear of their lives, even as the threats against Salman Rushdie have been renewed. After Dutch director Theo Van Gogh was murdered for his documentary on women in Islam, other directors have backed off similar proposals. The Church of San Petronio, in Bologna, has an illustration of Mohammed in hell, drawing on Dante's description. In August 2002, Italian police arrested one Italian and four Moroccans after reports that an al Qaeda linked network was planning to bomb the church.

If we yield now to pressures for censorship, Islamists and authoritarian regimes overseas will have learned that by undercutting our trade, attacking our embassies, and threatening our citizens, they can control our press, just as they do their own, and they will take those lessons to heart.

By Paul Marshall
National Review Online

Paul Marshall is senior fellow at Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom and the editor of, most recently, Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Shari'a Law.

Muslims Getting Special Treatment by Media

What should not be hgappening - special treatment in the media - is happening over the subject of Islam and MUslims as Western media outlets bow down to the violence and threats Muslims are puting forth. Tomorrow, they plan to demonstrate at the Danish Embassy in New York City.

Even the European Union is considering making special rules exempting Islam from the same treatment and media coverage as other religions and cultures. Freedom of speech is going down the toilet very quickly.

**********

COPENHAGEN (AFX) - The editor of the Danish newspaper that first published the controversial prophet Mohammed cartoons said the media was giving Muslims special treatment as a result of the subsequent uproar.

'It turned out that the freedom of the press crumbled much more quickly than I thought. It seems to me that the freedom of the press the world over is being limited as Muslims are being given special treatment,' Jyllands-Posten editor Carsten Juste told the Danish daily Kristelig Dagbladet.

'The result is that these privileges are going to be extended even further,' Juste warned, saying he was 'very ill at ease with what is happening at the moment'.

Juste said religious belief was a private matter, but it had entered the public arena like never before.

'Now we have to be careful about things we never thought we would have to be careful about,' such as writing about the oppression of women in Muslim societies, he said.

Original cartoons

Orwellian Nightmare Becoming Reality in Great Britain

Stepping over to the UK there is word that George Orwell's nightmare of humans constantly under surveillance by the government is one step closer to actuality with Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent win on national ID cards for Britons.

Full story (New York Times)

A Bit of Good News for Blair: ID Cards for Britons Advance
By ALAN COWELL
LONDON, Feb. 13 — The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair faced down its opposition on Monday in a politically charged vote in the House of Commons on a plan to introduce mandatory national identification cards. The vote moved Britain closer to the use of such cards but did not make clear precisely when that would be.

Despite a rebellion by about 20 members of Mr. Blair's own Labor Party, the government won the vote, 310 to 279. A defeat would have been Mr. Blair's fourth humiliation in Parliament since the general election last year — and since taking power in 1997 — raising doubts about his authority in his third term of office.

In the May election his majority was cut to just 64 votes, meaning that a relatively small number of dissident Labor legislators can derail his legislative plans. By surviving the challenge on Monday, Mr. Blair was seen as scoring a qualified victory.

Mr. Blair was not in the Commons for the vote because engine failure grounded an airplane that was to fly him back from South Africa.

The vote was the first of two major challenges this week. The second is expected Wednesday in a further vote on counterterrorism legislation.

In the vote on Monday, the Commons rejected an amendment from the House of Lords that would have made optional, instead of mandatory, a plan to require Britons to be given national identity cards when they apply for passports. But in a compromise worked out among the legislators, Parliament will have to pass another law to make the new rules binding.

The government argues that the biometric information in both the new passports and the ID's, like fingerprints and iris scans, will help the police fight terrorism, organized crime and identity fraud.

The House of Lords, which has often challenged the government on civil rights issues, will debate its proposal again and could provoke a constitutional stalemate if it refuses to accept the Monday vote in the Commons.

Mandatory identity cards are part of a package of measures that Mr. Blair's government is seeking, saying Britain needs to tighten its internal security procedures, particularly after the attacks in London in July, in which four bombers killed 52 travelers on subway trains and a bus.

But Parliament has thrown out some proposals, like one to increase the permitted period of detention without charge or trial to 90 days.

Before the vote on Monday, Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer and Mr. Blair's heir apparent, said at a meeting, "We should do all in our power to prevent you or I having our identity stolen or abused, and to ensure that, for each of us, our identity is secure and protected."

Charles Clarke, the home secretary and highest law-enforcement official, said the proposal from the House of Lords would undermine the whole program for a "sensible, phased introduction" of mandatory ID's, which are common in many European countries but unfamiliar to many Britons.

"We've always been clear that the identity-cards scheme has been designed and is intended eventually to become a compulsory scheme for all U.K. residents," he said.

Opposition to mandatory cards has come from the opposition Conservatives and from civil rights groups.

David Davis, the opposition spokesman on home affairs, warned legislators that they might "sleepwalk into the surveillance state" by building a national database from information on identity cards that could produce "the most attractive possible target for every fraudster, terrorist, confidence trickster and hacker on the planet."

"These people will be able to lift data out, put viruses and false data in," he said. "Far from protecting the public, the government will put the individual citizen at risk," he said.

Another Conservative official, Edward Garnier, said requiring people to apply for identity cards when they renewed their passports was "compulsion by the backdoor." Bill Cash, another Conservative, said the law proposed by the government contained the "building blocks to George Orwell's Ministry of Truth."

Destablizing Democratically-Electing Governments

As you grow older you realize that sometimes what seems to be a choice is really not a choice. It will soon become apparent to Palestinians in Israel that they really had no choice in their recent democratic elections. Even though they democratically elected the Hamas party, it is not the party the United States or the Israelis wanted so now the two will force the people to vote again until they "get it right" and re-elect the party the US prefers - Fatah. That is, the US and Israel are openly discussing how they will destabilize the democratically elected Hamas government until the Palestinians vote for the Fatah party, the party backed by the USA and the Israelis.

Here's more........

For sure, feelings are mized about this. On one side, people are told they must practice democracy as a form of government and have democratic elections where the poeple elect who they want; on the other hand it is irrelevant because if a powerful government like the USA doesn't like who the people elect because it does not jibe with previous plans, they will just destroy it. Hmmm seems that accusations of this have been in the air for decades, coming from Central and South America - although the destabilizations and coups have been more covert.

How will student textbooks tell of this Hamas situation in years to come?

Is it not clear, or is it irrelevant that starving the Hamas government of funds starves, quite literally, the alreayd starving Palestinians - starves humans so they have no food and even worse physical conditions than they alredy have? Perhaps some of them can just move from theor cloth and tin shack to a cave.....

U.S. Goverment to Give Windfall to Oil Companies

Even though oil is above $50/barrel, oil futures pries are above $60/barrel and prices at the pump are near$3.00/gallon, the Bush Administration thinks the oil companies do not have enough money.........

New York Times (Full story)



February 14, 2006
U.S. Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies
By EDMUND L. ANDREWSWASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by laws and regulations that date back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and Congress wanted to encourage more exploration and drilling in the high-cost, high-risk deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

"We need to remember the primary reason that incentives are given," said Johnnie M. Burton, director of the federal Minerals Management Service. "It's not to make more money, necessarily. It's to make more oil, more gas, because production of fuel for our nation is essential to our economy and essential to our people."

But what seemed like modest incentives 10 years ago have ballooned to levels that have alarmed even ardent supporters of the oil and gas industry, partly because of added sweeteners approved during the Clinton administration but also because of ambiguities in the law that energy companies have successfully exploited in court.

Short of imposing new taxes on the industry, there may be little Congress can do to reverse its earlier giveaways. The new projections come at a moment when President Bush and Republican leaders are on the defensive about record-high energy prices, soaring profits at major oil companies and big cuts in domestic spending.

Indeed, Mr. Bush and House Republicans are trying to kill a one-year, $5 billion windfall profits tax for oil companies that the Senate passed last fall.

Moreover, the projected largess could be just the start. Last week, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Development, a major industry player, began a brash but utterly serious court challenge that could, if it succeeds, cost the government another $28 billion in royalties over the next five years.

In what administration officials and industry executives alike view as a major test case, Kerr-McGee told the Interior Department last week that it planned to challenge one of the government's biggest limitations on royalty relief if it could not work out an acceptable deal in its favor. If Kerr-McGee is successful, administration projections indicate that about 80 percent of all oil and gas from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico would be royalty-free.

"It's one of the greatest train robberies in the history of the world," said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has fought royalty concessions on oil and gas for more than a decade. "It's the gift that keeps on giving."

Republican lawmakers are also concerned about how the royalty relief program is working out.

"I don't think there is a single member of Congress who thinks you should get royalty relief at $70 a barrel" for oil, said Representative Richard W. Pombo, Republican of California and chairman of the House Resources Committee.

"It was Congress's intent," Mr. Pombo said in an interview on Friday, "that if oil was at $10 a barrel, there should be royalty relief so companies could have some kind of incentive to invest capital. But at $70 a barrel, don't expect royalty relief."

Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said Monday that the giveaways might turn out to be less than the basic forecasts indicate because of "certain variables."

The government does not disclose how much individual companies benefit from the incentives, and most companies refuse to disclose either how much they pay in royalties or how much they are allowed to avoid.

But the benefits are almost entirely for gas and oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico.

The biggest producers include Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobil as well as smaller independent companies like Anadarko and Devon Energy.

Executives at some companies, including Exxon Mobil, said they had already stopped claiming royalty relief because they knew market prices had exceeded the government's price triggers.

About one-quarter of all oil and gas produced in the United States comes from federal lands and federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

As it happens, oil and gas royalties to the government have climbed much more slowly than market prices over the last five years.

The New York Times reported last month that one major reason for the lag appeared to be a widening gap between the average sales prices that companies are reporting to the government when paying royalties and average spot market prices on the open market.

Industry executives and administration officials contend that the disparity mainly reflects different rules for defining sales prices. Administration officials also contend that the disparity is illusory, because the government's annual statistics are muddled up with big corrections from previous years.

Both House and Senate lawmakers are now investigating the issue, as is the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog arm.

But the much bigger issue for the years ahead is royalty relief for deepwater drilling.

The original law, known as the Deep Water Royalty Relief Act, had bipartisan support and was intended to promote exploration and production in deep waters of the outer continental shelf.

At the time, oil and gas prices were comparatively low and few companies were interested in the high costs and high risks of drilling in water thousands of feet deep.

The law authorized the Interior Department, which leases out tens of millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico, to forgo its normal 12 percent royalty for much of the oil and gas produced in very deep waters.

Because it take years to explore and then build the huge offshore platforms, most of the oil and gas from the new leases is just beginning to flow.

The Minerals Management Service of the Interior Department, which oversees the leases and collects the royalties, estimates that the amount of royalty-free oil will quadruple by 2011, to 112 million barrels. The volume of royalty-free natural gas is expected to climb by almost half, to about 1.2 trillion cubic feet.

Based on the government's assumptions about future prices — that oil will hover at about $50 a barrel and natural gas will average about $7 per thousand cubic feet — the total value of the free oil and gas over the next five years would be about $65 billion and the forgone royalties would total more than $7 billion.

Administration officials say the issue is out of their hands, adding that they opposed provisions in last year's energy bill that added new royalty relief for deep drilling in shallow waters.

"We did not think we needed any more legislation, because we already have incentives, but we obviously did not prevail," said Ms. Burton, director of the Minerals Management Service.

New Book Release: Managing your Health & Wellness

Title: Managing Your Health & Wellness
Author: Diane L. Cramer, M.S.

Are you trying to lose weight, get control of a bad habit, alleviate a chronic condition, geel more energized or improve some area of your health? Diane Cramer has the insight you need to accomplish this!

The Astrology Made Easy Series by Llewellyn Worldwide is one of the most fantastic ideas I have ever seen in astrolgy. With each new book it has succeeded in tackling an area of life and providing informaiton for beginners and intermediate lovers of astrology. As with the other books in the series, this one contains a CD-ROM. This particular one offers an astrological framework for understanding and improving your health.

Using your birth date, time and place you can get a report that analyzes exercise and behavior patterns, mental outlook, resistance to disease, activity level, ability to handle stress and more. You can use the system to create a personalized health profile that will contain specific suggestions for you (both lifestyle and dietary).

There is also a comprehensive herbal remedy section for those who prefer alternative medicine - and most who are interested in astrology are open to such things.

Highly Recommended!

New Book Release: Vocations

Title: Vocations (The New Midheaven Extension Process)
Author: Noel Tyl

We spend more than one third of our day involved with work. When we meet someone, one of the first questions we ask is "What do you do?"

But what we do for a living is not just about earning money. It is about personal fulfillment. Not many are fulfilled - they only have "a job". This new book by noted astrologer Noel Tyl is about vocation, or calling.

Choosing the right vocation means having the ability to support yourself financially as well as being able to enjoy the life you have on this planet.

Using a process he calls Midheaven Extension Process, Tyl shows how to use a natal (birth) chart to discern a person's vocational profile. This highly innovative approach is elegant in its simplicity but admittedly is not something a novice would be able to jump into doing. It takes more than a passing knowledge of astrology and is intended for professional or advanced astrologers.

In our modern career culture and in a time when people are demanding work that has purpose, this is a breakthrough in vocational astrology. It offer astrologers a streamlined and highly reliable process for the challenging task of vocational and career guidance for their clients. Tyl gives 61 astrological charts as examples - many of them famous people - to provide practical examples of the Midheaven Extension Process.

New Book Release: Love After Sex

Title: Love After Sex
Author: Olivia

Having happy and healthy romantic (intimate relationships is important and this book by Olivia tackles the subject astrological sign by astrological sign.

Love After Sex opens doors to exploring how one can fan the flames of seduction and grat lovemaking after the initial sparks turn to embers. Quite a bit of the information is standard information familiar to those who read a lot fo astrology books and know the basic signs well. But it is her examples in the book that give new life to this subject and make it a fun read.

Olivia brings into the love equation the factors of sex, money and power dynamics to show how they play out in the everyday love relationships.

Written in a hip and witty style, it is suitable for beginner; no computeres or exact birth times are needed. It is also gender and sexual orientation-neutral.

Voices of Moderate Muslims on the violence in the Middle East

From the San Francisco Gate comes reports of some statements from moderate Muslims:

San Francisco Gate - full article

· Writing in the Jerusalem Post, reporter Orly Halpern cites a "secular Iraqi Muslim" in Baghdad who told him that the commotion over the cartoons "is not a religion issue mostly." Instead, Halpern's Iraqi contact explained, "We are angry because of identity abuse. We are filled with Western bulls--t that we can't swallow anymore." Halpern also cited a Palestinian newspaper editor who "blamed the West's stereotyping of Islam for the [recent] demonstrations" over the cartoons.

(Have the Muslims doing the burning and violence failed to notice that they are making the stereotype appear to be a realistic portrait?)

The editor told him: "I believe this reaction is exaggerated....But it's a result of a policy of Western campaigning against Islam. They [the demonstrators] believe that this is a campaign against Islam. I don't think it is. The cartoonists know nothing about Islam. Unfortunately, the Western media [have] mixed moderate Islam with radical Islam as if there isn't any difference, and they are accusing Islam of being a terrorist religion." Halpern also quotes Enas Muthaffar, a Muslim-Palestinian film director, who said: "These [violent] people are just letting off steam because they can't do it against their own governments....I am so ashamed of these barbaric acts. Burning down embassies? What is this? This is an insult to Islam and to Arabs. These people are ruining our name."

· Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an immigrant to the Netherlands, where she serves as a Liberal Party member of the Dutch parliament, said at a press conference in Berlin yesterday that she defends "the right to offend." (Die Welt, "The Free West" blog)

Speaking in response to the cartoons controversy, Hirsi Ali, who was brought up as a Mulsim and has received death threats for her outspoken criticism of Islam (Reuters South Africa), said in Berlin: "Shame on those politicians who stated that publishing and republishing the drawings was 'unnecessary,' 'insensitive,' 'disrespectful' and 'wrong.' I am of the opinion that Prime Minister...Rasmussen of Denmark acted correctly when he refused to meet with representatives of tyrannical regimes who demanded from him that he limit the powers of the press." Hirsi Ali added that she believed "publication of the cartoons confirmed that there is widespread fear among authors, filmmakers, cartoonists and journalists who wish to describe, analyze or criticize intolerant aspects of Islam all over Europe."(Die Welt, "The Free West" blog)

Criticizing certain specific Islamic doctrines or beliefs, the Dutch politician noted that the Prophet Mohammed "did and said good things." However, she opined, "[H]e was also disrespectful and insensitive to those who disagreed with him." Hirsi Ali said: "I think that the prophet was wrong to have placed himself and his ideas above critical thought[,]...was wrong to have subordinated women to men[,]...was wrong to have decreed that gays be murdered...[and]...was wrong to have said that apostates must be killed." (Die Welt, "The Free West" blog)

Danish Muslim leader calls for Muslim takeover of Denmark (Sharia law)

Some Muslims in Denmark are making no secret of their intentions to overthrow the Christian country of Denmark and turn it into a Muslim-ruled country ruled by Sharia law:

Artricle from The Site Institute

Hizb al-Tahrir in Denmark Issues Statements Denouncing Caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and Calls for the Establishment of an Islamic Caliphate

The recently established website of Hizb al-Tahrir in Denmark, http://www.prophetdk.com , has posted two statements in which the group condemns the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as an “attack on all Muslims in the entire” world, and blames the ability of such slander to be published on the absence of a Pan-Islamic state, Muslim rulers’ neglect to act, and Muslims’ acquiescence to aggression upon them. According to the group, the Danish government has a history of making “harsh laws” against Muslims in Denmark, closed Islamic schools, and allegedly launching campaign to frighten Muslims.

To meet these acts, Hizb al-Tahrir in Denmark advocates the creation of an Islamic Caliphate to defend the Prophet and establish Islamic law on earth. Further, they urge Muslims, and “especially the people with power in the Muslim lands,” to work with the group to remove the “unbelieving” regimes in the Muslim world.

Fadi Abdullatif, the spokesman for Hizb al-Tahrir in Denmark who created the website February 6, 2006, and signed one of the statements, was charged in August 2005 of calling for the killing of the Danish government. According to a BBC report, Abdullatif and his group distributed flyers in Denmark that advocated the extermination of the Muslims’ rulers as Muslims travel to fight in al-Fallujah, in Iraq. The website he created bears the vitriol in the Arabic language, but links to the English branch of the Hizb al-Tahrir organization contain innocuous statements and media reports.

Egyptian Paper Printed Danish Cartoons in October 2005 - No Protests

Lots of thing in the news still about the cartoon issue.

Hopefully, you are buying Danish products!!

How much more evidence is needed to kow that this current violence and boycotting in the Middle East is fabricated by Muslim extremists trying to force Islamic sharia law on Denmark?

Read this from the Copenhagen Post


Little stir was caused when an Egyptian newspaper printed the Mohammed drawings last October during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan

A popular newspaper in Cairo printed the much-contested Mohammed drawings already last October during the Muslims' holy month of Ramadan, reported an Egypt-based blog-writer.

The widely read independent opposition newspaper Al-Fagr printed the caricatures just a few weeks after they originally appeared in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, but no protests were reported, noted the blog-writer, an Egyptian businessman who goes under the name 'Sandmonkey'.

Although Muslim protestors have attacked Danish embassies in a number of countries to protest the publication of the caricatures in Jyllands-Posten, there was no reaction from the Egyptian newspaper’s Muslim readers indicating that they found the drawings insulting, Sandmonkey told The Copenhagen Post.

'This whole business has been driving me crazy for the past two weeks,' he said. 'Of all the countries to protest against - why Denmark? You guys have been a friend of the Arabs for years.'

The blog-writer said that he believed authorities in Egypt and other Muslim countries were using the case for political reasons.

'The drawings create a common enemy to distract people from political reforms. It's useful to have something outside the country to focus your anger on,' he said.

Book Review: Cycles of Life

Title: Cycles of Life: Understanding the Principles of Predictive Astrology
Author: Ron Suskin

There are some books that take extra effort to read and this is one of them. Is it worth it? That you will need ot guage for yourself, however I found it very challenging.

Suskin is offering a detailed explanation of the cycles we all go thorugh in our lives, each flavored by one of the planets. The place where it bogs down, which he admits, is in using the chart he gives to figure out your cycles. This however, is really not complicated. He explains it in a very comprehensible manner. He uses Madonna as an example. But the problem may come in the interpretation.

An accomplished professional astrologer, I took the time to fill out the chart, but when I was done I could not make any of his interpretations jibe with what had taken place in my life at the times his system indicated. There was one noticeably large gap of several years where I knew significant things had occurred but according to this system, there was nothing. It seemed to say I had no significant events from 1990 to 2004 and thenplaced all significant potential event times between 2008-2016.

While this may be fine for some, I think readers will be be quite disturbed if they buy the book and experience the same. It would be good to be able to track back form one's birth the sinificant events and times and note that which planets gave energy to the transformation.

Danish Muslims Drew the Cartoons that Caused the Violence

Here is a little-known aspect of the current violence being committed by the Muslim community at large in relation to 12 editorial drawing printed in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten.

Basically, in order to escalate into crisis mode the cartoon situation after months of not getting a rise out of anyone....the Danish Muslim delegation (Danish Muslim imams and intellectuals) CREATED intentionally offensive drawings of Mohammed as a pig (especially offensive to non-pork eating Muslims) and then traveled to the Middle East to anger Muslim political leaders and average citizens. This they did against the country they ran to FROM the Middle East and which gave them asylum and a life in a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world. Some, like Pia Kjærsgaard of the Danish People's Party, see it as an act of treason.

....and Muslim leaders in Denmark are saying one thing in Denmark and another in Arabic on the Middle Eastern media.


From the Counter-terrorism Blog:


Fabricated cartoons worsened Danish controversy

The controversy over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed is expanding, as more Muslims join the boycott and protests against Denmark and various European newspapers decide to publish the cartoons, mostly out of solidarity with Jyllands Posten and to make a strong political stand. One issue that puzzles many Danes is the timing of this outburst. The cartoons were published in September: Why have the protests erupted from Muslims worldwide only now? The person who knows the answer to this question is Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, a man that the Washington Post has recently profiled as “one of Denmark's most prominent imams.”

Last November, Abu Laban, a 60-year-old Palestinian who had served as translator and assistant to top Gamaa Islamiya leader Talaal Fouad Qassimy during the mid-1990s and has been connected by Danish intelligence to other Islamists operating in the country, put together a delegation that traveled to the Middle East to discuss the issue of the cartoons with senior officials and prominent Islamic scholars. The delegation met with Arab League Secretary Amr Moussa, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi, and Sunni Islam’s most influential scholar, Yusuf al Qaradawi. "We want to internationalize this issue so that the Danish government will realize that the cartoons were insulting, not only to Muslims in Denmark, but also to Muslims worldwide," said Abu Laban.

On its face, it would appear as if nothing were wrong. However, the Danish Muslim delegation showed much more than the 12 cartoons published by Jyllands Posten. In the booklet it presented during its tour of the Middle East, the delegation included other cartoons of Mohammed that were highly offensive, including one where the Prophet has a pig face. But these additional pictures were NOT published by the newspaper, but were completely fabricated by the delegation and inserted in the booklet (which has been obtained and made available to me by Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet). The delegation has claimed that the differentiation was made to their interlocutors, even though the claim has not been independently verified. In any case, the action was a deliberate malicious and irresponsible deed carried out by a notorious Islamist who in another situation had said that “mockery against Mohamed deserves death penalty.” And in a quintessential exercise in taqiya, Abu Laban has praised the boycott of Danish goods on al Jazeera, while condemning it on Danish TV.

Gun-toting Muslims also stormed and burned the Danish, Chilean and Swedish embassy offices to the ground and went after the Norwegian Embassy, in Syria. Fortunately, they were uable to murder the embassy staff as they had been awarned and vacated the building. The Syrian government says it could not do anything to protect the embassy. They continue to run around looking for Danes and Norwegians to murder. How, by their actions, are they disproving the violent image of Mohmammed as portrayed in one of the 12 original cartoons? They seem to be only proving it to be true, very true.

The Danish Editorial Cartoons

Here is a thumbnail copy of the 12 editorial cartoons displayed in Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005.

(Direct Link)

Buying Danish, Honoring Freedom

War, in more ways than one happening today under an Aries Moon.

For the last six months there has been a brouhaha underway from Muslims angry that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed. The cartoons were commissioned by the newspaper after a writer stated that she ws unable to get anyone to illustrate a children book she had written about Mohammed.

Two of the 12 drawings showed Mohammed in a violent light. The other 10 were things such as Mohammed as a teacher in a school etc. Muslims failed in forcing the newspaper to apologize, failed in forcing the Danish government to punish the newspaper, failed in forcing teh European Union to take sanctions against Denmark for it, and in general failed in suppressing the freedom of speech and freedom of religion that exists in the Western world. For months they have printed stories containing lies, slanted alleged reporting on the cartoons every day and no actual news about the cartoons, trying to create a firestorm.

So...as of late have issued a few bomb threats and death threats against the newspaper Jyllands-Posten and its staff (the building was evacuated last night for a bomb threat over the cartoons), against the 530 Danish soldiers in Iraq, against the artist who created the cartoons and also instituted a boycott removing all Danish products from shelves in Muslim countries. The Danish ambassadors of countries in places like Kuwait, Qatar, Sudan, Libya and Saudi Arabia have been verybally abused and kicked out of threatened and forced to leave. Armed Muslim terrorists have stormed and jumped on top of building they thought contained Danes, hoping to find some to murder.

Instituting the boycott is a WTO violation, in addition to the fact that thise actions make it appear to the entire Western world that someonehow while Jesus the Christ, God, the Virgin Mary, Buddha, etc are omnipotent enough to take care of themsleves and survive being satired/mocked or even neutrally illustrated....Mohammed is somehow made impotent by an illustration and needs the murderous, terroristic, violent, financially wicked defense of human beings.

Along the way Muslim newspapers ADDED three cartoons to the 12 - these depicting Mohammed as a pig (which would be especially offensive since Muslims don't eat pork) and two other animals, in attempt to get a rise out of Muslims and because their efforts these last few months did not work.

Norway stood behind Denmark and reprinted the cartoons and they are being abused by the Muslim world too, over this.

Then today, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain also stood up for freedom of press reprinted the cartoons. They are to be applauded. However the Egyptian-born owner of the French paper that published the illustrations fired the managing editor for printing them.

I find it interesting that extremism and things such as economic boycotts come from right-wingers/conservatives (witness, boycotting of advertisers who produce shows that Christian fundamentalist don't like).

If you wish to assist Denmark in not suffering too much financial loss over the economic boycott in the Muslim countries - the please Buy Danish!!

You can go to http://www.danish.com or http://www.danish-deli-food.com, or http://www.danishfood.net, or

You can buy Arla food products in the USA (cheese:Rosenborg, Dofino and Mediterra). You can buy Lego toys and Carlsberg beer. Havarti cheese (imported) is from Denmark.