Price of Crude Oil Falls Again, but Analysts Warn It Will Remain at Lofty Levels

?HOUSTON — With the Memorial Day weekend and summer driving season coming soon, the sudden drop in oil prices could mean that drivers will find moderately lower gasoline prices at just the right moment.

But many energy analysts and economists predict that oil and gas prices will remain stubbornly high.

Supplies remain constrained by turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa, oil specialists said, and there is always the possibility that conflict could cut production in Nigeria. At the same time, expanding economies like China and India continue to drive the growth in oil consumption.

“Nothing has changed, except psychology and taking profits,” Allen Sinai, chief global economist of Decision Economics, a consulting firm, said of this week’s selloff in the oil futures market. “This is a correction, and not a shift in trend.”

Light sweet crude, the benchmark of New York trading, fell below $100 on Thursday for the first time since March, but it remains almost 30 percent higher than a year ago. At the close on Friday, oil for June delivery was down $2.62 at $97.18 a barrel.

Gasoline prices fell a fraction of a penny on Friday, according to AAA’s daily gas gauge. But with the average regular gallon costing $3.98, that is still 28 cents higher than a month ago and a $1.06 more than a year ago.

Other commodities were mixed after a sharp selloff on Thursday. Gold and cocoa were higher, while silver, wheat, cotton and copper were lower again on the day.

Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst of the Oil Price Information Service, predicted that the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline would fall to $3.75 by Memorial Day and to $3.50 later in the summer. Those are still historically high prices, taking consumers back to a level they were paying earlier this year.

President Obama, speaking to auto plant workers in Indiana on Friday, acknowledged the public frustration over high gas prices. “We’ve got high gas prices that have been eating away at your paychecks and that is a headwind that we’ve got to confront,” he said.

Meanwhile Attorney General Eric H. Holder directed a special task force to examine whether reductions in oil prices were being passed on to consumers. “Fraud or manipulation must not be allowed to prevent price decreases,” Mr. Holder said in a memo.

Corrections, even sharp ones, are not unusual as commodity prices follow longer trends up. A Barclays Capital research note on Friday observed that on several occasions last year, weak economic data pushed oil prices down to $70 a barrel. “Those periods were indeed short-lived,” Barclays noted, before oil prices continued their march upward.

While commodity traders move oil markets up and down from day to day, the fundamentals of supply and demand are the drivers from month to month and year to year. Though the fundamentals continue to point higher, oil prices are not expected, at least anytime soon, to return to the levels reached in 2008 when a barrel of crude neared $150 a barrel.

The Energy Department predicts moderately tightening world markets. The department last month estimated that world consumption would grow by an average of 1.5 million barrels a day in both 2011 and 2012. Despite more drilling in OPEC and non-OPEC countries, the department projected that supplies would increase to meet only roughly half the added demand this year and roughly 80 percent of the added demand in 2012.

International financial analysts and oil experts have been predicting a correction for some time in oil prices, since there are ample supplies at the moment. But many think oil prices are going higher in the second half of the year. ?

“Worldwide, the macro picture has not changed,” said Andy Lipow, a former Amoco trader who is president of his own Houston consulting firm. “Oil demand around the world continues to increase at the same time we are experiencing a supply disruption in Libya as well as a reduction of supplies from the Gulf of Mexico.”

He predicted that the price of oil would return to the $110 a barrel level by the end of the year. The Macquarie Group projected in a commodities research note this week that light sweet crude would average $110 a barrel this year, $115 in 2012 and $117 in 2013.

The military stalemate in Libya has taken over a million barrels a day of high-quality crude off the market, and oil fields and terminals have been damaged in the fighting. Meanwhile nearly half of Yemen’s 260,000 barrels of daily production is offline. That is a relatively small amount, but Yemeni crude is also a high-quality product that refiners find difficult to replace.

Saudi Arabia promised earlier in the year to increase its production capacity, but it actually cut production recently, claiming that the world markets were flush. Whether the kingdom steps up production remains to be seen, and energy experts are watching closely to see what if any decisions are made on OPEC production and prices at the organization’s next meeting in June.

Recent International Energy Agency and Energy Department reports predict that China, India, other developing nations and the Middle East itself will continue to consume more oil as they build factories and their middle classes add thousands of cars every week to the world fleet.

The Energy Department reported that crude inventories last week had risen by 3.4 million barrels, because American gasoline consumption has been slowing. Consumption may rebound somewhat as prices ease again, energy experts say.?Meanwhile, after the earthquake in Japan, demand for oil was down by about 30,000 barrels a day. That reduction was less than expected, and Japan will almost certainly import more oil as its economy recovers and it replaces some nuclear generation with heating oil.

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Ugandan Opposition Figure Arrested Again

KAMPALA, Uganda – The leading opposition politician in Uganda was arrested Thursday after police prevented him from leading a demonstration here, only a day after being granted bail from a previous arrest over a similar protest.

Dr. Kizza Besigye, a retired army colonel and former confidante to President Yoweri Museveni, was hauled out of his car and members of his staff were severely beaten after a two-hour standoff with police in central Kampala as Mr. Besigye was driving slowly to work from his home, followed by hundreds of supporters on foot.

A Ugandan police spokeswoman said officers tried to get Mr. Besigye to use a different route as he entered the city center but that the politician refused. As the crowds built up, a plainclothes officer shattered Mr. Besigye’s passenger window with a hammer and sprayed Mr. Besigye in the face with pepper spray, Reuters reported, before officers detained him.

“We tried to engage him, so that he could continue alone, but he resisted,” said the police spokeswoman, Judith Nabakooba. “His supporters shouted, they started becoming rowdy, and started hitting vehicles with stones.”

“For security reasons,” Ms. Nabakooba said, “we decided to use the last option, which was to get him out of his vehicle.”

Mr. Besigye, who was released on bail Wednesday after being arrested last Thursday for leading protests, had attempted to stage a fifth-round of his walk-to-work demonstration against rising commodity prices Thursday morning, but was stopped by police outside his gate. Mr. Besigye then got into his car and drove into town instead, with crowds trailing behind.

The arrest on Thursday was the fourth in recent weeks for Mr. Besigye. The American government has condemned the crackdown on street protestors, urging the Ugandan government to respect civil liberties.

 

12 Die as Shiite Mosque in Iraq Is Bombed Again

BAGHDAD — A suicide bomber on Thursday attacked a large Shiite mosque in Diyala Province, killing at least 12 people and wounding dozens, according to an Iraqi security official. Sunni and Shiite clerics were meeting in the mosque at the time as part of an effort to show that tensions between the groups had subsided.

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It was the fifth attack on the Imam Hussein mosque in the past five years.

The authorities say they believe that the attack was planned by insurgents seeking to disrupt the recent stability in the Balad Ruz district, where the mosque is located, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his access to delicate information.

“I heard the sound of a big explosion, and then winds of fire came towards me and they hit my chest and pushed me for meters inside the mosque and I lost my consciousness,” said Bassam Jasim, 40, in an interview at a local hospital where he was being treated. His arm was wounded in the attack.

A police officer at the scene, Capt. Mohammed al-Ettibi, said: “You can smell the burned bodies. It’s so strong that you can smell it from 100 meters away.”

There had been about eight months of relative calm in the district after years of violence among Shiites, Sunnis, Turkmens and Kurds. Although violence has significantly decreased in Iraq over the past two years, it has spiked in recent weeks. Recent attacks included the assassinations of local politicians and law enforcement authorities.

In the northern province of Kirkuk on Thursday, a car bomb exploded, killing a local police chief, three of his guards and two others. Twelve people were wounded in the attack.

American and Iraqi officials have said they expect violence to increase during the next several months when the United States is scheduled to withdraw all its troops.

Employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Diyala and Kirkuk Provinces.

 

Thailand and Cambodia Clash Again in Border Dispute

BANGKOK — Thai and Cambodian troops clashed for a third day on Sunday in the first major territorial encounter since an informal cease-fire that followed four days of fighting in February. At least 10 people were killed and thousands of residents were evacuated from border areas, according to reports from both sides.

The United Nations called on the countries to settle the conflict peacefully, with an effective and verifiable cease-fire. The exact cause of the latest clash, which began early Friday, was unclear, with the two sides accusing each other of making the first move in what was mostly a long-range artillery duel.

The fighting was reported at border areas 100 miles west of Preah Vihear, an 11th-century temple that has been the focus of armed tensions since it was listed in 2008 by the United Nations as a World Heritage site under Cambodian administration.

Both nations claim ownership of a strategic area of 1.8 square miles near Preah Vihear. Two other ancient Hindu temples in the border area are the focus of the latest eruption of fighting.

In his weekly television address, the prime minister of Thailand, Abhisit Vejjajiva, accused Cambodia of starting the fighting. “When there is firing into Thailand, we must fire back,” he said.

Mr. Abhisit added: “We must not fall into Cambodia’s trap in trying to spread a picture of conflict, or say the conflict is unsolvable through bilateral talks.”

A sticking point in efforts at negotiations is Thailand’s resistance to Cambodia’s demand for mediation by international bodies. In the past, outside judgments have favored Cambodia. In 1962, the World Court ruled that Preah Vihear, which stands on a border bluff overlooking the Cambodian countryside, belonged to Cambodia.

The disputes involve border demarcations between the two countries made by former French colonial administrators and include references to competing maps and interpretations of maps.

The conflicting claims are a rallying cry for nationalists on both sides. In Thailand, they have become a focus of the antigovernment “yellow shirt” protests in recent months.

In February, the United Nations forwarded a Cambodian request for mediation to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in which both sides agreed to allow unarmed military observers to be posted along the border.

But the Thai military resisted that plan, and the country’s foreign minister, Kasit Piromya, said that his government was trying to secure the cooperation of the armed forces to find a peaceful settlement.

Cambodia accused Thailand over the weekend of firing artillery shells “loaded with poisonous gas” and of flying jet fighter sorties over Cambodian territory. Thailand rejected the accusations as groundless.

 

Venture: The New York Cosmos Want to Take the Field Again

In the back of the gallery, on a riser, a D.J. remixed pop classics like Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue” while a grainy film loop of Cosmos triumphs played on a wall. The food could be described as haute stadium — miniature hot dogs topped with sesame pickled-red-cabbage slaw. Propped up around the room were vintage trophies and photos of Pelé, Brazil’s beloved superstar, and Giorgio Chinaglia, Italy’s egomaniacal striker, who together in 1977 helped the squad win one of its five championships in the North American Soccer League.

“We’re very, very privileged that we’ve got the original Cosmos superstar striker here tonight,” Paul Kemsley, an impish 43-year-old Briton in a dark suit, said into a microphone. “Giorgio Chinaglia, here tonight!” The audience cheered as Chinaglia, now a hulking 64-year-old with a hangdog smile, nodded slightly. “We’ve also got the original Cosmos goalie, Shep Messing, here tonight!” More cheers, more nods. Then Kemsley wrapped it up.

“Thanks so much for coming,” he said, turning serious. “We hope you get it. It’s gonna be huge. Support us. The Cosmos are back.”

Hang on -— the team that gave Americans their first taste of soccermania, once packing Giants Stadium with more than 77,000 fans? That rum band of night prowlers with their own table at Studio 54 and Hollywood hangers-on? The franchise that vanished not long after Steve Ross, the head of Warner Communications, decided that pro soccer had no future? Those Cosmos are back?

Certainly the brand is back. Amid all the team memorabilia on display at that February party were plenty of crisp new Cosmos shirts, shorts and warm-ups, part of a recently unveiled line of clothing from Umbro, the English company that co-sponsored the shindig.

But Kemsley’s ambitions far exceed retro sportswear. A former real estate mogul who flamed out spectacularly in England when the recession struck, he is now chairman of the Cosmos, whose rights he bought recently. Since then, the team has been his all-consuming passion; he talks about building a stadium as well as Cosmos-related restaurants and hotels in New York City. He predicts that he and Umbro will sell a fortune’s worth of shirts in Europe and Asia. He has a staff of 16 already (including an executive named Terry Byrne, a close friend and former manager of David Beckham’s). He is touring the world to spread news of a second coming.

“I’m going to Singapore, to a dinner with the president,” Kemsley told me a week before the party. “The whole thing is just sick, do you know what I mean?”

For now, Kemsley is missing just two essentials: players and a league to play in. Players are easy; they can be bought. Breaking into Major League Soccer is trickier. Now in its 16th season, the country’s biggest professional soccer league will soon sell off rights to its 20th team, which Commissioner Don Garber has earmarked for New York City. The hope is to start a local rivalry with the New York Red Bulls, who play in Harrison, N.J.

The winning bidder for the 20th franchise will have to fork over as much as $100 million, Garber says, and have enough left over to build a stadium in the city. As important, prospective owners need to buy into the league’s modus operandi. “We need good owners, good stadiums, good marketing, serious guys who can be serious about the sport,” Garber says. “The Cosmos haven’t lived for 30 years. And unless it’s relaunched the right way, it won’t be successful.”

“Bless Don,” Kemsley said one afternoon not long ago, sounding like one of those charming rogues in a Guy Ritchie film. “I accept it’s not a done deal. But he’s got to give me that franchise.”

The Cosmos were the brainchild of Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, Turkish-born brothers and executives at Atlantic Records, a division of Warner Communications. In 1971, the Cosmos joined the struggling N.A.S.L. and initially played their games in dingy little stadiums. Then Ross, a natural-born impresario, decided in 1975 that what ailed the team could be cured by the biggest celebrity in the sport. So he coaxed Pelé out of retirement and into a Cosmos jersey with a multiyear contract that paid more than $1 million annually. At the time, the highest-paid athlete in baseball, Hank Aaron, earned $200,000 per season.

Pelé was introduced to Manhattan at a media-mobbed 21 Club on June 10, 1975. He was soon followed by the arrivals of Chinaglia and Franz Beckenbauer, a soft-spoken defender who captained West Germany to a World Cup championship in 1974. The Cosmos started drawing huge crowds to Giants Stadium, and during a summer best remembered for a blackout and the Son of Sam murders, the team was a gorgeous diversion. Mick Jagger showed up in the locker room. Liza Minnelli, Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Bjorn Borg hovered around the team at Studio 54.

But when Pelé departed after the 1977 season, the buzz vanished. When the 1986 World Cup was awarded to Mexico rather than to the United States, the league was doomed. As players, coaches and executives scattered for the exits, nobody except for a former teacher named Peppe Pinton saw much value in anything Cosmos-related.

Pinton, who was Chinaglia’s personal assistant, gathered up what was left of the Cosmos — the gear, the trophies — and loaded it all into a storage facility. For years, he kept the trademark alive by running Cosmos-branded training camps for kids and by suing anyone who tried to exploit the Cosmos name. (By selling T-shirts, for instance.) “I spent $800,000 to $900,000 in legal fees over the years,” says Pinton, now 64 and the owner of a restaurant in Tappan, N.Y. For years, he looked and waited for a buyer who shared his particular fervor.

“I love the man,” Kemsley says, “but he drove me absolutely mad.”

 

Books: Defending Vaccination Once Again, With Feeling

Or so I thought before opening Seth Mnookin’s new book. Barely a dozen pages in, I began to reconsider, and by the end I had completely changed my mind: Mr. Mnookin’s passionate defense of vaccination may be just what the public needs, in equal parts because of what it says and because of who is saying it.

Mr. Mnookin is no expert in the field — at least he wasn’t when he entered the fray. Neither a doctor nor a scientist, he has no vested interest in upholding the medical status quo (thus avoiding an accusation regularly flung at vaccine proponents). He hails instead from what might be called, sadly enough, exactly the opposite demographic: he is young and hip, got a good liberal arts education, lives in an upscale enclave and works in another, as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. He is the father of a young child.

And it is people of precisely this description who are slowly picking apart the safety net that protected their own childhoods, prompted by a well-intentioned mixture of arrogance, ignorance and confusion.

It is not that these parents buy into some of the more lurid accusations out there, like the one floated by a British doctor that all pediatric vaccinations cause some degree of neurologic damage. It is more that the parents are alarmed by the hubbub and prefer to play it safe — but wind up defining “safe” in exactly the wrong way. In some communities nonvaccination rates have hit the double digits — well into the danger zone.

Expert opinion seems to have oddly little influence over these parents, but perhaps an analysis by a peer, rather than an expert, will change some minds. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Mr. Mnookin has put it all together in a readable narrative encompassing celebrity high jinks worthy of Vanity Fair at its snarkiest.

But those come at the end. Mr. Mnookin doggedly begins at the very beginning, with the first vaccine consisting of fresh smallpox pus. Subsequent vaccines were refined, first with the use of less dangerous germs and then with noninfectious germ fragments. The first great triumph of mass vaccination, the Salk polio vaccine, made its debut in 1954, promptly followed by the first great vaccine-associated disaster: a sloppily made batch that paralyzed several dozen children in California.

One shudders to think of the fallout from such an event today, but back in the ’50s parents were still familiar with the toll of childhood diseases, and vaccine momentum barely stumbled. Now, Mr. Mnookin reflects, cases of vaccine-preventable disease have become so uncommon that in 2003 one desperately ill infant (too young to be vaccinated) managed to cough the unmistakable “whoop” of whooping cough in the faces of dozens of baffled medical professionals before the disease was correctly diagnosed — too late to save her life.

Autism, meanwhile, was first named during World War II, and since then rates have skyrocketed. The first to claim a vaccine-autism link was a British physician named Andrew Wakefield, in a small study published in 1998. Dr. Wakefield ultimately lost his medical license for a variety of misbehaviors, and this flagship study, under investigation for years, was formally discredited several months ago.

Dr. Wakefield held that measles virus from the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine spread through the intestinal tracts of vulnerable children and then caused brain damage. Meanwhile, separate speculation focused on the mercury-based preservative thimerosal (used not in the M.M.R. but in other vaccines up until 2003); the idea here was that toxic mercury levels damaged the brain. Neither notion has stood up to careful analysis, and studies have repeatedly failed to confirm any clear association between these vaccinations and autism.

Mr. Mnookin traces out all these separate threads (with the footnotes of a true scholar), even venturing away from the tangle long enough to explain how scientists are trained to think about causation and how profoundly this measured approach is bound to infuriate a distraught parent with a suddenly altered child.

But he really hits his stride when he turns to the social history of autism advocacy; his section on the actress Jenny McCarthy is a tour de force. To promote her 2007 book describing the purported vaccine-induced autism of her young son and his subsequent cure, Ms. McCarthy staged a media blitz, a medical tent show writ large. Blond and charismatic, she waved away the science, energized the people who wanted to believe her message (the not inconsiderable “I feel, therefore it is” segment of our society, as Mr. Mnookin puts it) and managed to do quite nicely for herself as well, netting a deal with Oprah Winfrey’s production company.

I suspect that it was never among Mr. Mnookin’s goals in life to become the de facto sparring partner of such an individual, but this book sealed his fate, and he has acquitted himself nobly. Parents who want to play it safe, but are not altogether sure how, should turn with relief to this reasoned, logical and comprehensive analysis of the facts.

 

Bad X-Rays Found Again at a Brooklyn Hospital

Claudia Hutton, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Health, said state regulators suspected that similar cases were occurring at other hospitals. The department is deciding whether to conduct spot checks around the state to determine the extent of the problem.

The inspection at the Brooklyn hospital, the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, in March, was prompted by an article in The New York Times in February, revealing that in 2007 the hospital had discovered that premature babies — the most vulnerable of all patients — were frequently subjected to whole-body X-rays when only chest exams had been ordered. These errors had never been reported to state health officials.

Downstate officials said they had promptly put an end to the risky X-ray practices. But last month, state inspectors reviewed chest X-rays of premature babies taken late last year and early this year and found 27 instances of infants’ irradiated beyond the chest area without proper shielding. Some premature infants were over-radiated multiple times, inspection records show.

“We were disappointed to find so many X-rays in our sampling that did not have adequate shielding to protect infants from being exposed to excess radiation,” said Dr. Nirav R. Shah, the state health commissioner. “Additional training and monitoring must be put into place to rectify this situation.”

In a brief statement released on Tuesday by Ronald Najman, a Downstate spokesman, the hospital said that in the wake of the inspection, it had addressed the issues raised by regulators “to ensure that we provide quality care to our patients.” The statement did not say why the problems had continued after radiologists at the hospital said they had stopped the original improper scanning practices.

Children are particularly vulnerable to radiation’s effects because their cells divide quickly and because they face an ever-increasing number of radiological procedures over their lifetime as new medical uses are found for radiation. X-rays are invaluable in diagnosing internal complications. But minimizing exposure is important because most scientists believe the effects of radiation are cumulative, meaning the more radiation one receives, the greater the chances of developing cancer later in life.

The state inspection on March 9 found “neonatal imaging was not provided in accordance with physician orders and the facility policies and procedures,” according to a statement of deficiencies sent to the hospital on March 21.

The first case cited in the report involved a baby born prematurely at 26 weeks who received five chest X-rays over a period of two months in which the radiation was not properly limited, or coned, to the chest area. For example, one “showed the patient’s neck, chest, abdomen, the upper arms and a small section of the right thigh.”

A second baby who was to have a chest X-ray had an image taken that included “the entire head, left arm, right arm, chest and abdomen,” the report said.

According to the state, one radiologist explained the wide areas of irradiation by saying that “technologists were sometimes instructed at the bedside by physicians to include additional areas of interest in the chest X-ray.”

Ms. Hutton, the state health department spokeswoman, said that explanation was unacceptable when the official medical record called only for a chest X-ray. “You shouldn’t be taking X-ray views not ordered by the doctor,” she said, “and if the doctor ordered them, they should be in the chart.”

According to the inspection report, the 27 improper X-rays were found among 542 chest images reviewed by state inspectors.

Ms. Hutton said if a fine was imposed, it would probably be a small one. “We just want compliance,” she said. “This is not a revenue stream for us.”

The hospital’s failure to report the problems in 2007 rankled state regulators. “You could have called us and said, ‘We just found something really bad,’?” Ms. Hutton said. “We had to learn about the issue from The New York Times.”

The Times article quoted extensively from internal e-mails at Downstate, including one from 2007 in which Dr. Salvatore J. A. Sclafani, the radiology chairman, wrote that he was “mortified” to find that the same premature infant had received about 10 whole-body X-rays when only a simple chest X-ray had been ordered. “Full, unabashed, total irradiation of a neonate,” Dr. Sclafani said, adding, “This poor, defenseless baby.”

Dr. Sclafani recently took a leave from his position to do research.

Downstate officials told The Times during the winter that back in 2007, the hospital had instituted procedures intended to minimize exposure to radiation. The steps included reducing the radiation dose administered to pediatric patients undergoing CT scans and eliminating CT scans that were not absolutely necessary.

According to doctors familiar with Downstate procedures, those steps did reduce exposure to radiation from CT scans.

 

Classic Commodore 64 lives again

。 7 April 2011 Last updated at 06:10 ET The revamped machine has a familiar look and feel Fans of retro computing will soon be able to buy a modern PC clad in a classic case.

Commodore is making a Windows PC that fits inside a boxy beige shell that looks exactly like its original C64.

The 8-bit machine was released in 1982, had 64 kilobytes of memory and became one of the best-selling computers ever.

Commodore's updated version will run Windows 7 but also has an emulator capable of playing games written for its ancestor.

Commodore has started taking orders for the C64x, priced at $595 (￡364), and said the machines would ship between May and June. It is expected to appear in shops later in the year.

The machine's internal hardware will be based around a dual-core Intel Atom D525, a chip typically found in notebook computers.

Its 1.8Ghz chip is far faster than the 8-bit 1MHz MOS 6502 processor used in the 80's original.

California Games was one of the most popular titles for the original Commodore 64

The C64x will also use an integrated Nvidia graphics chip and buyers have the option of equipping a model with a Bluray DVD player.

All the hardware for the machine fits inside the keyboard case.

The first models will sport the same taupe colour scheme as the original along with a "clicky" keyboard familiar to anyone who used the older C64 or its predecessor, the Vic 20.

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