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Monday, December 3, 2012
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Signal problems preceded NJ train derailment
Derailed freight train cars lay in water in Paulsboro, N.J., Friday, Nov. 30, 2012. People in three southern New Jersey towns were told Friday to stay inside after the freight train derailed and several tanker cars carrying hazardous materials toppled from a bridge and into a creek. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
Derailed freight train cars lay in water in Paulsboro, N.J., Friday, Nov. 30, 2012. People in three southern New Jersey towns were told Friday to stay inside after the freight train derailed and several tanker cars carrying hazardous materials toppled from a bridge and into a creek. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
Several cars lay in the water after a freight train derailed in Paulsboro, N.J., Friday, Nov. 30, 2012. People in three southern New Jersey towns were told Friday to stay inside after the freight train derailed and several tanker cars carrying hazardous materials toppled from a bridge and into a creek. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
An official stands by derailed freight train tank cars in Paulsboro, N.J., Friday, Nov. 30, 2012. People in three southern New Jersey towns were told Friday to stay inside after a freight train derailed and several tanker cars carrying hazardous materials toppled from a bridge and into a creek. At least one tanker car may contain vinyl chloride, Gloucester County Emergency Management director J. Thomas Butts told WPVI-TV. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)
Officials stand next to derailed freight train cars in Paulsboro, N.J., Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, after several tanker cars carrying hazardous materials toppled from a bridge and into a creek. At least one tanker car may contain vinyl chloride, Gloucester County Emergency Management director J. Thomas Butts told WPVI-TV. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)
Map locates train derailment and hazardous spill in New Jersey
PAULSBORO, N.J. (AP) ? There may have been a problem with a signal at a New Jersey bridge just before a trail derailed there, spewing a hazardous chemical into the air that sickened dozens of people.
National Transportation Safety Board chairman Deborah Hersman said Saturday that train crewmembers have told investigators that a radio code used to change a light from red to green failed to work just before Friday's accident.
The conductor got out of the train and visually inspected the bridge in Paulsboro, she said. The crew then called for and received permission to cross, she said.
It's unclear if the malfunctioning signal had anything to do with the accident, she said. Hersman said the train was moving 8 mph just before seven cars derailed on the bridge ? below the 10 mph speed limit.
More than 100 people in southern New Jersey remained out of their homes Saturday as officials continued their efforts to clear a hazardous gas that spewed from a ruptured freight train car.
The precautionary evacuations in Paulsboro were ordered late Friday, hours after the train derailment, and will likely remain in effect throughout the weekend and possibly longer.
The order came after readings showed higher levels of vinyl chloride in the air. The gas, used to make the common plastic PVC, can make people dizzy or sleepy.
A Conrail spokesman said his company was paying for 106 hotel rooms for displaced residents. He was not certain how many people had been told to leave.
Meanwhile, officials continued the delicate cleanup and investigation that started after the train derailed, sending four tanker cars partially into a creek.
Speaking at a news conference Saturday morning, Coast Guard Capt. Kathy Moore said crews would "exclusively be working" on removing the remaining chemicals, now in a solid state, out of the breached car.
Moore said there were no signs that any of the other train cars had been ruptured, but added "there's still a lot we don't know."
National Transportation Safety Board members arrived Friday to start the work of piecing together how the accident happened on the swing-style rail bridge where there was another derailment three years ago. With increased health concerns close to the site, Hersman said her investigators would initially focus on reviewing records, interviewing witnesses and other parts of the investigation that can be done away from the accident scene.
Meanwhile, local authorities said the job of lifting tanker cars was so immense that no cranes in the Philadelphia area were strong enough to handle it. One was being floated in by barge from New York Harbor ? a full day's journey away ? for the job.
While the machinery is big, the operation must be precise to avoid any further ruptures to derailed cars.
The derailment happened at about 7 a.m. Friday in Paulsboro, an industrial town directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia International Airport. The train ? two locomotives, 83 freight cars and a caboose ? was making its way from Camden when seven cars derailed. Five of them were on the bridge and two were nearby.
Four of the tankers were filled with vinyl chlorine. One of those cars ruptured, spewing some of the gas into the air.
The gas can make people dizzy or sleepy. Breathing very high levels can cause someone to pass out, and breathing extremely high levels can cause death. Most of the vinyl chloride is gone from the body one day after being breathed in.
More than 70 people who live or work in the area went to an emergency room, but none were found to have life-threatening conditions and most were discharged within hours.
The bridge was rebuilt after it buckled in August 2009 when nine cars carrying coal derailed. Officials blamed bridge misalignment for that accident.
Hersman said Friday that her agency will not rule on a cause during its initial, on-the-ground investigation.
On Friday, 17 NTSB workers were in Paulsboro starting to assess the integrity and history of the bridge, the mechanics of the train and the condition of its crew.
She said the cars would be moved only after they'd been documented.
For the ruptured one, the major concern was dealing with the solidified vinyl chlorine that remained inside. Tom Butts, chief of the Gloucester County Office of Emergency Management, said the chemical could be sprayed with water, which would turn it into gas, and then more water could be used to neutralize it as it dissipates into the air. But Hersman said the method of removing the vinyl chloride was not decided for certain.
Local authorities said residents should remain cautious and heed official announcements in case more of the gas gets into the air during the cleanup.
Assemblyman John Burzichelli, a former mayor of Paulsboro who was acting as the town's spokesman on Friday, said getting the rail fixed and reopened is important for commerce in a stretch of New Jersey with refineries and factories.
"This is heavy rail and this is heavy freight," he said.
As long as the bridge is out, he said, businesses will have to rely on barges and trucks to move goods.
___
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Saturday, December 1, 2012
Fiscal cliff would hurt low-wage workers the most
Fiscal cliff drama in Washington coinciding with?strikes and work stoppages among America?s lowest-paid workers, at Walmart and fast food restaurants, is no coincidence. If Congress goes over, these are the people who will feel the pinch.?
Protesters with signs hold a demonstration outside a Burger King restaurant in support of fast-food employees on strike in New York November 29, 2012. Reich argues that the recent rash of strikes among low wage workers and the 'fiscal cliff' arguments in Washington are interrelated.
Andrew Kelly/Reuters/File
EnlargeWhat does the drama in Washington over the ?fiscal cliff? have to do with strikes and work stoppages among America?s lowest-paid workers at Walmart, McDonald?s, Burger King, and Domino?s Pizza?
Skip to next paragraph Robert ReichRobert is chancellor?s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Clinton. Time Magazine?named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including ?The Work of Nations,? his latest best-seller ?Aftershock: The Next Economy and America?s Future," and a new?e-book, ?Beyond Outrage.??He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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Jobs are slowly returning to America, but most of them pay lousy wages and low if non-existent benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that seven out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage ? like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains. That?s why the median wage keeps dropping, especially for the 80 percent of the workforce that?s paid by the hour.
It also part of the reason why the percent of Americans living below the poverty line has been increasing even as the economy has started to recover ? from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15 percent in 2011. More than 46 million Americans now live below the poverty line.
Many of them have jobs. The problem is these jobs just don?t pay enough to lift their families out of poverty.
So, encouraged by the economic recovery and perhaps also by the election returns, low-wage workers have started to organize.??
Yesterday in New York hundreds of workers at dozens of fast-food chain stores went on strike, demanding a raise to $15-an-hour from their current pay of $8 to $10 an hour (the median hourly wage for food service and prep workers in New York is $8.90 an hour).
Last week, Walmart workers staged demonstrations and walkouts at thousands of Walmart stores, also demanding better pay. The average Walmart employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart?s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don?t qualify for benefits.
These workers are not teenagers. Most have to support their families. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median age of fast-food workers is over 28; and women, who comprise two-thirds of the industry, are over 32. The median age of big-box retail workers is over 30.
Organizing makes economic sense.
Unlike industrial jobs, these can?t be outsourced abroad. Nor are they likely to be replaced by automated machinery and computers. The service these workers provide is personal and direct: Someone has to be on hand to help customers and dole out the burgers.
And any wage gains they receive aren?t likely to be passed on to consumers in higher prices because big-box retailers and fast-food chains have to compete intensely for consumers. They have no choice but to keep their prices low.?
That means wage gains are likely to come out of profits ? which, in turn, would affect the return to shareholders and the total compensation of top executives.
That wouldn?t be such a bad thing.?
According to a?recent report?by the National Employment Law Project, most low-wage workers are employed by large corporations that have been enjoying healthy profits. Three-quarters of these employers (the fifty biggest employers of low-wage workers) are raking in higher revenues now than they did before the recession.
McDonald?s ? bellwether for the fast-food industry ? posted strong results during the recession by attracting cash-strapped customers, and its sales have continued to rise.
Its CEO, Jim Skinner, got $8.8 million last year. In addition to annual bonuses, McDonald?s also gives its executives a long-term bonus once every three years; Skinner received an $8.3 million long-term bonus in 2009 and is due for another this year. The value of Skinner?s other perks ? including personal use of the company aircraft, physical exams and security ? rose 19% to $752,000.
Yum!Brands, which operates and licenses Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, has also done wonderfully well. Its CEO, David Novak, received $29.67 million in total compensation last year, placing him number 23 on?Forbes? list of highest paid chief executives.?
Walmart ? the trendsetter for big-box retailers ? is also doing well. And it pays its executives handsomely.?The total compensation for Walmart?s CEO, Michael Duke, was $18.7 million last year ? putting him number 82 on?Forbes? list.
The wealth of the Walton family ? which still owns the lion?s share of Walmart stock ? now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an?analysis?by the Economic Policy Institute.
Last week, Walmart?announced that the next Wal-Mart dividend will be issued December 27 instead of January 2, after the Bush tax cut for dividends expires ? thereby saving the Walmart family as much as $180 million. (According to the online weekly ?Too Much,? this $180 million would be enough to give 72,000 Wal-Mart workers nowmaking $8 an hour?a 20 percent annual pay hike. That hike would still leave those workers making under the poverty line for a family of three.)
America is becoming more unequal by the day. So wouldn?t it be sensible to encourage unionization at fast-food and big-box retailers?
Yes, but here?s the problem.
The unemployment rate among people with just a high school degree or less ? which describes most (but not all) fast-food and big-box retail workers ? is still in the stratosphere. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts it at 12.2 percent, and that?s conservative estimate. It was 7.7 percent at the start of 2008.
High unemployment makes it much harder to organize a union because workers are even more fearful than usual of losing their jobs. Eight dollars an hour is better than no dollars an hour. And employers at big-box and fast-food chains have not been reluctant to give the boot to employees associated with attempts to organize for higher wages.
Meanwhile, only half of the people who lose their jobs qualify for unemployment insurance these days. Retail workers in big-boxes and fast-food chains rarely qualify because they haven?t been on the job long enough or are there only part-time. This makes the risk of job loss even greater.
Which brings us back to what?s happening in Washington.
Washington?s obsession with deficit reduction makes it all the more likely these workers will face continuing high unemployment ? even higher if the nation succumbs to deficit hysteria. That?s because cutting government spending reduces overall demand, which hits low-wage workers hardest. They and their families are the biggest casualties of austerity economics.
And if the spending cuts Washington is contemplating fall on low-wage workers whose families are under the poverty line ? reducing not only the availability of unemployment insurance but also food stamps, housing assistance, infant and child nutrition, child health care, and Medicaid ? it will be even worse. (It?s worth recalling, in this regard, that 62 percent of the cuts in the Republican budget engineered by Paul Ryan fell on America?s poor.)
By contrast, low levels of unemployment invite wage gains and make it easier to organize unions. The last time America?s low-wage workers got a real raise (apart from the last hike in the minimum wage) was the late 1990s when unemployment dropped to 4 percent nationally ? compelling employers to raise wages in order to recruit and retain them, and prompting a round of labor organizing.
That?s one reason why job growth must be the nation?s number one priority. Not deficit reduction.
Yet neither side in the current ?fiscal cliff? negotiations is talking about America?s low-wage workers. They?re invisible in official Washington.?
Not only are they unorganized for the purpose of getting a larger share of the profits at Walmart, McDonalds, and other giant firms, they?re also unorganized for the purpose of being heard in our nation?s capital. There?s no national association of low-wage workers. They don?t contribute much to political campaigns. They have no Super-PAC. They don?t have Washington lobbyists.
But if this nation is to reverse the scourge of widening inequality, Washington needs to start paying attention to them. And the rest of us should do everything we can to pressure Washington?and?big-box retailers and fast-food chains to raise their pay.
The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. This post originally ran on www.robertreich.org.
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LNG Tanker Due at UK South Hook Next Week>> LNG World News
The Mekaines LNG carrier, with a capacity of 266,000 cubic metres, is due to arrive in the UK?s South Hook terminal from Qatar on December 7, according to the Milford Haven Port Authority website.
The South Hook terminal can process 15.6 million tonnes of LNG a year and is capable of delivering 21 billion cubic metres of gas a year into the UK?s national transmission system.
Qatar Petroleum owns 67.5 per cent of South Hook LNG Terminal Co, Exxon Mobil Corp 24.15 per cent and Total SA owns the rest.
LNG World News Staff, November 30, 2012; Image: Qatargas
Source: http://www.lngworldnews.com/lng-tanker-due-at-uk-south-hook-next-week-23/
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Read all about it: Pope has not canceled Christmas
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - And so it came to pass that in the eighth year of Pope Benedict's reign, some tabloid and social media decreed that he had cancelled Christmas.
The day after Benedict's latest book "The Infancy Narratives - Jesus of Nazareth" - was published on November 20, Vatican officials found some headlines they were not expecting.
"Killjoy pope crushes Christmas nativity traditions," read one tabloid headline, claiming that Benedict had snubbed traditions such as animals in nativity scenes and caroling.
"Pope sets out to debunk Christmas myths," ran another.
Holy Scrooge! Some blogs unceremoniously branded Benedict the new Grinch that stole Christmas and one rocketed him to the "top of the grumpy list for 2012."
And then there was this zinger headline from a web news site: "Pope bans Christmas".
Coming little more than a month before Christmas, it was the last thing the Vatican needed - another image problem for the pope.
Alarmed by some of the headlines, the Catholic social network XT3 felt compelled to run a blog that dissected the media's coverage of the book.
It was headlined: "The pope has not banned Christmas".
So what was all the fuss about?
In the 137-page book, the pope states a fact: that in the gospels there is "no reference" to the presence of animals in the stable - actually, it was probably a cave - where Jesus was born.
Bloggers had a feast with that, with one calling it "Bombshell number one".
What some neglected was that just a few sentences down, the pope states that even today, "No representation of the crib is complete without the ox and the ass".
He explains: The tradition of the ass and ox came from reflecting on parts of the Old and New Testaments. Christian iconography then adopted the motif early in Church history to show that even animals knew Jesus was the son of God.
KEEP ON CAROLLING
In other words, the tradition that has developed over the centuries matters more than an unverifiable fact, at least as far as the case of the ox and ass in the stable is concerned.
"I think that what people need to realize here is that the pope is trying to be as historical as he can be," said Father Robert Dodaro, professor of patristics, or the study of early Church writings, at Rome's Patristic Institute.
"He wants to see the biblical narratives as history where possible but he is also trying to explain details in the narratives that cannot be historically verified," he said.
Some bloggers, taking their cue from television and website headlines, even wrote that the pope had spoken out against Christmas carols.
In the book, the opposite was true.
Benedict says the evangelist Luke wrote that at the moment of Jesus' birth the angels "said" the well-known phrase "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased".
But in the next line he explains that "Christianity has always understood that the speech of angels is actually song", that "the angels' song of praise has never gone silent", and that it is "only natural that simple believers (even today) join in their caroling on the Holy Night".
So, no need to cancel any school performances.
Another section of the book that irked some bloggers is where the pope restates what biblical scholars have known for decades, if not centuries - that Jesus was born several years earlier than the first century AD.
Benedict writes that since King Herod died in 4 BC, Jesus was probably born "a few years earlier". He attributes the erroneous fixing of the year of Jesus' birth to a miscalculation by the monk Dionysius Exiguous some 500 years later.
"No one's faith should be shaken by this book," said Dodaro. "On the contrary, it should be fortified by this account. This is a believable account of the birth of Christ," he said.
And in St Peter's Square, workmen have started building the Vatican's larger than life nativity scene, which is expected to have animals and singing angels.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/read-pope-not-cancelled-christmas-120815146.html
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