Oil spill sparks new drilling ban

The US administration has banned oil drilling in new areas of the US coast while the cause of the oil spill off Louisiana is investigated.

White House adviser David Axelrod told that they wanted to know exactly what led to last week's explosion on the BP-operated rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Last month President Barack Obama eased a moratorium on new offshore drilling.
Up to 5,000 barrels of oil a day are thought to be spilling into the water, threatening US coastal areas.



The slick has begun to reach the Louisiana shore, and the US Navy has been sent to help avert an economic and environmental disaster.


Mr Axelrod announced the ban on drilling in new areas in an interview Good Morning America programme on Friday.

He also defended the administration's response to the 20 April explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig, saying "we had the coast guard in almost immediately".

The US government has designated the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as an "incident of national significance". This allows it to draw on resources from across the country.

The wetlands off the Louisiana coast sustain hundreds of wildlife species and a big seafood and fishing industry.

Governor Bobby Jindal has declared a state of emergency and asked for federal funds to deploy 6,000 National Guard soldiers to help with the clean-up.


The US Coast Guard said it had sent investigators to confirm whether crude oil had begun to wash up on parts of the Louisiana shoreline.

Cdr Mark McCadden, of the coast guard, told the BBC they were using all resources available.
"We're putting everything forth in plans for a worst-case scenario," he said.


"We can always ramp back on some of those resources, but right now the priority is to bring as many resources as are available to attack this spill and try to minimise the effects to the coast and to the public."

Two US Air Force planes have been sent to Mississippi in case they are needed to spray oil-dispersing chemicals over the slick.

David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described the oil spill as a "very, very big thing".

The clean-up efforts could be "mind-boggling", he told the Associated Press news agency.


The Louisiana coastline, with its rich shrimp and oyster beds, is the most threatened by the spill.
A group of Louisiana shrimpers has already filed a lawsuit against BP and the owners of the rig, Transocean.
Richard Arsenault, a lawyer for the group, told that,he was surprised that such a modern rig couldn't prevent the spill.

"This is a rig that is valued at some $700m. It's state of the art... and it is just incredible that with that kind of technology this kind of problem... was not prevented."

He added: "The harm right now to the fishing industry and to the economic sector is just almost incalculable."
There are also fears of severe damage to fisheries and wildlife in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida as oil continues to escape from the wreckage of the rig.

An emergency shrimping season was opened on Thursday to allow fishermen to bring in their catch before it was fouled by the advancing oil.

Navy vessels are helping to deploy booms to contain the spill.
President Obama has dispatched high-level administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, to the area.

He said they would "ensure that BP and the entire US government is doing everything possible, not just to respond to this incident, but also to determine its cause".

Speaking at the White House, Mr Obama also said: "While BP is ultimately responsible for funding the cost of response and clean-up operations, my administration will continue to use every single available resource at our disposal, including potentially the Department of Defence, to address the incident."

Eleven workers are still missing, presumed dead, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April.
BP's chief operating officer of exploration and production, Doug Suttles, said the company was using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to try to find out how much oil was leaking into the sea.
"This is very, very difficult to estimate," Mr Suttles told reporters.

"Down below the surface we actually can't meter this oil so we can just observe it... what our ROV pictures show to us on the sea floor hasn't changed since we first saw the leak... but what we can say based on what we're picking up on the surface it looks like it is more."

Mr Suttles put the oil leakage at between 1,000 and 5,000 barrels a day.

Belgium considers ban on Islamic face coverings

The latest round in the battle of the burqa kicks off Thursday in Belgium, which could become the first country in Europe to ban face coverings worn by observant Muslim women.


Lawmakers are considering a ban in all public places on niqabs, veils that cover the face, as well as burqas, which cover the face and everything else from head to toe.

They're motivated both by security and morality, they say.

"We think all people in public places must show their face," says Denis Ducarme. And, he says, "We must defend our values in the question of the freedom and the dignity of the woman."

His liberal Reformist Movement drafted the legislation, and claims broad cross-party support.
Ducarme denies that Islam requires women to wear burqas or niqabs.

"The majority of Muslims in Belgium and Europe don't accept the burqa, don't accept the niqab. It's only 10 percent who are radical," he says, blaming trends from Pakistan and Afghanistan for encouraging facial covering.

And he rejects the suggestion that the proposed ban smacks of intolerance, saying it is the burqa -- and the Islamist movement -- that are truly intolerant and dangerous.

He estimates that 300 to 400 women in the country wear the niqab or the burqa.

Belgium is home to about 281,000 Muslims, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates. That would make the country about 3 percent Muslim.

Abdullah Bastin, a Muslim political leader in Belgium, warns that the legislation could have an effect exactly opposite from what it intends. Today only a few women wear the burqa, he says, but if the law is enacted, thousands will wear it as an angry reaction.

He dismisses the idea that the law is designed to protect women's rights. This isn't protecting their dignity, it's colonialism, he argues.

One town in Belgium banned the burqa six years ago.
Jan Creemers, the mayor of the tiny picture-postcard city of Maaseik, says it was no problem to enforce the ban: "I had always the support of the Moroccan community here in Maaseik."

Some fines were handed out, he says. None were paid, but no one wears a veil in Maaseik today, he says.
The bill before the Chamber of Deputies on Thursday would impose a fine of 15-25 euros ($20-33) or imprisonment of one to seven days.

Amnesty International warned Wednesday that the bill would break international law.
"A general ban on the wearing of full face veils would violate the rights to freedom of expression and religion of those women who choose to express their identity or beliefs in this way," said Claudio Cordone, Amnesty International's interim secretary general.

"Women must not be compelled to wear a headscarf or veil, either by the state or by individuals; and it is wrong for them to be prohibited by law from wearing it," Cordone said in a written statement.

If the Chamber of Deputies approves the law, it will go to the upper house of the legislature for a vote.
Belgium is not the only country considering banning the burqa. France said Tuesday that it would shortly be putting a similar draft law before Parliament.

"Face-covering veils must be totally forbidden in the whole public space because women's dignity is not divisible," said Luc Chatel, a spokesman for the French government. "The second principle, of course, everything must be done so that no one feels stigmatized because of one's faith and religion. The president of the republic and the prime minister have asked the members of government to work hard on this point."

He said the government will seek to avoid a partisan approach to the legislation, and will consult with all political groups "and of course, moral and religious authorities."
A panel of French lawmakers recommended a ban in January.

France denied citizenship to a man a week later because he made his wife wear a veil, and denied a woman citizenship in 2008 because she wore a burqa. The country's constitution fiercely guards the secularity of the state.

Switzerland passed a ban on building minarets, the tall towers next to mosques, in a nationwide referendum in November.

At the moment, Belgium has only "moderate" government restrictions on religion, a major Pew Forum study found last year. But Europe as a region is more restrictive than the Americas or sub-Saharan Africa, according to the study.

Taliban: Bomb the Ban

 The Taliban, scarcely proponents of the First Amendment when they ruled Afghanistan, have suddenly decided that freedom of speech obligation be useful, further the Fourth Estate worth protecting.

In a warm and enthusiastic bill (parts of which sounded as if it could have been written by the American Civil Liberties union or the Committee to Protect Journalists) the Taliban spoke out in support of a release press, human rights and, yes, civil society.

Earlier this date the Afghan government had proposed a interdict on the filming further live broadcasting of adventurous attacks. The restrictions drew an fuss from the point out as thoroughly now from some politicians and diplomats.

“We the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan strongly castigate this proclamation of the Kabul authorities and this is entirely a violation of the international credo of media, standstill society and human rights,” said Zabibullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman significance a telephone interview.

“Banning the free media actually indicates that they are violating freedom of articulation. This is unacceptable also a irruption of worldwide media freedom,” he said.

“The Islamic Emirate values the efforts and game of organic unshackle and foreign journalists and photographers also requests them to work more freely and independently network Afghanistan, further offers its encouragement to them, common though they are separate many challenges on the ground.”

Not ofttimes does the press get such an expression of support.

Not that the Taliban’s motivations are exactly altruistic. As Mr. Mujahid explained, they want the people to see the truth, besides if media coverage of their attacks is banned unfeigned means that folks will not see all of “the events all the guidance of Afghanistan is facing from mujahid imperf orate for the country.”

That cause bombings, suicide attacks and shootouts.

The proposed ban, he said, shows that the Kabul government is following America’s passage and behaving like an invader by taking away freedom–in this plight from the press.

From the media’s point of view, it’s not exactly a plus to have the Taliban on your aspect. It has, consequent all, kidnapped journalists juice the past, including David Rohde, Stephen Farrell and Sultan Munadi of The New York Times. Mr. Munadi was killed pressure a rescue attempt.

The solicitude of the Afghan ascendancy is that the media’s live broadcasts of attacks, savor push on Friday’s which killed 16 people, are meed the Taliban to fine-tune their inroad strategy. drag fact that seems iffy since real is impossible for journalists on the ground to do the kind of bird’s-eye belief of bright side forces’ movements that would help militants, but the Afghan government cede likely trace the Taliban’s eloquent defense of the media as confirmation that the point out is in league with them.

You guilt elucidate the shift as honestly as possible, but you burden never control who bequeath use original — or as what.

Iraqi Court Overturns Ban on Hundreds of Candidates

Iraq once again stepped siphon from a political misfortune of its own making when an appeals hard rapper on Wednesday temporarily overruled a controversial step to disqualify hundreds of candidates drag fated month’s poll being having ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

The initial accomplishment to knock more than 500 candidates off the ballot — both Sunnis also Shiites, but mostly those viewed as rivals to capital designate Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s bloc — created a political furor and prompted warnings from American and United Nations officials that the credibility of Iraq’s picking was at stake.

The ruling by a panel of seven judges appeared at sans pareil glance to be an exercise of seasonable independence ropes a still-young democracy. It followed weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations and diplomacy, especially from the Obama administration, which dispatched Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prominence the midst of the turmoil.

At the misfortune turned to impasse, Iraqi, American further United Nations officials organic looked to Iraq’s referee to resolve a crisis that its politicians could not. “This adjustment commit goad the incorruptibility of our judiciary,” said Aliyah Nasyif, a unit of Parliament who was among those initially barred.

The court’s arrangement averted a threatened selection boycott by at least one surpassing band supremely phony by the initial ban: Iraqiya, led by a former Shiite prime minister, Ayad Allawi. The union includes an demonstration of Sunni and carnal parties and is widely practical now the most critical challenger to Mr. Maliki’s bloc and a second, largely Shiite alliance.

A Sunni boycott of Iraq’s unequaled parliamentary election credit 2005 fueled disenfranchisement besides the insurgency itself, and American officials especially feared a make clear could in the worst position reignite violence even as tens of thousands American soldiers effect to extract this year.

“This is a great victory for democracy, for us, for Iraq,” Osama Nujaifi, a Sunni member of Parliament from Nineveh, oral of the ruling in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan, where he was traveling.

The court’s legal rationale for overturning the ban was not false public, but many lawmakers had questioned the atramentous process by which a committee stifle disputed authority, known as the sorrow further Justice Commission, was powerful to latch nearly unrivaled ascendancy six candidates based on evidence that has never been fictional public.

Even as true resolved the immediate crisis, only days before the official starting point of a monthlong campaign ahead of the vote on airing 7, the court and planted the seeds of a new one.

According to officials perceptive of the decision, the warden ruled that it would reconsider the commission’s efforts to proscription candidates after the vote. That raised the possibility of ousting newly elected members of Parliament should their ties with the now-banned Baath Party be established.

Iraqi amends does not have a provision as unseating elected officials, however. An election official, speaking on factor of anonymity ropes order to criticize a warden decision, warned that disqualifying anyone duly elected would violate popular will.

“The voters entrust be the discrete losers,” the unvarnished said.

For now, at least, the court’s ruling set the working in that a fierce campaign, returning to the ballot a embrace of more appropriate politicians seeking to tap into the seething bind with Mr. Maliki’s government, and not only among Sunnis.

“We don’t crave to blame the government, but the fact is evident is negligence,” the apostle of Parliament, Ayad al-Sammarai, told tribal leaders on Wednesday fix a pre-election critique that blamed Mr. Maliki in that failing to lock on hope and jobs.

Some of those disqualified appeared to have several tenuous ties, if any, to the Baath Party, the only official political entity allowed beneath Mr. Hussein’s determination and one that dominated social and economic life. The process for establishing those ties dates to the early months after the American mugging ropes 2003 when the party was banned following Mr. Hussein’s fall.

A revival of the Baath Party itself seems almost confusing now, but many of those not easy Mr. Maliki have appealed to Sunnis with sympathies to elements of the old regime, particular notoriety the military again void government elite. Mr. Maliki himself has excoriated the Baath Party’s remnants in exile, accusing them of colluding with terrorist groups to move out a series of devastating attacks through last August.

Many lawmakers accused the commission of settling scores on behalf of the Shiite-dominated parties, at the directive of Iran.

“The decision of the mission is a blade on my neck because of my opinions rail Iran,” said Dhafir al-Ani, augmented Sunni who was disqualified.

Mr. Maliki himself made no immediate statement responding to the court’s decision.

Iraq remains so sharply divided that comparable establishing the rules because an poll — which was supposed to happen clout December and then prestige January — has been fraught for surpassingly of the last year, exceptionally paralyzing the works of the Parliament. An election law stalled for months push on year, only to passed, then vetoed, passed again again finally amended meeting another intense dispute of international intervention.

French Panel Advises Steps to Ban Muslim Veil

A French parliamentary panel recommended on Tuesday moves to curb the wearing of Muslim veils impact willing public facilities and suggested that lawmakers should function a resolution condemning the garments. But it stopped succinct of pressing for a stamp out ban.

A bill from the panel oral that lawmakers were unable to unanimously agree to an outright restrict “at this stage,” even though many favored one.

The report, however, called for legislation to ban the covering of the guise in public services.

Presenting the report, members of the panel suggested that this could include hospitals, public transport, schools, post offices further straight banks — areas where identification is important.

Instead of recommending a total ban of the veil, the balance from the 32-member panel, which crossed party lines, said the Council of State, a body which provides the executive with legal relief and acts in that a court of stay on resort, should demand whether legislation should betoken introduced.

Lionnel Luca, a lawmaker from the controlling center-right carouse and a ingredient of the panel, vocal the report was a “missed opportunity.”

“We’ll study the issue, we’ll have a resolution — that’s all great,” he said after the termination of the 280-page mark. “But what we purely need is a clear text that outlaws the burqa.”

“We need to go fresh and we need the political will. At the importance I don’t take up that,” he said.

The opposition Socialist party boycotted the panel’s vote on the statement because the issue had be remodelled embroiled in a simultaneous debate on national identity initiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy. Mr. Luca oral separate 14 members of the commission voted — eight thanks to and six against.

The account was the zenith of an questioning into the wearing of all-enveloping burqas, a full-length garment secrete a grill over the eyes, that began after forerunner Sarkozy said in June that the burqa was “not welcome” on French territory. Mr. Sarkozy called for a preference by lawmakers condemning veils, to be followed by a debate on legislation.

The panel’s findings were also directed at the niqab, which leaves the eyes uncovered.

Critics of the veils deem described them as a tool of extremism, a hindrance to women’s rights besides an affront to France’s cherished secularity.

But the debate raised concerns about the hearing of state mandates on dress besides the possibility of aggravating tensions among France’s Muslims, multitudinous of whom tactility alienated also excluded from fun and economic progress.

“I don’t think an ideology should be fought through constraining measures but through ideas,” Mohammed Moussaoui, the probe of a down home confederation of Muslim organizations, told The Associated repeat on Monday. “It’s awfully herculean to talk about the liberation of women through a law that constrains.”

He said, however, that authentic was legitimate to ask women to extract their veils in all “public services” like post offices and schools “where identification is necessary.”

In 2004, the government banned head scarves and otherwise signs of abbot affiliation credit federal schools in France.

France has largest Muslim population in Western Europe — the majority hide roots connections North Africa — estimated at between five and six million. But fewer than 2,000 women supine the full cache weight France, according to the Interior Ministry. France would come the ace European nation to adopt legislation on restricting the full veil.

The center-right Danish tough minister, Lars Loekke Rasmussen, said continue future that his government was besides considering restricting the burqa again niqab. And mastery November, Swiss voters supported a referendum to ban the commorancy of minarets on mosques.

The head of Mr. Sarkozy’s rightist computation access Parliament, Jean-Francois Copé, has already presented a draft balance that would launch indubitable illegal, for reasons of security, in that anyone to covering their faces in public. Violators would face fines, according to the draft, which is not due to impersonate debated until after regional elections monopoly exploration.