Note: The number of victims has risen to 39 since this report was posted

Refinery blast kills 24 in Venezuela, 86 hurt

Associated Press/Daniela Primera - Fire rises over Amuay refinery near Punto Fijo, Venezuela, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2012. A huge explosion rocked Venezuela's biggest oil refinery, killing at least 19 people and injuring dozens, an official said. (AP Photo/Daniela Primera)

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A huge explosion rocked Venezuela's biggest oil refinery and unleashed a ferocious fire Saturday, killing at least 24 people and injuring more than 80 others in the deadliest disaster in memory for the country's key oil industry.

Balls of fire rose over the Amuay refinery, one of the largest in the world, in video posted on the Internet by people who were nearby at the time. Government officials pledged to restart the refinery within two days and said the country has plenty of fuel supplies on hand to meet its domestic needs as well as its export commitments.

At least 86 people were injured, nine of them seriously, Health Minister Eugenia Sader said at a hospital where the wounded were taken. She said 77 people suffered light injuries and were released from the hospital.

Officials said those killed included a 10-year-old boy, but that most of the victims were National Guard troops stationed at the refinery.

Vice President Elias Jaua, who traveled to the area in western Venezuela, said the authorities were "trying to save the greatest number of lives."

Officials said firefighters had controlled the flames at the refinery on the Paraguana Peninsula, where clouds of dark smoke were billowing at daybreak.

Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said the state oil company should be able to "restart operations in a maximum of two days."

"We have sufficient supplies... in the entire country, and our production at the maximum to deal with any situation in our domestic market," Ramirez said. "In that sense, we won't have major effects."

An official of the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA, said the country also has enough supplies on hand to guarantee its international supply commitments. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

The blast occurred about 1:15 a.m. when a gas leak created a cloud that ignited, Ramirez said. An adjacent National Guard post was severely damaged by the blast, he said.

"That gas generated a cloud that later exploded and has caused fires in at least two tanks of the refinery and surrounding areas," Ramirez said. "The blast wave was of a significant magnitude."

Images in the early hours after the explosion showed the flames casting an orange glow against the night sky. One photograph showed an injured man being wheeled away on a stretcher.

"The areas that had to be evacuated were evacuated," Falcon state Gov. Stella Lugo said on television, according to the state-run Venezuelan News Agency. "The situation is controlled. Of course there's still a fire rising very high, but ... the specialists tell me there is no risk of another explosion."

Ramirez said a panel of investigators was being formed to investigate the cause of the gas leak. A prosecutor also was assigned to lead the investigation. Troops were deployed to the area.

Ramirez said that nine storage tanks were damaged. He said supplies of fuel had been cut off to part of the refinery, and that the fire had been brought under control, though the flames would continue to burn up fuel in some of the tanks.

"At this time, the situation is controlled," Jaua said on television, while smoke continued to billow from the refinery.

Amuay is part of the Paraguana Refinery Complex, which also includes the adjacent Cardon refinery. Together, the two refineries process about 900,000 barrels of crude per day and 200,000 barrels of gasoline. Venezuela is a major supplier of oil to the U.S. and a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

While the cause of Saturday's disaster remained unclear, some critics of President Hugo Chavez's government have recently pointed to increasing numbers of smaller accidents and spills as an indication of problems within the state-run company known as PDVSA.

"This tragedy is probably the worst one the oil industry has had in many years. Accidents happen, of course, although the problem with PDVSA is the inordinate amount of accidents that have taken place during the last years," said Gustavo Coronel, an energy consultant and former executive of PDVSA. Considering that record overall, Coronel said, "we are not talking about bad luck but about lack of maintenance and inept management."

Deadly accidents also occurred in Venezuela's oil and natural gas industry in the past. In 1993, a natural gas pipeline exploded beneath highway in Las Tejerias, engulfing a passenger bus and cars. Officials said 36 people were killed.

On Saturday morning, Ramirez said the explosion occurred in an area of the refinery where storage tanks are located. On television, he showed an aerial map of the rows of tanks where the flames raged.

"All of the events happened very quickly," he said. "When we got here in the middle of the night, at 3 or 3:30 in the morning, the fire was at its peak."

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Associated Press writers Jorge Rueda and Fabiola Sanchez contributed to this report.

Diplomats: Iran shrouds suspected nuclear site

Herman Nackaerts, Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, centre left, and Iran's Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh speak to journalists after their talks at the permanent mission of Iran in Vienna, Austria, Friday, Aug. 24, 2012. (AP Photo/Hans Punz)

VIENNA (AP) — Iran has shrouded a building that the U.N. nuclear agency suspects was used for secret work on atomic weapons, meaning spy satellites can no longer monitor Tehran's alleged efforts to clean up the site, diplomats told The Associated Press on Friday.

For months, satellite images have recorded what the International Atomic Energy Agency suspects is an attempt to sanitize the site. At the same time, Iran has repeatedly rebuffed agency efforts for access — and did so again Friday. Talks between the two sides ended without an agreement that would have allowed IAEA experts to visit the site at the Parchin military complex southeast of Tehran.

The diplomats said the main building is now covered with what appears to be plastic sheeting, shielding any activity there from the outside world and effectively shutting down the IAEA's only way of monitoring the site with its eyes in the sky through spy and commercial satellite imagery.

Iran denies any cover-up at Parchin or anywhere else, describing allegations that it worked secretly on developing nuclear arms as lies based on fabricated intelligence made available to the agency by the U.S., its Western allies and Israel. It also denies that its public nuclear work — uranium enrichment — is meant to create nuclear missile warheads, saying it is enriching only to make reactor fuel, medical isotopes and for research.

But it has refused eight months of agency requests to visit Parchin and has turned away IAEA attempts to probe other alleged weapons research and development for over four years, as well as rejecting offers of enriched reactor fuel from abroad. Its defiance has heightened suspicions about its ultimate nuclear aims, led to U.N. and other multinational sanctions, and increased threats of armed action from Israel, which says it will never accept an Iran armed with atomic weapons.

Israel is particularly worried about a fortified bunker at Fordo, where Iran has begun producing uranium enriched to a level closer to the grade used in nuclear weapons than its main stockpile of fuel grade material. About 70 kilometers (40 miles) south of Tehran, Fordo has about 800 centrifuges operating so far, enriching to a 20-percent level, and continues assembling others without operating them — diplomats say that close to 3,000 are now fully or partially screwed together, including hundreds over the past three months.

Possibly alluding to such work, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday that his country has recently received "additional proof of the fact that Iran is continuing to make accelerated progress toward achieving nuclear weapons while totally ignoring international demands."

Parchin is an important piece of Iran's suspected nuclear puzzle of secret atomic weapons research and development. The agency believes Iran ran explosive tests in 2003 needed to set off a nuclear charge there, with the suspected blasts taking place inside a pressure chamber.

Iran has never said whether the chamber existed, but describes Parchin as a conventional military site — and has kept IAEA inspectors from visiting until there is agreement on a road map of procedures on how such an inspection can take place.

IAEA officials have suggested that this caveat is a stalling tactic, allowing for removal of all traces of such suspected work — and over the past half year have shown the agency's 35-board nation members satellite photos documenting what they say is an extensive cleanup of the site.

Diplomats inside those closed briefings have described the images showing earth moving equipment around the buildings, streams of water pouring out of the site where the chamber is believed to be, and the demolition of surrounding structures. Earlier this year, IAEA chief Yukiya Amano suggested that any visit by his inspectors had to come sooner than later if they hoped to find any evidence that was left by the alleged cleanup.

Iran's refusal to give access had left the agency no choice but to rely solely on satellite views — until the shrouding went up and the curtain was dropped on what, if any, cleaning up was continuing at the site. The diplomats said the buildings were covered less than two weeks ago. They demanded anonymity because they weren't authorized to divulge information meant to be kept confidential within the agency.

The diplomats' accounts appeared to be backed up by a satellite image dated Aug. 15 and published Friday by the Institute for Science and International Security, showing what the Washington-based think tank said appeared "to be pink tent-like material" over the building allegedly housing the explosives chamber and an adjacent building.

"The purpose of covering the buildings could be to conceal further cleanup activity from overhead satellites or to contain the activity inside," ISIS said in a commentary accompanying the photos

Expectations for Friday's meeting had been modest from the outset and Herman Nackaerts, the chief IAEA negotiator at the talks, said "important differences ... prevented agreement."

Iranian envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh was more upbeat, telling reporters "there are still some differences... but I have to say we are moving forward."

The information on the shrouding of the building came from two diplomats who demanded anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the confidential satellite images. One of the two, who was familiar with the outcome of Friday's talks, questioned Soltanieh's comments, saying that little progress was made on the main issue of contention — demands by Iranians that were refused by the agency that any access to Parchin, or other sites, officials and documents the IAEA is interested in be carefully orchestrated by specifying who or what can be accessed and how often.

IAEA officials say that would give the agency little leeway to follow up on any new evidence it finds by effectively denying them a chance to revisit sites, again question officials or asking for new documentation.

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Ian Deitch contributed to this story from Jerusalem

Destroying children with the cloak of ADHD - Parents need to pay attention Friday, August 17, 2012 by: Jaqui Karr

(NaturalNews) ADHD, your child, drugs, corruption... are words that should not be in the same sentence - or same conversation for that matter. Last month, a study was published that makes it questionable whether this generation of children stands even a remote fighting chance against the pharmaceutical companies.... They do if their parents are informed...

Let us start with the conclusion of the study: "Later start of stimulant drug treatment of attention/hyperactivity disorder is associated with academic decline in mathematics." Translation: if you want your kids to do well in school you need to get them on stimulant drugs as early as possible, hopefully while still in the womb.

The fact that one of the researchers on the study received funding from a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs to treat ADHD is more than wrong; it should be outright illegal to have such a conflict of interest - but that's another conversation.

The statistics are out of control and climbing: almost one in ten children in America are diagnosed with ADHD and over 65 percent of them are currently on prescription medication. Medications that have dozens of side effects. Medications that can cause irreversible damage, trigger auto-immune disorders, cause insomnia, stomach disorders... And yet, we see quotes like this: "There are obvious benefits of getting started sooner rather than later," J. Russell Ramsay says to Reuters Health; he studies ADHD at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia.

In the Reuter's article, titled "Early ADHD treatment may ward off problems in school," they start off by suggesting that kids will have trouble in school if they are not on drugs before the age of 11 or 12. ELEVEN OR TWELVE. ...One tries to be an "objective journalist" and just report the facts but at times like this it gets challenging.

Has it occurred to anyone to check the diets of these kids?

The massive sugar spikes they are getting hit with every day, hyper-active reactions to gluten - which is making its way to the top of the highly inflammatory food list, liters of soda pop that create brain malfunction, rocket fuel in our water supply that causes every kind of system malfunction, excitotoxins, hormones and steroids via animal products, the chemical cocktails sprayed on to the few fruits and vegetables they might be eating... the list is just too long to make it possible for children (and adults) NOT have foggy brains, depression, or ADHD - among hundreds of other disorders. Has anyone thought to try an all natural, organic, plant strong diet and see how children perform?

The problems AND answers lie in food. Sadly, the pharmaceutical companies will do everything in their power to get the "experts" and medical community to say otherwise. Even sadder is that for the mainstream, whatever the guy in the white lab coat says must be true.

The CDC site itself has a page that provides parents with a checklist to help them pre-qualify their child before rushing to their doctor for a prescription. Items on that list: "Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly" and "Is often easily distracted" ...traits that would have had 100 percent of us diagnosed with ADHD when we were kids. Tragically sad.

Horrendous diets can certainly cause issues, but it's also important that parents remember that kids are just kids and most normal kids "act up" and cause trouble. Always have, always will - unless sedated. Please let your kids be kids.

Sources:

Helga Zoega, Kenneth J. Rothman, et al. A Population-Based Study of Stimulant Drug Treatment of ADHD and Academic Progress in Children. Pediatrics peds.2011-3493; Published online June 25, 2012 (10.1542/peds.2011-3493)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

http://www.cdc.gov/NCBDDD/adhd/widget/checklist/index.html

About the author:
Jaqui Karr is a gluten & nutrition expert, bestselling author, certified dietician, and professional speaker. Her books, seminars, and online programs have helped thousands of people on 5 continents over the years find better health and enjoy a higher quality of life. Her newest program is "Gluten Demystified" - watch this free online video now for valuable information that could help you prevent the trigger of hundreds of disorders that have been linked to gluten: http://glutendemystified.com

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/036842_children_ADHD_drugs_diet.html#ixzz24c2EMwD3

Greeks brace for more pain

WITH STORY GREECE VOICES BY NIKOS PAPHITIS : Dina Bika, 44, poses behind the counter of her coffee-bar in the Psyrri district of central Athens, on Thursday, Aug. 23, 2012. As Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras sets off around Europe to plead for more time to achieve the country’s tough reform targets, austerity-weary Greeks are bracing for new pain but mostly expect to stay in the 17-nation eurozone, come what may. Bika, whose custom has dropped 80 percent in the past few years, said she expects Greece to leave the currency union “sooner or later,” and new planned cutbacks will just delay the inevitable. “Going back to the drachma would not be the worst thing that could happen to us, it would teach us to function in a more responsible way, both as individuals and as a state,” she said.(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Business is down — the high-spending customers that once flocked to the area have been replaced by backpackers on a tight budget. Greece, meanwhile, has lurched from crisis to crisis, dependent on billions in loans to survive.

As the country's Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras, heads aroundEurope for top-level talks on Greece's attempts to right its finances, austerity-weary Greeks back home are preparing themselves for new pain amid fears that they may be kicked out of the 17-country group that uses the euro.

"It would have helped if we hadn't entered the euro," Liamiras says. "Leaving it won't do any good."

The multi-billion euro international loans that Greece has been relying on have come with tough conditions which have led to harsh cuts in government spending and benefits. The economy, left reeling by the austerity measures, has slumped into a four-year recession. And it looks as though there will be more pain to come.

If the debt inspectors overseeing Greece's loans decide that it has failed on key reforms, vital funds could be halted. This would push the country to default on its debts.

A bust Greece might well be forced to leave the euro and go back to its old currency, the drachma, to pay its way. Many Europe-watchers fear this could plunge its country into abject misery — the new drachma would rapidly lose its value, inflation would vaporize savings and the price of basic goods would rocket.

Here are the views of four Athenians on the planned new cutbacks and on Greece's future in the euro. Their remarks have been edited for clarity.

Dina Bika, 44, runs a coffee-bar in the Psyrri tourist district of Athens and has seen a massive drop in business. She thinks Greece's days in the eurozone are numbered:

The new measures will just protract the time it takes for us to return to the drachma. I don't think they will work.

So it would be better to get to the inevitable — it's like in America where you can spend 20 years in death row and then end up in the electric chair. Why wait 20 years, for a pardon? I don't think we'll get it.

(Leaving the euro) would teach us to function in a more responsible way, both as individuals and as a state.

(Greece's creditors) seem to be toying with us. When you have 10 children to save, you help the strongest ones and toss whichever is weakest off a cliff.

I think they will save those countries that they want to save, and we are just like a guinea pig that will die during the experiment.

People really aren't in the mood to react, most are focusing on how to make an extra euro a day just to survive.

Over the past six years, our business has dropped eighty percent. Most shop owners spend their time just waiting for a customer to come in.

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Coppersmith Apostolos Liamiras, 26:

I don't think there's any chance of our leaving the euro, that would make things very hard not just for Greece but for the rest of Europe too.

We are already suffering (from the crisis) and that's our own fault, not the Europeans', due to the policies we followed for ages.

I believe the series of austerity measures will continue. In any case I don't think they have been properly planned, with specific improvements in mind. They are passed out of necessity, because (the government is) obliged to do so.

But I don't think people will take to the streets right now. I'd give it at least another year.

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Dimitris Dedoussis, 20, works in a corner shop near Syntagma Square, the focus of previous anti-austerity protests. He expects Greeks to fight back:

The new measures will have great consequences and will create broader problems, mostly for us, the middle classes.

So far (people) have managed because they had some modest savings set aside, or by borrowing. But I don't think people will be able to meet the new demands.

Sooner or later they will take to the streets because we can't continuously bear the brunt of the financial crisis.

I think they will not be able to push us out (of the eurozone) easily, and that they will seek ways of extracting the last euros left in our pockets.

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Yiannis Darmanis, 70, owns a second-hand shop in the Psyrri area. He says Greece's crisis is the worst he has experienced in his lifetime, but expects the country to stay in the euro — unless a revolution breaks out:

And then there will be no turning back. What does somebody with nothing — no food, no money to pay their bills — have to lose?

The new measures seem to me inevitable. But I still hold out hope, because we Greeks have learned to hope and be patient.

As things haven't come to the point where the Europeans kick us out ... we Greeks will wait and see what happens with the new measures.

The evil is not just in Greece, it's spread throughout Europe, but they picked Greece — which is just three percent of the eurozone — as the sacrificial victim. You can handle three percent, but you can't handle the remaining 97 percent. They shouldn't think we are naive.

I spoke to a couple and the man said: "My wife has lost her job, I have lost my job, we have stopped our children's private tutoring and I am waiting for Greece to burn down so that I can make a living off its ashes."