Suhair blog

Rebels push west before Libya crisis talks

Rebels advanced west toward the birthplace of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Monday, firing mortars and heavy machineguns in sporadic clashes with loyalist forces.

Emboldened by Western-led air strikes against Gaddafi's troops, rebels took the town of Nawfaliyah and moved toward Sirte, Gaddafi's home town and an important military base, in the sixth week of an uprising against his 41-year rule.

As rebels pressed forward in the east, Gaddafi's troops were patrolling an area near the center of Misrata after shelling the previously rebel-controlled western city for days and Arab news networks reported Western air strikes in the west of Tripoli.

The government in Tripoli said it had "liberated" Misrata from rebels and declared a ceasefire there.

Diplomatic activity accelerated on the eve of a 35-nation meeting in London on Tuesday to discuss the crisis in the oil-producing North African desert state.

Italy proposed a deal including a ceasefire, exile for Gaddafi and dialogue between rebels and tribal leaders. The rebel leadership ruled out compromise with Gaddafi's followers.

"We have had a vision from the very beginning and the main ingredient of this vision is the downfall of the Gaddafi regime," spokesman Hafiz Ghoga told reporters in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi in eastern Libya.

Qatar became the first Arab country to recognize the rebels as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people, in a move that may presage similar moves from other Gulf states. Libyan state television called the move "blatant interference".

Russia criticized the Western intervention that has turned the tide in the conflict, saying it amounted to taking sides in a civil war and breached the terms of a United Nations Security Council resolution.

U.S. SAYS REBELS NOT ROBUST

U.S. Vice Admiral Bill Gortney said on Monday the rebels fighting Gaddafi were not robust and the gains they have made on the battlefield in recent days were tenuous.

Gortney, director of the U.S. military's Joint Staff, said the United States was not directly supporting the opposition but it had achieved a military benefit from coalition air strikes.

He said the United States had no confirmed report of any civilian casualty caused by coalition forces and that coalition had fired six Tomahawk cruise missiles in the past 24 hours and had carried out 178 air sorties.

The French and British leaders called for supporters of Gaddafi to abandon him and asked Libyans opposing him to join a political process to pave the way for his departure.

"Gaddafi must go immediately," President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister David Cameron said in a joint statement. "We call on all his supporters to drop him before it is too late."

In the nine days since the start of the Western-led bombing, the motley volunteer force of rebels has pressed half-way along the coast from its stronghold of Benghazi toward Tripoli and regained control of major oil terminals in the OPEC state.

A U.S. Treasury Department official said rebels could sell Libyan crude without being subject to U.S. sanctions if they conducted the transactions outside entities in Gaddafi's administration subject to sanctions.

With its finances under pressure, the rebel leadership said it hopes to restart oil exports within a week. Some energy traders said that, sanctions aside, they could not touch Libyan oil because of shipping and legal risks.

On Monday rebels met sporadic resistance as they pushed their advance in convoys of pick-up trucks with machineguns.

Just west of sandy, barren Nawfaliyah, bursts of sustained machinegun fire and the whoosh of several rockets could be heard, and plumes of black smoke rose ahead.

"Those are from our guns," said Faisal Bozgaia, 28, a hospital worker turned rebel fighter, pointing to the smoke.

ADVANCE STRETCHES SUPPLY LINES

Rebels said occasional ambushes by Gaddafi forces had pushed them back but that they later regained their positions.

"We are advancing one, two kilometers at a time," rebel Khalif Ali, 22, said in the town of Harawah, west of Nawfaliyah.

But the rapid advance is stretching rebel supply lines.

"We have a serious problem with petrol," said a volunteer fighter waiting to fill up in the oil town of Ras Lanuf.

Reuters correspondent Michael Georgy, reporting from Sirte to the west, saw police and military but no sign of fighting.

Soldiers were manning checkpoints and green Libyan flags flapped in the wind. Militiamen fired AK-47 rifles defiantly into the air. "If they come to Sirte, we will defend our city," said Osama bin Nafaa, 32, a policeman.

In Misrata, Gaddafi soldiers manned checkpoints and took up position on rooftops. Some housefronts were smashed, smoke was rising from several areas and gunfire rang out across the city.

Several civilians approached a group of journalists, some of them woman and children waving green flags. "Misrata is ours, there are still some bad guys in other parts, but Gaddafi is winning, the city is ours," resident Abduq Karim said.

"Civilians are happy," said an army official who declined to be named. "Everything you are hearing is a lie. The function of our army is to save the people and to protect the leader. We cannot kill our own people."

A rebel spokesman in another western town, Zintan, said forces loyal to Gaddafi had bombarded the town with rockets early on Monday, Al Jazeera reported.

Western-led air strikes began on March 19, two days after the U.N. Security Council authorized "all necessary measures" to protect civilians from Gaddafi's forces.

But from the outset, the mission faced questions about its scope and aims, including the extent to which it will actively back the rebel side and whether it might target Gaddafi himself.

The start of allied bombings proved a turning point for the rebels who were hemmed into Benghazi at the time.

RUSSIA ACCUSES WEST

Russia, which abstained in the U.N. vote, said Western attacks on Gaddafi forces amounted to taking sides.

"We consider that intervention by the coalition in what is essentially an internal civil war is not sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council resolution," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a news conference.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the BBC: "We are there to protect civilians -- no more, no less."

France, which dropped the first bombs of the campaign nine days ago, said the coalition was strictly complying with U.N. terms. It said its warplanes struck a command center south of Tripoli belonging to Gaddafi's forces on Sunday and Monday.

The Defense Ministry in London said British Tornado aircraft destroyed Libyan government ammunition bunkers in the Sabha area of Libya's southern desert in the early hours of Monday.

On Sunday, NATO agreed to take full command of military operations in Libya after a week of heated negotiations.

The United States, which led the initial phase, had sought to scale back its role in another Muslim country after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. An alliance spokeswoman said on Monday the transition would take a couple of days.

Libya accused NATO of "terrorizing" and killing its people as part of a global plot to humiliate and weaken it.

A Libyan government spokesman said on Monday night that Western air strikes in Sabha, 700 km (420 miles) south of Tripoli, killed 12-13 civilians the night before. Libyan television reported an air strike on Surman, west of Tripoli.

The government says the Western-led air attacks have killed more than 100 civilians, a charge denied by the coalition which says it is protecting civilians from Gaddafi forces and targeting only military sites to enforce a no-fly zone.

(Additional reporting by Alexander Dziadosz, Edmund Blair, Maria Golovnina, Michael Georgy, Ibon Villelabeitia, Lamine Chikhi, Mariam Karouny, Joseph Nasr, Marie-Louise Gumuchian and Steve Gutterman; Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Tom Pfeiffer; Editing by Peter Millership)

Plans for RI fire memorial in limbo; land tied up

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Small photographs, crosses and assorted knick-knacks adorn the grassy site of one of the nation's worst nightclub fires, a makeshift memorial whose modesty belies the enormity of a disaster that killed 100 people eight years ago Sunday.

Survivors of The Station nightclub fire and relatives of those killed have marked each anniversary with a somber service at the West Warwick site, hoping that the coming year will be the one when the property owner will cede control of the land so they can erect the stirring, permanent memorial they envision.

Next month, an anxious group of relatives plan to ask the West Warwick Town Council to acquire the land through eminent domain and transfer it to them for use as a memorial.

The families say the owner had promised to transfer it to them once all the lawsuits over the fire were resolved, which happened last year when a judge signed off on a $176 million payout to hundreds of survivors and victims' relatives. But that handoff hasn't happened, and the property owner says it never committed to giving the land to any one group.

Without ownership of the land, the people affected by the fire say they've been entirely stalled in their memorial design plans.

"We need people to know that we're not giving up on this. We need the public to know that this is going to happen," said Chris Fontaine, the president of the Station Fire Memorial Foundation whose 22-year-old son, Mark, died in the fire.

The blaze on Feb. 20, 2003, began when a flashy pyrotechnics display from the 1980s rock band Great White set afire cheap soundproofing foam on the walls and ceiling of the building. Besides the 100 killed, more than 200 were injured in the fourth-deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history.

The fate of the site is essentially the last unresolved issue in the case.

Club owners Jeffrey and Michael Derderian, who installed the foam, and Daniel Biechele, the Great White tour manager who set off the pyrotechnics, pleaded either guilty or no contest to involuntary manslaughter charges in 2006. Michael Derderian served less than three years in prison, Biechele less than two. And proceeds from the $176 million settlement reached with dozens of people, companies and governments have already been paid out.

But the site, where victims' relatives will gather Sunday afternoon, looks more or less the same as it did soon after the rubble was cleared.

Mary Jo Carolan, president of Triton Realty Inc., which owned the property at the time of the fire and has since placed it under the control of a related limited liability corporation, told The Associated Press in an e-mail that the company tried unsuccessfully to donate the land to the town several years ago but was rejected because of concerns over maintenance. She said the company had told representatives from the foundation that it "would contact them to discuss the development process of the land at the appropriate time," and that it was still interested in discussing how best to use the land.

"We're just getting to the end of all the legal issues that we have here. Basically, there's no deadline. We didn't commit to any one organization," she said in a phone interview.

It's highly unlikely a private developer would have much interest in building on the .66-acre site, which town property records list as assessed at $51,500, given the searing emotions still wrapped up in the property.

The foundation commissioned a design competition for the memorial and unveiled a winning plan in 2008 that called for a 100-string harp that would be played by the wind, gardens and a memorial park. But that plan was largely set aside because of concerns that it would be too difficult to maintain. A group of construction unions has volunteered its labor but hasn't been able to access the land for even routine topographical surveys.

Town Council President Angelo Padula said he had reservations about taking over the land through eminent domain, fearing that would set an unwelcome precedent. He said he'd rather the town act as a mediator between the dispute rather than get in the middle.

West Warwick, which has severe financial troubles and was among the dozens of defendants sued — ultimately reaching a multi-million dollar settlement — didn't want to be responsible for ownership of the land or the maintenance, Padula said.

"We want to know what's going on with that because it does look kind of terrible," Padula said. "Nobody's there to upkeep the property. In the summertime the grass grows and the victims' parents take care of it or family members."

Dave Kane, whose 18-year-old son, Nicholas O'Neill, was the youngest victim, said he was "heartsick" that the memorial plans are in limbo.

"It's been through eight years of weather and wear and tear and, poetically, tears," Kane said. "And we're going to hear this now? Maybe we'll give it to you?"

Ecuador orders Chevron pay $8 bln over oil damage

QUITO (AFP) – A court in Ecuador ordered US oil giant Chevron to pay an estimated $8 billion for causing environmental damage in the Amazon region, in a ruling that both sides plan to challenge.

Chevron blasted the decision as a "product of fraud," while lawyers representing the Ecuadoran Amazon communities that filed the decades-old lawsuit claim $8 billion is far too low.

"We're preparing an appeal because we believe that the amount is insufficient compared to the damages caused," said attorney Pablo Fajardo, noting the ruling came from a court in the town of Lago Agrio in the province of Sucumbios, near the Colombian border.

The plaintiffs were seeking more than $27 billion, claiming Chevron was responsible for damage between 1964 and 1990 in the Amazon rainforest caused by oil extraction by Texaco, a company it bought in 2001.

They say soil and rivers were contaminated and that local residents reported higher rates of cancer.

Chevron inherited the lawsuit, which was originally filed in 1993. It claims it was absolved of liability because Texaco paid $40 million in cleanup efforts, approved by the government, before it was bought by Chevron.

"The Ecuadoran court's judgment is illegitimate and unenforceable," Chevron said in a statement. "It is the product of fraud and is contrary to the legitimate scientific evidence."

Fajardo described the court's fine as slightly more than $8 billion, while The Wall Street Journal reported the total is $8.6 billion, more than half of which would go toward restoring polluted soil.

Environmental activists applauded the ruling.

"Chevron has spent the last 18 years waging unprecedented public relations and lobbying campaigns to avoid cleaning up the environmental and public health catastrophe it left in the Amazon rainforest," US-based Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network said in a statement.

The organizations called the court's decision "historic and unprecedented," saying it was the first time indigenous people won a lawsuit against a multinational corporation in the country where the damage occurred.

Chevron pledged to appeal, arguing that earlier rulings by US and international courts will bar enforcement of the decision.

"Chevron does not believe that today's judgment is enforceable in any court that observes the rule of law," it said in the statement. "Chevron intends to see that the perpetrators of this fraud are held accountable for their misconduct."

The lawsuit on behalf of Ecuadoran Amazon communities was originally filed in New York in 1993.

The Ecuadorans allege that Texaco dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon.

Chevron, the second-largest energy company in the United States, has long claimed the process was tainted.

In 2009, Chevron posted videos online purporting to show a bribery scheme implicating the judge presiding over the lawsuit. The judge recused himself days after the videos were released.

This award passes the record of $5 billion initially imposed on ExxonMobil Corp. for an oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989. But that amount was later reduced to $500 million after a series of appeals by Exxon.

Last year, British oil giant BP contributed $20 billion to a compensation fund for cleanup efforts and victims of its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The disaster, which began with a deadly April blast aboard the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, sullied the coastline from Texas to Florida, killing wildlife and devastating key local industries such as tourism and fishing.

Chevron closed at $96.95 per share in trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, up by $1.22 per share.

JPMorgan CEO Dimon awarded $17 million stock, options

NEW YORK (Reuters) – After posting a $17.4 billion profit for 2010, JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) awarded Chief Executive Jamie Dimon restricted stock and options that could be worth $17 million.

The award is a large part of overall compensation for Dimon, who runs the second-largest U.S. bank by assets.

It includes a grant of about $12 million worth of restricted stock, plus options worth about $5 million based on a commonly used valuation method.

Details were released in a Thursday regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Full details on Dimon's pay, including salary, bonus and perks, will be released in a proxy filing later this year.

Banker compensation has been an explosive issue since the 2008 financial crisis, as the U.S. government spent hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to prop up the financial sector.

Though it took $25 billion from the U.S. Treasury, which it has since repaid, JPMorgan is widely considered to have weathered the crisis better than most other major U.S. banks.

It nonetheless faces many potential headwinds, including a slowdown in trading revenue, litigation tied to mortgages and foreclosure activity, and a $6.4 billion lawsuit over its ties to imprisoned Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff.

According to Thursday's filing, Dimon was awarded 251,415 units of restricted stock, half of which vest on January 13, 2013 and half a year later.

Dimon was also awarded 367,377 stock appreciation rights with a strike price of $47.73, according to the filing. These rights have a 10-year term and vest in five equal installments, beginning January 19, 2012.

He could lose some of his awards, or vesting could be delayed, if he were to be fired, hide important risks or hurt the bank's reputation, or if JPMorgan's financial performance were to suffer, the filing shows.

Shares of JPMorgan closed down 12 cents at $47.82 on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

(Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Nordstrom's 4Q net income rises 35 percent

NEW YORK – Tighter inventory controls, a lower credit card delinquencies and a holiday rebound in full-price sales helped upscale department store chain Nordstrom Inc.'s fourth-quarter profit rise 35 percent, the company said Thursday.

The retailer also announced it is buying flash-sale website HauteLook for $180 million in stock, a testament to the changing buying habits of luxury shoppers.

Investors seems disappointed with a muted sales forecast and sent Nordstrom shares down $1.38, or 3 percent, after hours to $45.10, despite an upbeat profit outlook for 2011.

Nordstrom reported net income of $232 million, or $1.04 per share, for the quarter that ended Jan. 29. That compares with $172 million, or 77 cents per share, a year earlier. Its quarterly revenue reached $2.92 billion, an increase of more than 10 percent from a year earlier.

Revenue at stores open at least a year rose 6.7 percent. The comparison is a key indicator of a retailer's health because it excludes stores that opened or closed during the year.

Analysts expected adjusted earnings of 99 cents per share on revenue of $2.83 billion, according to FactSet.

HauteLook Inc. is a leader among private-sale websites, where access is often limited and each sale, usually of designer clothes and shoes, lasts just a couple days. Nordstrom said buying the website will build on its own success selling goods through multiple channels.

The retailer has fused its online and in-store inventory systems, allowing shoppers to see online what's in stock at a given store anywhere in the chain. Starting last November, Nordstrom added Wi-Fi access for shoppers at all its full-line department stores.

The HauteLook deal includes up to $90 million in additional payments. Nordstrom said some of the $180 million in stock has not yet vested. The website will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary.

"We know the way our customers shop for fashion is changing rapidly," Blake Nordstrom, the company's president, said during a conference call with analysts after the stock market closed and the company released its report. "The online business is an important cornerstone of our growth strategy, and HauteLook will contribute to our overall results in this space."

Founded in 2007, HauteLook mushroomed during the recession, along with other discount luxury flash-sale sites like RueLaLa and Gilte Groupe, as shoppers focused on discounts. The sites are still growing, with a 70 percent increase in customer traffic from January 2010 to January 2011, according to Internet research firm Experian Marketing Services.

For 2011, Nordstrom expects to earn $2.95 to $3.10 per share. Analysts forecast $3.04 on average, according to FactSet.

Nordstrom expects revenue at stores open at least a year to rise between 2 percent and 4 percent for 2011. But that's slower than the 8.1 percent increase Nordstrom achieved in its latest fiscal year.

The company said that full-price sales have returned to pre-recession levels.

he company's lower-price Nordstrom Rack division did better than it has in recent quarters, drawing $93 million in revenue, up 24.1 percent from a year earlier. That division's revenue at stores open at least a year rose 3.9 percent from a year earlier.

For the fiscal year that ended in January, Nordstrom reported net income of $613 million, or $2.75 per share, up from $441 million, or $2.01 per share in fiscal 2009. Its revenue rose almost 13 percent to $9.31 billion.

During regular trading Thursday, Nordstrom shares fell 22 cents to close at $46.48.