This June, Petroleum Minister M Veerappa Moily had competition from Jennifer Lopez when it came to drawing the attention of Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow.
An Indian delegation to the Central Asian country was hoping to make a breakthrough on the much-awaited Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline plans. But Berdimuhamedow was busy with a private performance by Lopez, sponsored by the China National Petroleum Corporation, on his 56th birthday. Lopez was reportedly paid "$1.5 million" as appearance fee by the Chinese company. Moily's meeting with the President did not happen that day because of the birthday bash.
Indian petroleum officials have often faced tough manoeuvring from their Chinese counterparts in the race for global deals. But the US pop diva's performance was something they could not match when Moily went to Ashgabat.
The glamour quotient in Chinese energy diplomacy came less than a month after the country had succeeded in ousting ONGC Videsh's $5-billion bid for ConocoPhillips' stake at Kashagan oilfield in Kazakhstan, with the help of the local government, recently.
Moily did get to meet the President later. "He gave a categorical personal commitment and expressed strong determination for timely implementation of the TAPI project. It is expected to be complete by 2017," Moily had said at press conference on Thursday, after his return from that country.
Human rights activists were up in arms against Lopez, citing "suppressed political activists and curtailed media and religious freedoms in the former Soviet republic", which forced her publicist to apologise, saying "she would not have sung for the leader if she had known about the country's human rights record."
But as the Wall Street Journal reported, "The Turkmenistan event underscores the lengths to which China's oil-and-gas companies will go to curry favour in resource-rich locales."
To keep Berdimuhamedow impressed is vital for China's energy strategy, as it is working on a Central Asia pipeline to carry 65 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas.
It also struck a 25-bum deal with the country recently.
"Chinese companies can go to any extent to strike deals," said a senior OVL official. "They have done it in Kazakhistan, Myanmar and in Sudan too. In Kazakh, we had struck the deal and they toppled us even after that was finalised, using the first right of refusal of the local government. Their government directly intervenes in many of the deals, while our companies have to fight it out on their own."
For its entry into the Myanmar energy market, China had used its veto power in the United Nations against the country as a pressure tactic. Similar things had happened in the PetroKazakhstan deal in 2005 and the EnCana Corp deal in Ecuador.
"For them, Africa, West Asia and Central Asia are important markets as the United States and Canada are reluctant to give blocks to China due to their reputation," said Debashish Mishra, Senior Director of Deloitte in India. "Plus these areas give them an advantage of pipeline connection as it is almost in their backyard. Like in Kazakh, it is not the problem with OVL, but a failure of the foreign ministry. We need better diplomatic relation."
However, during the visit, Turkmenistan promised that it is open to giving participating stakes for the companies in hydrocarbon fields, which swayed away global majors from being the consortium in the project through terror-torn area giving hope for the revival of the TAPI project.
INDIA'S TURKMENISTAN AGENDA
To talk about the 1,680-km pipeline that will start from the South Yolotan-Osman field in Turkmenistan, pass through Herat, Helmand and Kandahar in Afghanistan via Quetta and Multan in Pakistan and end in Fazilka, India.
The agreement signed by the countries ensure delivery of 90 million standard cubic metres per day (mcmd) of gas from Turkmenistan to South Asia with 38 mcmd each going to Pakistan and India and 14 mcmd to Afghanistan
Turkmenistan has the world's fourth largest gas reserves and supplies more than 40 bcm of natural gas to China
China Angle
China's Central Asia pipeline is set to transport 65 billion cubic metres of gas from Turkmenistan, and China also struck a 25-bcm deal with the country recently
NEW YORK, July 13, 2013 ? Congress has blocked funding to arm rebels in Syria after months of telling President Barack Obama to give opposition groups weapons to help them oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The House and Senate Intelligence committees are holding up military aid in fear that terrorists may also get access to American arms.
This delay on Capitol Hill demonstrates a broader problem: U.S. policy on Syria is undecided.
SEE RELATED: Could Edward Snowden ruin America?s biggest trade deal with Europe?
Given the risk of handing weapons to extremists, Washington should be apprehensive.
Individual principles, rather than party lines, are not the bases of indecision among legislators. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY.) are among Republicans and Democrats in the House who believe arming opposition groups is a misstep.
Senators Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)?and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) of the Foreign Relations Committee co-authored the Syria Transition Support Act, a bi-partisan bill to deliver humanitarian and arms assistance. The bill passed the committee vote, but is suspected of lacking sufficient support to move forward for a vote in the Senate.
Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for months has said that Obama should offer military aid. Now his committee is holding back on funding. It has been reported that the White House has not provide enough information about the military intervention strategy including the endgame.
SEE RELATED: From Bush to Obama, America is focused on Africa
?If we are going to arm, we have to make sure we have control of what arms are out there and how people are trained to use those arms so they don?t fall into the hands of our enemy al-Qaeda,? said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. Only last month Ruppersberg responded positively to the President?s announcement to arm the Syrian insurgency.?
Although Congress is right to be concerned about arming rebels, lawmakers should have made a thoughtful assessment before lobbying Obama to send weapons.
Even more puzzling, legally the administration does not need the approval of Congress to move forward.? The Obama administration has the authority to ship weapons. The President can clearly send arms, but he won?t.
The delay in Washington indicates that the White House is either sending weapons in secret or is still figuring out a strategy.
SEE RELATED: Putin uses Russia?s pensions to boost economy over sustainable options
Both scenarios are causes of concern. Outside of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, the White House has not shared its plans with Capitol Hill. The secrecy has raised criticism from Sen. Corker who said that the Obama administration is wrong to ?hide such a fundamental foreign policy matter? from Congress and Americans. He went on to claim that, ?This approach is not appropriate and it just wastes time at the expense of our national interests.?
Covert operations is nothing new to U.S. policy in Syria.
Since last year, the CIA and American troops have been secretly training the Syrian rebel group, the Free Syrian Army with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.
Regardless of the possible lack of strategy or secrecy, sending weapons to Syrian rebels is the wrong approach. Whether weapons has been or will be shipped the probability is high that America will inadvertently deliver arms to pro-Assad fighters and even groups linked to al-Qaeda.?
The Obama administration announced last month that the Supreme Military Council, an insurgency group, would receive military assistance. The leaders of Supreme Military Council can be called as moderate group, but their decentralized control of the militias throughout Syria makes the organization incapable of filtering out extremists among their lower ranks- the Council has admitted to this problem.
There are also reports that many American weapons are in the possession of pro-Assad militias. Some received U.S. arms through the black market, where they were initially sold to Iraq in 2009, according to senior analyst, Christopher Harmer at the Institute for the Study of War. Moreover, he claims that thousands of weapons are floating around Iraq ready for sale in the black market after fighting there for nearly 10 years.
Iran-backed militias fighting for Assad have been found with American and Belgian arms, according to Phillip Smyth, an analyst for Jihadology.net, affiliated with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His research is based on more than 30 online forums and 100 Facebook pages. Smyth has also found photos on social media sites of Iranian with American made automatic assault rifles and bomb dischargers: M-16s and M-4s and M-203 grenade launchers.
Syrian rebels groups, some who are linked to the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate have been also found with similar arms according to British military analyst, Eliot Higgins. His finding is also based videos and photos on social media sites.
Considering that U.S. arms have a history of reaching the black market, it is far from realistic to believe that there is a way to guarantee weapons will not go to the wrong groups or individuals. Since Washington is stalling on sending military aid, the White House and Capitol Hill can go back to the drawing board to create a less risky strategy.
This article is the copyrighted property of the writer and Communities @ WashingtonTimes.com. Written permission must be obtained before reprint in online or print media. REPRINTING TWTC CONTENT WITHOUT PERMISSION AND/OR PAYMENT IS THEFT AND PUNISHABLE BY LAW.
BELFAST (Reuters) - More than 30 police officers were injured and 11 people arrested during overnight violence around traditional Orange Day parades in Northern Ireland, authorities said on Saturday.
Thousands of pro-British Protestants march every summer in the British province, a regular flashpoint for sectarian violence as Catholics, many of whom favor unification with Ireland, see the parades as a provocation.
Violence between the two religious groups still sometimes flares since a peace deal was signed in 1998, which largely ended three decades of trouble. Much of Belfast remains divided along religious and nationalist lines.
A total 32 police were injured in what Chief Constable Matt Baggott described as "shocking and disgraceful" violence, including head, eye and leg wounds. Another 400 reinforcements were being brought in from Britain.
Tens of thousands of Orange Order marchers, wearing orange sashes and waving British flags, paraded at more than a dozen venues across Northern Ireland on Friday to mark the 1690 victory at the Battle of the Boyne by Protestant Prince William of Orange over Catholic King James of England.
The Orange Order was angered this year when authorities ruled they could not walk along a stretch of road that divides the two communities, a flashpoint for trouble in the past.
"I think that this morning some of the leadership of the Orange Order need to reflect upon whether they provided the responsible leadership asked for by myself and the party leaders," Baggott told a news conference.
Calm had returned on Saturday and the Orange Order said it was "suspending protest action" over the ruling, after it had previously said it would continue over the weekend.
Overnight, rioters had thrown petrol bombs, bricks, bottles and fireworks at police, who responded with plastic bullets and water cannon.
Nigel Dodds, a lawmaker representing North Belfast in Britain's Parliament, was released from hospital after he was hit on the head by a missile, said his party colleague Nelson McCausland.
Last edited by xXRubyDarkWolfXx on Sat Jul 13, 2013 11:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
Sansa stood infront of the three graves that were before her, her long grey dress swaying peacefully in the cold winter wind. In her delicate hand holds a bunch of flowers, they are frail against the cold of the North and are starting to wilt and die. She looks to the nearest grave, it engraves, "Robb Stark, The Young Wolf" she drops the flowers onto his grave and walks away slowly, promising herself never to return to the place. For she is the last of the Starks.
Cloud behavior expands habitable zone of alien planetsPublic release date: 1-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Steve Koppes skoppes@uchicago.edu 773-702-8366 University of Chicago
A new study that calculates the influence of cloud behavior on climate doubles the number of potentially habitable planets orbiting red dwarfs, the most common type of stars in the universe. This finding means that in the Milky Way galaxy alone, 60 billion planets may be orbiting red dwarf stars in the habitable zone.
Researchers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University based their study, which appears in Astrophysical Journal Letters, on rigorous computer simulations of cloud behavior on alien planets. This cloud behavior dramatically expanded the habitable zone of red dwarfs, which are much smaller and fainter than stars like the sun.
Current data from NASA's Kepler Mission, a space observatory searching for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, suggest there is approximately one Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of each red dwarf. The UChicago-Northwestern study now doubles that number.
"Most of the planets in the Milky Way orbit red dwarfs," said Nicolas Cowan, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics. "A thermostat that makes such planets more clement means we don't have to look as far to find a habitable planet."
Cowan is one of three co-authors of the study, as are UChicago's Dorian Abbot and Jun Yang. The trio also provide astronomers with a means of verifying their conclusions with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018.
The formula for calculating the habitable zone of alien planetswhere they can orbit their star while still maintaining liquid water at their surfacehas remained much the same for decades. But the formula largely neglects clouds, which exert a major climatic influence.
"Clouds cause warming, and they cause cooling on Earth," said Abbot, an assistant professor in geophysical sciences at UChicago. "They reflect sunlight to cool things off, and they absorb infrared radiation from the surface to make a greenhouse effect. That's part of what keeps the planet warm enough to sustain life."
A planet orbiting a star like the sun would have to complete an orbit approximately once a year to be far enough away to maintain water on its surface. "If you're orbiting around a low mass or dwarf star, you have to orbit about once a month, once every two months to receive the same amount of sunlight that we receive from the sun," Cowan said.
Tightly orbiting planets
Planets in such a tight orbit would eventually become tidally locked with their sun. They would always keep the same side facing the sun, like the moon does toward Earth. Calculations of the UChicago-Northwestern team indicate that the star-facing side of the planet would experience vigorous convection and highly reflective clouds at a point that astronomers call the sub-stellar region. At that location the sun always sits directly overhead, at high noon.
The team's three-dimensional global calculations determined for the first time the effect of water clouds on the inner edge of the habitable zone. The simulations are similar to the global climate simulations that scientists use to predict Earth climate. These required several months of processing, running mostly on a cluster of 216 networked computers at UChicago. Previous attempts to simulate the inner edge of exoplanet habitable zones were one-dimensional. They mostly neglected clouds, focusing instead on charting how temperature decreases with altitude.
"There's no way you can do clouds properly in one-dimension," Cowan said. "But in a three-dimensional model, you're actually simulating the way air moves and the way moisture moves through the entire atmosphere of the planet."
These new simulations show that if there is any surface water on the planet, water clouds result. The simulations further show that cloud behavior has a significant cooling effect on the inner portion of the habitable zone, enabling planets to sustain water on their surfaces much closer to their sun.
Astronomers observing with the James Webb Telescope will be able to test the validity of these findings by measuring the temperature of the planet at different points in its orbit. If a tidally locked exoplanet lacks significant cloud cover, astronomers will measure the highest temperatures when the dayside of the exoplanet is facing the telescope, which occurs when the planet is on the far side of its star. Once the planet comes back around to show its dark side to the telescope, temperatures would reach their lowest point.
But if highly reflective clouds dominate the dayside of the exoplanet, they will block a lot of infrared radiation from the surface, said Yang, a postdoctoral scientist in geophysical sciences at UChicago. In that situation "you would measure the coldest temperatures when the planet is on the opposite side, and you would measure the warmest temperatures when you are looking at the night side, because there you are actually looking at the surface rather than these high clouds," Yang said.
Earth-observing satellites have documented this effect. "If you look at Brazil or Indonesia with an infrared telescope from space, it can look cold, and that's because you're seeing the cloud deck," Cowan said. "The cloud deck is at high altitude, and it's extremely cold up there."
If the James Webb Telescope detects this signal from an exoplanet, Abbot noted, "it's almost definitely from clouds, and it's a confirmation that you do have surface liquid water."
###
Citation: "Stabilizing Cloud Feedback Doubles Frequency of Red Dwarf Habitable Planets," by Jun Yang, Nicolas B. Cowan and Dorian S. Abbot, Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 771, No. 2, July 10, 2013.
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Cloud behavior expands habitable zone of alien planetsPublic release date: 1-Jul-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Steve Koppes skoppes@uchicago.edu 773-702-8366 University of Chicago
A new study that calculates the influence of cloud behavior on climate doubles the number of potentially habitable planets orbiting red dwarfs, the most common type of stars in the universe. This finding means that in the Milky Way galaxy alone, 60 billion planets may be orbiting red dwarf stars in the habitable zone.
Researchers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University based their study, which appears in Astrophysical Journal Letters, on rigorous computer simulations of cloud behavior on alien planets. This cloud behavior dramatically expanded the habitable zone of red dwarfs, which are much smaller and fainter than stars like the sun.
Current data from NASA's Kepler Mission, a space observatory searching for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, suggest there is approximately one Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of each red dwarf. The UChicago-Northwestern study now doubles that number.
"Most of the planets in the Milky Way orbit red dwarfs," said Nicolas Cowan, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics. "A thermostat that makes such planets more clement means we don't have to look as far to find a habitable planet."
Cowan is one of three co-authors of the study, as are UChicago's Dorian Abbot and Jun Yang. The trio also provide astronomers with a means of verifying their conclusions with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018.
The formula for calculating the habitable zone of alien planetswhere they can orbit their star while still maintaining liquid water at their surfacehas remained much the same for decades. But the formula largely neglects clouds, which exert a major climatic influence.
"Clouds cause warming, and they cause cooling on Earth," said Abbot, an assistant professor in geophysical sciences at UChicago. "They reflect sunlight to cool things off, and they absorb infrared radiation from the surface to make a greenhouse effect. That's part of what keeps the planet warm enough to sustain life."
A planet orbiting a star like the sun would have to complete an orbit approximately once a year to be far enough away to maintain water on its surface. "If you're orbiting around a low mass or dwarf star, you have to orbit about once a month, once every two months to receive the same amount of sunlight that we receive from the sun," Cowan said.
Tightly orbiting planets
Planets in such a tight orbit would eventually become tidally locked with their sun. They would always keep the same side facing the sun, like the moon does toward Earth. Calculations of the UChicago-Northwestern team indicate that the star-facing side of the planet would experience vigorous convection and highly reflective clouds at a point that astronomers call the sub-stellar region. At that location the sun always sits directly overhead, at high noon.
The team's three-dimensional global calculations determined for the first time the effect of water clouds on the inner edge of the habitable zone. The simulations are similar to the global climate simulations that scientists use to predict Earth climate. These required several months of processing, running mostly on a cluster of 216 networked computers at UChicago. Previous attempts to simulate the inner edge of exoplanet habitable zones were one-dimensional. They mostly neglected clouds, focusing instead on charting how temperature decreases with altitude.
"There's no way you can do clouds properly in one-dimension," Cowan said. "But in a three-dimensional model, you're actually simulating the way air moves and the way moisture moves through the entire atmosphere of the planet."
These new simulations show that if there is any surface water on the planet, water clouds result. The simulations further show that cloud behavior has a significant cooling effect on the inner portion of the habitable zone, enabling planets to sustain water on their surfaces much closer to their sun.
Astronomers observing with the James Webb Telescope will be able to test the validity of these findings by measuring the temperature of the planet at different points in its orbit. If a tidally locked exoplanet lacks significant cloud cover, astronomers will measure the highest temperatures when the dayside of the exoplanet is facing the telescope, which occurs when the planet is on the far side of its star. Once the planet comes back around to show its dark side to the telescope, temperatures would reach their lowest point.
But if highly reflective clouds dominate the dayside of the exoplanet, they will block a lot of infrared radiation from the surface, said Yang, a postdoctoral scientist in geophysical sciences at UChicago. In that situation "you would measure the coldest temperatures when the planet is on the opposite side, and you would measure the warmest temperatures when you are looking at the night side, because there you are actually looking at the surface rather than these high clouds," Yang said.
Earth-observing satellites have documented this effect. "If you look at Brazil or Indonesia with an infrared telescope from space, it can look cold, and that's because you're seeing the cloud deck," Cowan said. "The cloud deck is at high altitude, and it's extremely cold up there."
If the James Webb Telescope detects this signal from an exoplanet, Abbot noted, "it's almost definitely from clouds, and it's a confirmation that you do have surface liquid water."
###
Citation: "Stabilizing Cloud Feedback Doubles Frequency of Red Dwarf Habitable Planets," by Jun Yang, Nicolas B. Cowan and Dorian S. Abbot, Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 771, No. 2, July 10, 2013.
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
The wristwatch of a man is seen as he holds a glass of wine in his hand in Johannesburg.
By Ron Allen, Correspondent, NBC News
JOHANNESBURG ? As South Africa prays for ailing anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela and welcomes the first African-American U.S. president, it is still struggling to become the country that Mandela dreamed it would be.
Progress has been made in the 19 years since Mandela was elected president, but it is still a nation divided by haves and have-nots.
One major change is that the ?haves? now include so-called? ?Black Diamonds? - a new class of wealthy, successful South Africans who are not white.
Sandton is perhaps Johannesburg?s most affluent neighborhood. It?s also where you?ll find one of the city?s hottest restaurants, ?Signatures,? known for its fine dining and upscale clientele.?
There?s nothing unusual about that. South Africa has long been a place with stunning wealth and the good life.
What?s striking here, is that the owner of ?Signatures,? Desmond Mabuza, is black. He was born and raised in Soweto, the iconic township at the center of protests during the battle over apartheid and where poverty is still endemic.
Mabuza bursts with energy and charm as he greets guests, then goes back in the kitchen to supervise the chefs and waiters.
?Yeah, I?ve certainly broken the mold,? Mabuza said in an interview as servers buzzed around the table. ?I just happen to be doing it because I enjoy it, not to make history or break barriers.?
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Built in a haphazard swath, shacks stretch on to the horizon in Alexandra Township on June 26, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Alexandra is situated next to the wealthy suburb of Sandton, laying bare post-apartheid South Africa's vast gulf between wealth and poverty.
He attributed his success to hard work, learning the business from bottom to top, and a big break right after high school, when he went to Marquette University in Wisconsin.
?The likes of Mandela have obviously laid the foundation. It?s up to us, the younger generation ... to come back and bring in the expertise required to take this country to the next level,? he said.
But Mabuza and the so-called ?Black Diamonds? - a term which is not always seen as a compliment - are exceptions.
Life has been very different for the overwhelming majority of black South Africans since the end of apartheid and the birth of Mandela?s ?Rainbow Nation,? with its promise of equal opportunity for all.
The unemployment rate is 25 percent on average, but it is closer to 50 percent among young black workers, according to a recent study. And whites, just 10 percent of the population of 48 million people, earn on average six times as much as blacks.
?The one singular failure, probably the Achilles? heel of the South African transition, is the nature of inequality,? said Adam Habib, Vice Chancellor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
South Africa, the most powerful economy on the African continent, has one of the greatest divides between haves and have-nots anywhere in the world.
It has the second highest?degree of inequality?in family income distribution in the world, only topped by Lesotho, a tiny kingdom within South Africa, according to the CIA?s World Factbook. ??
?The vast majority of people who are poor are still black,? Habib said.
And what?s more, there?s now a huge divide within the black population. At the top are those ?Black Diamonds,? men like Patrice Motsepe, a billionaire who made his fortune in mining, and in the news recently after vowing to donate half his money to charity. ?
Others include top government officials like Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa, with wealth estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
They and others who have made it big are often the target of resentment here, because in many cases their wealth and success are largely seen as the result of government contracts, and preferences given to black businesses through a very aggressive affirmative action program called ?Black Economic Empowerment.?
As economist Mike Schussler explained, ?a lot of people feel those jobs are given to friends and family and people with political connections rather than on ability.?
While there?s favoritism everywhere, Schussler and other analysts insist it?s rampant in South Africa. And it doesn?t help that the government of President Jacob Zuma is widely viewed as a corrupt and ineffective steward of the economy.
At the bottom are folks like Dennis Martinez. He and his family live in what?s basically a tin-roofed shack in Soweto, where they burn an open fire to cook and keep warm against the evening chill. ?We haven?t got lights, we stay in shacks, if it?s raining then all the rain comes through,? he said.
View images of civil rights leader Nelson Mandela, who went from anti-apartheid activist to prisoner to South Africa's first black president.
Martinez said nothing much has changed in the nine years he?s lived there.
Asked if life was getting better, he said, ?No, it is not, because we haven?t got jobs and we have to struggle.?
However, even amid the poverty there is optimism and hope. Martinez?s daughter Danielle, 9, and wearing a somewhat tattered dress, declared ?I want to be a president? when asked about her ambitions for the future.
?I want to help poor people. I want to give them money, food and presents,? she said.
While South Africa?s government claims correctly that a vast number of people now have better housing and basic services than during the apartheid era, few would dispute there is still a long way to go to get to where Mandela hoped his nation would be.
PIFO, Ecuador (AP) ? Gino Descalzi used to fret about things like aphids, mildew and the high cost of shipping millions of roses a year from Ecuador to florists in the United States. These days he's worried about a 30-year-old former spy stuck in the transit area of the Moscow airport, and he can't believe it.
The Obama administration sent a thinly veiled economic threat to this South American country on Thursday when it indefinitely delayed a decision to eliminate tariffs on imports of roses worth about $250 million a year. The move created leverage over the leftist government seen as likeliest to grant National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden political asylum that would protect him from U.S. criminal charges.
About the same time, a small group of U.S. senators made explicit threats of trade retaliation if Ecuador harbors Snowden. And on Saturday, Vice President Joe Biden asked Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa to turn down any asylum request, although Correa described the conversation as cordial.
A week after Snowden began his stuttering, surreal flight across the globe, every passing day without him making progress toward Ecuadorean asylum makes the prospect look less likely. But the men who grow roses, asters and delphinia in the thin air of Ecuador's sun-soaked highlands are deeply concerned that, whatever happens to Snowden, they may turn out to be the most unlikely collateral damage from the geopolitical wrangle over his fate.
"This totally changes the financial panorama for our businesses and seriously affects the structure of our markets," said Descalzi, whose 280 employees produce some 22 million roses a year. "We're just shocked that an event so far from the political and economic life of Ecuador has caused so much commotion and worry."
The rose benefit for Ecuador had been widely expected to be approved. Any delay, they say, puts it into uncomfortably uncertain territory.
Even if Snowden never touches Ecuadorean soil and the U.S. cuts the 6.8 percent tariff on Ecuadorean roses, along with tariffs on frozen broccoli and canned artichokes, Ecuadorean flower growers are worried that the brouhaha has damaged Ecuador in the eyes of the United States, hurting its reputation for stability and reliability among the buyers who must decide between flowers from Ecuador and the already tariff-free blooms from its nearby market-dominant competitor, Colombia.
"This is not a mathematical equation," said Benito Jaramillo, the head of the Ecuadorean flower-growers' association. The graduate of Texas A&M and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign employs hundreds of people growing "summer flowers" ? a category of less-flashy blooms like hydrangeas and asters ? on his farm about a half-hour from the capital, Quito.
"The point is that there are a lot of other factors that damage our industry's image and competitiveness in the mid-term," Jaramillo said.
Flowers are serious business in Ecuador.
The industry says it employs about 50,000 people on about 550 farms across the country and is indirectly responsible for 110,000 jobs, putting it after only oil, seafood and bananas in the ranks of the country's biggest exporters. It boasts that the long days, rich sunlight and cool nights of the Andean highlands mean the heads of flowers, particularly roses, grow fuller and richer than those from Colombia, which they scoff at as more suitable for grocery stores than florists.
Industry representatives spent around a year campaigning hard in Washington for the inclusion of cut roses under the Generalized System of Preferences, or GSP, a mechanism meant to encourage development in lower-income countries. A broader trade pact that covers a wide range of Ecuadorean products, the Andean Trade Preference Act, had been widely expected to expire next month. That now seems certain, not least because Ecuador declared Thursday that it was preemptively rejecting it.
Now, the flower industry has turned its focus to its own government, which it desperately hopes won't offer asylum to Snowden.
"We can't put the interests of 14 million Ecuadoreans at risk because of a 29-year-old hacker whom we don't even know," Descalzi said. "This gentleman doesn't mean anything to us."
The business impacts of the Snowden affair have infuriated Ecuador's main business groups, who accuse the government of putting ideology before commerce.
The decision to renounce the Andean Trade deal was "permeated by political and ideological motives," said Roberto Aspiazu, chairman of a coalition of Ecuador's largest industries. The country's business sector is calling on the government to manage the relationship with the United States "with the utmost care," he said.
The government said it planned to compensate business damaged by the loss of U.S. tariff benefits and has painted its decision in terms of the nation's sovereignty versus U.S. threats.
"But in any case, now they're wanting to destroy Ecuador for receiving an asylum application from Mr. Snowden and they are pulling out the rubbish that we spy as well," President Correa said. "If you behave badly we will take (the trade deal) away from you. Well, here you have the sovereign response from Ecuador, my comrades."
But business groups warned that any government compensation could be interpreted as a subsidy subject to international litigation.
When asked how he feels about the whole situation, Jaramillo, the head of the flower association, thought before responding with a single word: "frustrated."
"One isolated issue shouldn't create so much damage," he said.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vwfWnUYPv8n8MBcTDOTUuvPQoEUOATJoZs3E53eAX8koTsyjWrJS5YX2sNpPdzwhegCfhkg4NwjMvBeyGBjIrNnf--qdgOK4D1-u1_ZGA=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 1-Jul-2013
Share ] 
