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China’s biggest oil company, state-run CNPC, agreed a $3 billion service contract with Iraq on Wednesday.

The deal could set a precedent for terms that fall far short of the lucrative contracts the oil majors had hoped for as they jostled for access to the world’s third largest oil reserves.

Starved of investment since the Gulf War of 1990-1991 and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion of 2003 that removed former President Saddam Hussein, Iraq holds some of the world’s last large, cheap, untapped oil reservoirs.

“The biggest significance of this deal is that CNPC will benefit as the first international oil company to be developing one of the giant discovered oil fields in Iraq in the new era,” said Alex Munton, analyst at global consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

The 400-plus-page study, Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern, was undertaken by a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the request of the International Joint Commission, an independent bilateral organization that advises the U.S. and Canadian governments on the use and quality of boundary waters between the two countries. The study was originally scheduled for release in July 2007 by the IJC and the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the study, which warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen “areas of concern”—including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee—may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants.

Gustav, downgraded to a Category 3 storm by the National Hurricane Center in Miami this morning, may strengthen to Category 4 later today and will make landfall as a “major” hurricane. The storm shut three-quarters of oil output in the region and refineries operated by Valero Energy Corp., the largest U.S. refiner, ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. There will be a special trading session today at the New York Mercantile Exchange.

“This storm will prove to be a worst-case scenario for the production region,” Jim Rouiller, senior energy meteorologist for Planalytics.com, said yesterday in an e-mailed message. “This storm will be more dangerous than Katrina.”

The center issued a hurricane watch from High Island, Texas, to Florida at 2 a.m. today. Gustav’s winds were estimated at 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour as it made landfall in western Cuba. While they slowed to 125 miles per hour this morning, the storm is forecast to gain strength as it passes into the central gulf today. Gustav was 425 miles southeast of the Mississippi River’s mouth and traveling northwest at about 15 mph at 4 a.m.

BP, Exxon, Shell

BP Plc, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, led producers shutting wells and whisking staff ashore. About 77 percent of Gulf oil output and 37 percent of natural-gas production was shut, the U.S. Minerals Management Service said in a statement yesterday. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the nation’s largest crude-oil terminal, closed yesterday.

The New York Mercantile Exchange announced an extended trading session beginning at 2:30 p.m. today because of Gustav.

Fields in the Gulf produce 1.3 million barrels a day of oil, about a quarter of U.S. production, and 7.4 billion cubic feet a day of natural gas, 14 percent of the total, government data show. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 closed 95 percent of regional offshore output and, along with Hurricane Rita, idled about 19 percent of U.S. refining capacity.

Exxon Mobil is shutting its Chalmette, Louisiana, refinery. Nonessential employees have been released so they can evacuate as requested by local officials, Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil said in a notice posted on its Web site yesterday.

Refineries Shut

The refinery, which can process 192,000 barrels a day, is run by Chalmette Refining LLC, a joint venture between Exxon and state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA.

ConocoPhillips, the second-largest U.S. refiner, began shutting down two refineries in Louisiana that together process almost 500,000 barrels a day of crude oil, the company said in a statement posted on its Web site late yesterday.

Marathon Oil Corp. began closing its 256,000-barrel-a-day Garyville, Louisiana, refinery, yesterday, according to a statement posted on its Web site. Valero was shutting its St. Charles refinery west of New Orleans and may decide today whether to shut its Port Arthur, Texas, refinery, spokesman Bill Day said in an e-mailed message.

Three Louisiana parishes with refineries have ordered mandatory evacuations.

Refinery production slowed at some complexes owned by Shell and Motiva Enterprises LLC, its venture with Saudi Arabian Oil Co., Shell said in a statement on its Web site.

Market Concern

“The big question for the market is going to be how quickly after Gustav passes will the industry be able to recover and get back online,” said Andy Lipow, president of Houston- based Lipow Oil Associates LLC.

Enbridge Inc., Canada’s largest pipeline company, and its U.S. affiliate closed conduits capable of bringing ashore 6.7 billion cubic feet a day of natural gas. Evacuation of Terrebonne Parish shut 550 million cubic feet a day of gas flow into the 10,500-mile (16,900-kilometer) Transco line to the U.S. northeast, owner Williams Cos. said in a statement.

Exxon Mobil said yesterday it had shut platforms producing 5,000 barrels of oil and 50 million cubic feet of natural gas.

BP, Europe’s second-largest oil company, said it shut Gulf production and evacuated all staff by noon local time yesterday. Its normal production is equivalent to 290,000 barrels a day from the region.

Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the second-largest U.S. independent oil producer, said in a statement on its Web site yesterday that it had shut the equivalent of 105,000 barrels a day of production, with all of it to be closed tonight.

Workers Evacuated

Shell said it would shut daily production equivalent to 510,000 barrels of oil yesterday.

Workers from 45 rigs and 223 production platforms were evacuated as of 12:30 p.m. yesterday, the Minerals Management Service said in a statement on its Web site. About 998,000 barrels of daily oil production have been halted in preparation for the storm, as well as 2.75 billion cubic feet of gas.

Crude oil futures on the Nymex fell 13 cents to $115.46 a barrel on Aug. 29 on speculation supplies will be adequate to meet demand after the storm passes. Natural gas futures fell 10.7 cents to $7.943 per million British thermal units.

Most U.S. financial markets are closed until Sept. 2 for the Labor Day holiday. Nymex said in an Aug. 29 statement that electronic trading will begin at 2:30 p.m. New York time today with trades dated Sept. 2.

The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port shut at 9:30 a.m. local time yesterday.

“It’s time to get our people off the offshore platform,” spokeswoman Barbara Hestermann said yesterday in an interview.

Shipments to customers continue from the port’s 53 million barrels of storage on shore, she said.

Katrina, Rita

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 cut supplies for months. About 27 percent of Gulf oil production and 19 percent of gas output was still shut in January 2006, the Minerals Management Service reported.

Rising waters from a Category 4 storm can cut escape routes as early as five hours before landfall, with flooding as much as six miles inland. The coastal storm surge may reach 18 feet, and the winds can rip away roofs and walls of homes, according to the National Hurricane Center.

A Category 5 storm can destroy the roofs of industrial buildings, flatten all trees and homes, and drive a storm surge above 18 feet. Only three Category 5 storms, Andrew in 1992, Camille in 1969, and the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, have made landfall in the U.S. since record-keeping began.

At its forecast track and intensity, Gustav would drive a 20-foot storm surge topped by heavy waves across southeastern Louisiana, Rouiller of Planalytics.com said. “The untested levees at New Orleans will be overwhelmed and may fail.”

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Nestor indicated that only 2 or 3 of the 50 individuals who were handcuffed this morning at the 2 houses were actually arrested and charged with a crime, and the crime they were charged with is “conspiracy to commit riot.” Nestor, who has practiced law in Minnesota for many years, said that he had never before heard of that statute being used for anything, and that its parameters are so self-evidently vague, designed to allow pre-emeptive arrests of those who are peacefully protesting, that it is almost certainly unconstitutional, though because it had never been invoked (until now), its constitutionality had not been tested.

…tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs “intelligence modules”. (Laura Margottini, “Surveillance Made Easy,” New Scientist, 23 August 2008)

New Scientist reports that the firm has sold the system to some 60 countries in Europe and Asia. Which countries? Well, Siemens won’t say.

However, privacy and human rights advocates say the system bears a remarkable resemblance to China’s “Golden Shield,” a massive surveillance network that integrates huge information databases, internet and email monitoring, speech and facial recognition platforms in combination with CCTV monitoring.

Designed specifically for “fusion centers” or their European/Asian equivalents, the Intelligence Platform promises to provide “real-time” high-tech tools to foil terrorist plots before they’re hatched (or keep tabs on antiwar/antiglobalization activists).

The latest item in the emerging “intelligent” software niche market, Intelligence Platform has been “trained” on a large number of sample documents to zero in on names, phone numbers or places from generic text. “This means it can spot names or numbers that crop up alongside anyone already of interest to the authorities, and then catalogue any documents that contain such associates,” New Scientist avers.

Or you think you are under intense surveillance by an army of spies, whom you refer to as the “www people,” as in the World Wide Web, and they wiretap your furniture and appliances.

Or else you refuse to drink water because you fear that another cup drawn from your faucet will, once and for all, deplete the world’s water supply.

Those thoughts are from three case studies of what psychiatrists interested in the intersection of mental illness, culture and society are calling, respectively, Truman Show delusion, Internet delusion and climate change delusion; all of them a window, through madness, into the modern world.

If you have delusions of grandeur in this century, you are probably not Napoleon, but you may be Bill Gates.

The Truman Show delusion, or Truman Syndrome, has drawn attention in recent months, in the United States and Britain, as psychiatrists in both countries describe a small but growing number of psychotic patients who describe their lives as mirroring that of the main character in the 1998 film “The Truman Show.”

Played by Jim Carrey, Truman Burbank leads a mundane existence in the suburbs, starting from the time he was in the womb, while being filmed for a documentary television show that he cannot escape.

Everyone is in on it, including his wife, and no one will believe Truman when he discovers clues that his life is being chronicled all the time by cameras.

Haren says the efforts under way at places like IBM will not only break down each worker into sets of skills and knowledge. The same systems will also divide their days and weeks into small periods of time—hours, half-hours, eventually even minutes. At the same time, the jobs that have to be done, whether it’s building a software program or designing an airliner, are also broken down into tiny steps. In this sense, Haren might as well be describing the industrial engineering that led to assembly lines a century ago. Big jobs are parsed into thousands of tasks and divided among many workers. But the work Haren is discussing is not done by hand, hydraulic presses, or even robots. It flows from the brain. The labor is defined by knowledge and ideas. As he sees it, that expertise will be tapped minute by minute across the world. This job sharing is already starting to happen, as companies break up projects and move big pieces of them offshore. But once the workers are represented as mathematical models, it will be far easier to break down their days into billable minutes and send their smarts to fulfill jobs all over the world.

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The Source Tagging Alliance, set up by leading retailers, is encouraging suppliers to use radio frequency identification (RFID) and source tagging on grocery product packaging at the point of manufacture.

Retailer Association chief executive John Albertson told the Howick and Pakuranga Times that supermarket chains were introducing electronic source tagging for goods deemed “hot” for shoplifting.

Such goods were usually small and expensive, and Mr Albertson said that over the next 18 months some would be secretly tagged, so they triggered exit alarms without giving any clues to would-be thieves.

National retail theft losses amount to $650 million a year, or $1.8m a day, he said. As supermarkets accounted for about 20 per cent of the retail spend, they carried a large share of the losses.

Progressive Enterprises has a tagging programme for its 150 supermarkets in the Woolworths and Countdown chains, national security manager Ian Seed told the Dominion Post.

There had been a marked increase in shoplifting, particularly of meat products, he said.

“We’re having a number of problems in all supermarkets at the moment,”said Foodstuffs’ Pak’n Save group manager Robert Kent.

In the small Manawatu town of Foxton, the local New World had installed the high-tech security after problems with people stealing meat.

“It seems to have worked, but what tends to happen is the thieves go down the road and start stealing from another market,” Mr Kent said.

Napier Pak ‘n Save head of security Mike Ralph said there had been a big increase in the number of blocks of cheese stolen in the past year, but the most commonly stolen items were razor blades, confectionery, hair creams and seafood – especially oysters.

Overseas, supermarkets are moving rapidly to adopt RFID, partly because it is also see as a cheap way of tracking the carbon-footprint of goods, and providing traceability for food safety.

Tarzan Kokoity, the province’s Deputy Speaker of parliament, announced that South Ossetia would be absorbed into Russia soon so that its people could live in “one united Russian state” with their ethnic kin in North Ossetia.

The declaration came only three days after Russia defied international criticism and recognised South Ossetia and Georgia’s other separatist region of Abkhazia as independent states. Eduard Kokoity, South Ossetia’s leader, agreed that it would form part of Russia within “several years” during talks with Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian President, in Moscow.