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Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook

000 ABNT20 KNHC 010358 TWOAT TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK...CORRECTED NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL 700 PM EST SUN NOV 30 2008 CORRECTED SPECIAL TROPICAL DISTURBANCE HEADER TO READ MIADSAAT FOR THE NORTH ATLANTIC...CARIBBEAN SEA AND THE GULF OF MEXICO... AS THE 2008 ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON APPROACHES ITS CONCLUSION... TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS. ISSUANCE OF THIS PRODUCT WILL RESUME ON 1 JUNE 2009. SHOULD ANY SIGNIFICANT DISTURBANCES DEVELOP DURING THE OFF-SEASON...SPECIAL TROPICAL DISTURBANCE STATEMENTS WOULD BE ISSUED...AS NEEDED. SPECIAL TROPICAL DISTURBANCE STATEMENTS CAN BE FOUND UNDER WMO HEADER WONT41 KNHC...AND UNDER AWIPS HEADER MIADSAAT. $$ FORECASTER STEWART

The Underground Railroad Bicycle Route

The Center for Minority Health and the Adventure Cycling Association partnered to create a bike trail stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Ontario. The trail was recognized at the 19th Annual Trails Symposium. read more

Gary Younge: Me, my son and Obama: one father's story

The day we brought my new-born son home to our Brooklyn apartment, an article in the New York Times pointed out that "a black male who drops out of high school [in the US] is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison than one with a bachelor's degree". These are the kind of statistics I often quote in my work. But this time it was personal. Looking down at him as he snoozed in the brand new car seat, I thought: "Those are not great odds. I'd better buy some more children's books."Over the next few weeks, as we fumbled with the nappies, pram, barfing and burping, a new, previously unthinkable option for black American males emerged: the presidency of the United States. Osceola was born on the weekend Barack Obama declared his candidacy. This prompted conversations that I would not have had otherwise. His success, I was told, would signify great things for my son. Osceola would grow up with an assumption that the highest office in the land was open to him. That the future could be his. That there was, I was told, nothing that this child could not achieve. Back in February 2007, when Obama announced his candidacy, this never made much sense to me. The fact that my son suddenly has a tiny theoretical chance of getting to the White House is less important than the more real chance of his ending up behind bars (one in three black American boys born in 2001 will do so) or dead (three black kids are shot every day). I wanted a president who could change the odds for the many rather than raise the stakes for a few. I didn't care what they looked like. It wasn't that I didn't understand the symbolic importance of his bid. I just did not want to mistake it for substance.On a political level, I have always thought he was interesting. Obama's announcement came 18 months after hurricane Katrina put black America's collective deprivation and individual success clearly on display. One man can rise to the presidency and a whole community can sink into the Gulf of Mexico: anything, I thought, really is possible. And with three days to go before election day, it looks like the US stands on the verge of making the historic decision to put a black man in the White House.This was no reflection on Obama. Everything I'd heard about him - not least his opposition to the Iraq war at a time when such a position was unpopular - was impressive. But his two years in the Senate suggested he was pretty mainstream and even, at times, a little suspect. He'd supported Joseph Lieberman (a Democrat who is now supporting John McCain) in his primary Senate campaign against an anti-war campaigner. And he voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state. It wasn't obvious to me that he would be any better than some other generic Democrat with different pigmentation. The idea that his presidency would mean anything for Osceola's life never really crossed my mind.To express such scepticism before many Obama supporters was to be accused of cynicism. The true believers do not just want you to drink the Kool Aid. They demand that you chug it.The people my scepticism vexed most were white liberals. Obama had become prey to the soft bigotry of unreasonable expectations. Describing the crowd's reaction to him in Rockford, Illinois, Time's Joe Klein noted: "The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved ... The white people, by contrast, are out of control." They had found a black politician they felt comfortable with, and wanted him to be everything: Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, a griot, president, vice-president, motherhood and apple pie. They prattled on about a post-racial America as though the Jena Six never happened and Sean Bell, a unarmed black man from Queens who was riddled with bullets on his wedding day, was still alive.My wife, who is African American, shared my reservations about Obama, but saw things differently. She remembers the thrill of being a young girl when the black Democrat Harold Washington was elected in her hometown, Chicago. She liked him because her parents liked him. She could see it was important, but she didn't know why."My dad grew up being told a black person couldn't be a pilot, and my son is growing up knowing that a black person can be president," she said. "It's not that racism is gone, it's just that it's not about the idea that all black people are excluded on the basis of their race from any part of society or any particular job. That was the racism my parents grew up with and that is now one generation removed from Osceola." Her dad became a pilot, as did her brother.Of course, Obama isn't standing for Osceola's benefit - which is just as well, because if Osceola could vote he would most likely support Elmo for mayor of Sesame Street. But in a sense these projections lie at the heart of any thoughtful appraisal of the racial dynamics underpinning Obama's candidacy. The desire to believe we are in a paradigm-shifting moment must be set against the fact that not every historic first changes the course of history. Changing our understanding of what is possible doesn't, in itself, create new possibilities. I watched Obama accept the Democratic nomination with my mother-in-law, Janet, in a cinema on the southside of Chicago. Janet was raised in the South with the laws that put her at the back of the bus. As a teenager she went with her mother to see Martin Luther King speak in Philadelphia, listening in the overflow in the vestry because there were too many people in the church.She was the one who first told me about Obama in 2003. She got involved in his primary campaign for the Senate when he didn't have a prayer, after she'd seen him on the local public channel, when he was a state senator. "He seemed like a bright guy," she says. "He reasoned his way through things and was always very impressive." She particularly liked his stance on the war. When he said he was running for Senate, she signed up as a volunteer. And now, here we were just five years later seeing him clinch the deal in Denver on the big screen. At one point, when he recalled his anti-war speech in 2002, she punched my arm. "I was there." As she drove me to my hotel, she would occasionally say to no one in particular: "I just don't believe it."Whether Osceola would ever be able to relate to what a momentous time this is for Janet remains to be seen. But her response made me think that the late comedian George Carlin was wrong. Symbols are too important to be left to the symbol-minded. By that time, my thinking on Obama had evolved. Not so much because of the man, but the moment. The atmosphere during this campaign has been unlike anything I've ever seen in a western country. To see so many people - particularly young people - engaged and hopeful about their political future after eight depressing years is inspiring. The last time I saw it was in South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994.Walking down Sumter Street during Charleston's Martin Luther King day parade, watching white volunteers chant: "Obama '08! We're ready. Why wait?" gave political voice to an America I never doubted existed, but had yet to see. Among them was a young man who was "so depressed" after Obama's New Hampshire defeat that he had dropped everything he had been doing in Guatemala and flown back to help out. Local African Americans lined the sidewalks, cheering encouragement. Obama's victory in Iowa had proved that a black candidacy was not a pipe dream. It was a moment. Fleeting and maybe even fatuous. But nonetheless a political moment that produced hopeful human engagement. Within half an hour it had evaporated. The white volunteers went back to the office and black people went back to their homes in the poorest parts of town and waited for change. But that didn't mean it didn't happen or that it couldn't happen again. Nor was there anyone else who could make it happen.A couple months later came Obama's race speech in Philadelphia in response to the attacks on his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, in which he addressed black alienation and white disadvantage, set them both in a historical context, and then called on people to rise above it. It was a tall order. He pulled it off.That weekend, a friend invited us to brunch with a group of other black people to discuss the fallout. There were nine of us (10 if you include Osceola, who yanked a blind from the window). It was a typical boho (black bohemian) Brooklyn crowd of voluntary sector workers, teachers and the like. Most, like me, had been ambivalent about Obama at the outset. But his candidacy was becoming a vehicle for something bigger: a teachable moment about the potential of anti-racist discourse.A year before, Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, laid out a plan of attack against Obama. "All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050. It also exposes a strong weakness for him - his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his centre fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values ... Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programmes, the speeches and the values. He doesn't ... Let's use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let's add flag symbols to the backgrounds."Clinton rejected Penn's advice, but McCain pretty much adopted it. And at this point it appears to have failed. This time Republicans have misread white America's appetite for divisive racial rhetoric and overestimated its fear of the other. The fears and division are still there. But whatever the result on Tuesday, they are clearly no longer the decisive mobilising force they once were. If there is promise in here for my son, it is not so much that he is capable of doing anything he wants - I am his father and it's my responsibility to teach him that - but that white people won't necessarily stop him. What that does for his odds of finishing high school or going to jail remains to be seen. In the meantime, I'm off to the bookshop.Barack ObamaRace issuesUS elections 2008guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Shell and Exxon join the profits bonanza

Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil followed BP yesterday by revealing record quarterly profits.Royal Dutch Shell, the biggest oil firm in Europe, beat City expectations with third-quarter current cost-of-supply profits - which strip out unrealised inventory gains and losses - up 74% to $10.9bn (£6.7bn). Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, smashed its own record for the highest quarterly earnings from a US firm, by delivering a profit of $14.83bn.Despite the better than expected figures, Royal Dutch Shell shares fell more than 3%, in part because of lower than expected production. "Overall, this is a good outcome," said Tony Shepard, an analyst at stockbroker Charles Stanley. "But some investors will be disappointed by the sluggish production volumes."Shell said it had benefited from higher oil and gas prices. Crude oil prices were more than 50% higher and gas realisations some 48% ahead of the same quarter last year.Oil prices have fallen by about half from their peak in July when they reached $147 a barrel but the continued scale of oil company profits have prompted calls for lower prices for consumers and the imposition of a windfall tax."We are steering the Shell ship through rough waters and so far OK," said chief executive Jeroen van der Veer. "Yes, we are generating large profits. Yes, we have the largest investment programme in Shell's history to create value for shareholders and to play our part in providing safe and cost competitive energy for consumers." As well as investments to secure energy supplies, strategy remained to pay "competitive and progressive dividends". The combination of a commitment to investment and dividend payouts echoed BP's response this week to questions about the scale of its earnings.Chief financial officer Peter Voser, who will take over from Van der Veer next summer, said that the company was on track to reach its target of asset sales of $5bn this year, though he acknowledged the credit crunch was curbing the number of buyers. He added: "We are in no rush to sell assets. It's not a fire sale."Like Shell and BP, Exxon benefited from the high price of crude oil. Its profits amounted to $162m a day or $113,000 a minute, despite disruption caused to offshore production in the Gulf of Mexico by two hurricanes - Gustav and Ike."Despite the continuing uncertainty in world financial markets, Exxon Mobil has maintained a strong financial position," said its chairman, Rex Tillerson, who said that capital investment of $19.3bn this year had made "a substantial contribution to employment and economic activity" in the countries in which they operated.The figures are likely to raise hackles among critics of the oil industry. Exxon's previous quarter yielded profits of $11.6bn, which was itself a US record. The presidential candidate Barack Obama branded the company's earnings as "outrageous" at a time when US motorists were "paying record prices at the pump".Exxon has been attacked by the environmental movement for its reluctance to invest in alternative energy sources. At the company's annual meeting in May, a significant minority of investors backed resolutions demanding limits on the company's greenhouse gas emissions and a shift towards renewable energy. The Texas-based company's upstream businesses, comprising exploration and production, enjoyed a 48% surge in earnings to $9.35bn as commodity prices soared, despite an 8% fall in output. Downstream, Exxon's refineries saw profits rise by $1bn to $3.01bn.The figures comfortably beat analysts' expectations and Exxon's shares rose in early trading on Wall Street."US downstream was up from last year, so that was a positive surprise," said Gene Pisasale, an energy analyst at PNC Capital Advisers. "They have the strongest balance sheet in the business."Exxon MobilRoyal Dutch ShellOilguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

My Florida home for your SF home (downtown / civic / van ness)

My 2 bedroom villa in senior community for similar housing in the San Francisco area. We are located less than 8 miles from beautiful Gulf of Mexico beaches and within walking distance of a variety of restaurants and shops. Dates and duraton of swap are flexible, December 2008 or any month from June through September of 2009. If interested more information and pictures of our condo can be provided.

My Florida Beach for your flat for THANKSGIVING 2bd

I have a 2 bedroom condo directly on the crystal white sands of the emerald gulf of Mexico (Fort Walton Beach), and I'd like to trade for a place in the bay area over Thanksgiving (Nov. 20-30).......... Interested?

Alabama Gov. Cites Environmental Concerns In Rejecting Proposed Offshore Liquefied Natural Gas Terminal (AHN)

(AHN) - Alabama Gov. Bob Riley cited environmental concerns in rejecting a proposed $500 million project by a Texas company to build an offshore liquefied natural gas terminal about 63 miles south of Mobile in the Gulf of Mexico. - Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:31:31 GMT

Future Risk of Hurricanes: The Role of Climate Change

Scientists focus on hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea to assess likely changes