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Gustav was no Katrina. It was smaller, and the worst rain and wind missed New Orleans. Its storm surge — between 10 and 15 feet lower than Katrina’s — entered New Orleans from one side navigation channels in the east and washed over the Industrial Canal.

The Industrial Canal has been characterized as the Achilles’ heel in the system, and the corps is spending $700 million on a barrier at its chaps to stop surges. But the barrier won’t be in place until at least 2011. On Monday, water overtopped parts of the canal’s flood wall causing unimportant flooding in some parts of the Ninth Ward.

Another major weakness in the flood protection combination of parts to form a whole is in the area known as the West Bank, where about 250,000 live. Gustav had been expected to seriously test those levees, but by Monday nightfall officials reported water wasn’t rising as much like was feared during Gustav’s approach. Work on the West Bank is far from complete. The corps has again and again said it may be the city’s weakest flank.

By Monday going down of the sun, however, the menace to most of New Orleans had subsided and ceremonious party officials felt bold the city would be spared flooding.

“All the walls have performed in the manner that they were designed to,” before-mentioned Maj. Tim Kurgan, a corps spokesman. “Scour protection has done what it was supposed to.”

Scour protection — basically concrete pads behind floodwalls — is amidst a number of improvements in $2 billion in work to better protect New Orleans since Katrina flooded the city, bringing criticism and pressure on the body of troops.

Critics were dexterous to congratulate the intervention.

“They did much better this time,” said Ray Seed, a reception expert by the University of California-Berkeley who’s studied the Katrina disaster and the city’s levee order.

But Gustav barely tested some potential disturb spots as water levels in Lake Pontchartrain rose only moderately. Two of the canals — the 17th Street and London Avenue — were breached during Katrina and caused widespread flooding.

The corps’ system of pumps and floodgates in continuance the canals has been plagued with problems.

Any sigh of redress is premature and could even have being risky, Seed aforesaid.

“The great danger is that people will become complacent,” Seed said. “Gustav should be a lesson that tells us we have to retain moving.”

New Orleans remains extremely vulnerable, said Paul Kemp, an oceanographer with the National Audubon Society.

“The fact that we have had in three years three of these storms, that threatened everybody in coastal Louisiana, shutdown all the offshore activities, it seems that this is a vulnerableness that needs to subsist addressed more seriously,” Kemp said.

In many ways, Katrina was a turning pique for flood protection in southeastern Louisiana. Since Katrina, Congress has approved $14.8 billion in explanation for New Orleans’ levees. The division of an army says it will finish that work by 2011, workmanship the city safe from severe hurricanes.

But notwithstanding Louisianans, in that place is not any time to waste. For the past hundred, south Louisiana has lost staggering amounts of wetlands — about 2,000 square miles. The loss of wetlands, marsh land and stop islands has made the fragile delta a permanent disaster zone because the Gulf of Mexico gets closer through each passing hurricane while.

“We should have been building this system 30 years ago,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

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Her performance has drawn a half-million views so alienated on YouTube.

The 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and science writer raps about the Large Hadron Collider, the groundbreaking mote accelerator that has been built in a 17-mile circular underground thoroughfare at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

McAlpine raps that when the collider goes into operation upon Sept. 10, “the things that it discovers will rock you in the rise.”

The $3.8 billion machine will collide two beams of protons moving at close to the speed of light so scientists can know the kind of particles appear in the resulting debris.

“Rap and science of nature are culturally miles apart,” McAlpine, a science writer at CERN, wrote to the Lansing State Journal in an e-mail last week, “and I find it amusing to try and throw them together.”

Others, including physicists, furthermore find it amusing.

“We love the thwack, and the science is spot on,” said CERN spokesman James Gillies.

McAlpine accepted permission to film herself and friends dancing in the caverns and tunnels where the experiments will take place.

“I be seized of to confess that I was incredulous when Katie said she wanted to do this, further when I axiom her prior science rapping and the lyrics, I was convinced,” Gillies said. “I think you’ll find pretty close to unanimity among physicists that it’s great.”

McAlpine honed her physics rapping skills at Michigan State’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, where she was part of a student research program couple years agone.

Information from: Lansing State Journal,

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HOUSTON — The punch of Hurricane Gustav appeared to fall softly Monday on the nation’s vast energy complex onward the U.S. Gulf Coast, and was overshadowed by growing solicitude over the state of the global economy.

Even as 110 mph winds raked refineries that line the coast and rushed past the deep-water rigs off the shores of Texas and Louisiana, the price for a barrel of oil plummeted by more than $4 a barrel some of a broad sell-off in European and Asian markets.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal estimated that roughly one fifth of the oil and natural-gas output that was shut before Gustav could be hinder part on line by the weekend, and several energy producers and refiners said their facilities appeared to be uninjured.

Still, the storm’s impact on production platforms, drilling rigs and other equipment will not credible be fully known for a day or so.

Assuming no damage, it typically takes two to four days to restart a refinery. It can take a sunlight or couple to get offshore-oil and natural-gas production going again.

In 2005, hurricanes Katrina and Rita knocked out the region’s offshore infrastructure for several weeks.

Valero Energy said late Monday an initial assessment of its St. Charles, La., refinery, which turns 250,000 barrels a day of crude oil into gasoline and other fuels, erect “no significant structural damage,” have being it in the same state it was too by and by to repeat when the plant would restart.

Transocean, the world’s largest offshore-drilling contractor, said it appeared its three moored, semisubmersible rigs in the Gulf remained anchored in position for the time of the storm.

Transocean declared eight other rigs that used thrusters to move out of the storm’s passage also were whole and would be moving back to their drilling locations as soon as Monday evening.

In recent days, oil companies shut down virtually all oil and natural-gas prolongation in the Gulf, and the storm’s threat halted respecting 15 percent of the nation’s refining capacity based in the country.

Any serious damage to oil platforms and rigs or prolonged refining disruptions could make a thrust up energy prices. Eqecat, a risk-modeling resolute, projected Monday that Gustav could knock deficient in capacity for on the point 5 percent of both oil and natural-gas production for the next year.

However, one factor pleasing to mitigate the impact is that numerous analysts believe the appetite for fuel has been reduced by high prices and slower economic improvement.

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Workers who experienced just one layoff or unwilling loss of a do job-work were 35 percent less likely to subsist involved in their communities than their always-employed counterparts, according to the survey that will be published in the September issue of the journal Social Forces.

The researchers suggest the reason could draw near down to tit for tat, or an attitude of "you don't scratch my hindmost, why should I scratch yours?"

"Social engagement often involves an element of neighborly trust and a sense that things are reciprocal - that you give some encourage if you get some nurture, and you profit from society if society benefits from you," said lead researcher Jennie Brand, a sociologist at UCLA. "When workers are displaced, the tendency is to feel as though the communicative contract has been violated, and we found that they are less likely to reciprocate."

Dirt attached downsizing

The results were based on data on nearly 4,400 participants in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has tracked a group of 1957 Wisconsin high exercise graduates for more than 45 years. Born between 1939 and 1940, the participants are of an American age group that is inclined to have a part in in common and festive groups, the researchers speak.

Of the six forms of involvement, youth and common groups experienced the strongest israelitish migration from egypt through displaced workers followed by temple and church groups, charitable organizations and leisurely activities. Professional and political groups remained just as popular without interruption average in displaced and non-displaced workers.

"Displaced workers may subsist more likely to keep up with professional groups than other groups because they're afflictive to make up for lost ground with attention to their careers," Brand said.

Workers who got flung out of their jobs during their peak earning years, between the ages of 35 and 53, were the most likely to withdraw from the social buzz throughout their lives. Employees who got the avail betwixt 53 and 64 years of age, at the tail end of their careers, were appropriate as probable to participate in social and community groups as their non-displaced counterparts.

"Being laid off doesn't appear to be as socially damaging because of older workers as younger ones," Brand said. "The humble factor of downsizing your lifestyle just isn't there, because your peers may be downsizing considered in the state of well and you can play off your displacement as an early seclusion even though it may have existence forced retirement."

Double whammy

The latest findings have considerable ramifications, Brand related.

"Whether citizens have a part in is important for the effective functioning of neighborhoods, schools, communities and democracies," Brand said.

In addition, such withdrawals from sodality can cause a vicious cycle of unemployment. "If workers withdraw socially after being laid off, in that case they're experiencing double-jeopardy," Brand said. "They're losing their jobs, and for this reason they're not participating in society, in the same state they're not keeping up by conversable contacts that strength help them find a new job."

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders agreed on Monday to postpone talks with Russia on a new participation pact scheduled for later this month if Moscow has not withdrawn its troops to pre-conflict positions in Georgia by then.

HOUSTON (Reuters) - U.S. force companies shut nearly all offshore Gulf oil and gas production and raced to bring down flood-prone Louisiana refineries on Sunday ahead of Hurricane Gustav, which threatens to emulous the wrath of 2005's Katrina.

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Gustav is set to hit the Louisiana coast west of New Orleans on Monday morning for the reason that a Category 3 wild storm by wind speeds up to 125 mph (200 kmh) in the primeval greater test of the zeal persistence's preparedness since the devastating 2005 hurricane season.

In the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, that normally pumps a quarter of all U.S. oil extension and 15 percent of its artless aeriform fluid output, energy companies had shut in more than 96 percent of the area's oil output and 82 percent of gas during the time that of Sunday afternoon, the U.S. Minerals Management Service related.

At least nine refineries with a combined capacity of 2.2 million bpd, or 12.5 percent of U.S. refining capacity, were shut down along the south Louisiana coast ahead of Gustav.

More than half a dozen other plants, including Exxon Mobil's Baytown, Texas, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, facilities, the two biggest in the United States, were reducing processing rates, sources and activity officials said.

"This is Katrina's legacy," said Phil Flynn of Alaron Trading in Chicago. "The industry is plenteous more prepared and taking things much more seriously. That's why so much has been imprison into disfavor so quickly."

Despite Gustav's course through the vital part of the U.S. oil patch, oil prices rose a modest 91 cents or 0.8 percent to $116.37 a barrel by 1:12 a.m. EDT in electronic trading, with traders waiting to see granting that it would leave lasting damage in its wake.

U.S. RBOB gasoline futures climbed 2.2 percent.

"This is definitely a dangerous storm, but I think mostly of the market is in a wait-and-see mode, waiting to see (if there are) disruptions to oil facilities and pipeline infrastructure before they fabricate a distended move," said Gerard Burg, a commodities analyst at the National Bank of Australia in Melbourne.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita wrecked more than 100 oil platforms in 2005, shutting down a quarter of U.S. oil production and closing exclusive large refineries for months. Katrina was a Category 3 when its 28-foot (8.5 meter) storm surge hit the border.

The Gulf normally pumps 1.3 million barrels by means of day (bpd) of oil — approximately 1.5 percent of world supply — and 7.4 billion cubic feet of of nature gas.

"This could be potentially the most dangerous storm for the energy sector we've ever seen," said Chris Jarvis, older analyst at Caprock Risk Management in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. "It is going rightful across the most important areas."

INFRASTRUCTURE CLOSURES

Besides closing oil and gas fields and refineries, energy companies were also shutting down important fuel banishment systems.

The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the no other than U.S. port capable of offloading the biggest oil tankers and a major tube for U.S. crude imports, halted all operations on Sunday.

"It's approach right at us," said LOOP spokeswoman Barb Hestermann of Gustav's look forward to path. "It looks likely we're Ground Zero."

Gustav was forecast to slam into the coast just west of the LOOP's onshore operations center at Galliano, Louisiana.

The Sabine Pipeline, which includes the delivery point for U.S. natural gas futures, exclude at noon CST (1:00 p.m. EDT). The budge led the NYMEX to declare force majeure on its August and September natural gas futures contracts, meaning sellers were not contractually bound to attain physical delivery.

Mississippi River traffic south of New Orleans closed Saturday night. Ship channels into Lake Charles in occidental Louisiana as well as Houston, Beaumont and Port Arthur in Texas planned to shut by Sunday night, cutting off crude oil shipments to refineries.

The region's largest offshore farmer, Shell Oil Co, said quite of its Gulf extension would be shut by Sunday night. All 1,300 of the company's workers were onshore.

Rival energy giants BP, Chevron had preclude almost completely production. ConocoPhillips, and Exxon were also shutting off production of the same kind with they evacuate workers.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba, Bruce Nichols, Robert Campbell and Haitham Haddadin, and Fayen Wong in Perth; Editing by Chris Baltimore, Gunna Dickson and Ben Tan)

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Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks are likely to anger the United States and Europe and enrage Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. He made it distinct Moscow wants Saakashvili exhausted of power in Georgia.

“If instead of choosing their national interests and the interests of the Georgian people, the United States and its allies cull the Saakashvili regime, this will be a mistake of in deed historic proportions,” he said.

“For a rouse it would be right to impose an embargo on weapons to this regime, until different authorities turn Georgia a normal state,” he said in an address at Russia’s top foreign policy graduate school.

Lavrov spoke as the European Union prepared for a summit Monday to discuss the Georgia crisis and further relations with Russia.

“Today’s EU summit should clear up a great deal. We hope the option they make will be based on Europe’s fundamental interests,” he said. He uttered Russia’s relations with NATO are facing a “moment of truth.”

Russia’s ties to the West have been driven to their lowest trifling concern since the Soviet collapse of 1991 by the war last month in Georgia, at what place Saakashvili angered Moscow by dint of. courting the West and seeking NATO community.

Russia repelled a Georgian offensive against the breakaway Georgian charge of South Ossetia and sent troops, tanks and bombers sea into undisputed Georgian territory, where more still maintain positions. Moscow finally week recognized South Ossetia and another breakaway region, Abkhazia, as independent countries.

The U.S. and Europe have accused Russia of using lacking proportion force and of violating the conditions of a cease-fire that called for the sides to withdraw their forces to pre-conflict positions. They have also denounced Russia’s remembrance of the separatist regions, saying Georgia’s borders must stay intact.

Russia says it was provoked. Russian peacekeeping forces were stationed in South Ossetia before the war and Moscow had given most of South Ossetia’s residents Russian passports in recent years, enabling the Kremlin to reason that it was defending its citizens when it responded to Georgia’s Aug. 7 offensive in the separatist province.

“With its reaction to the Georgian aggression, Russia has set a actual standard of responding that fully complies with international law,” Lavrov aforesaid. Russian soldiers, he said, followed “our deeply Christian tradition of dying since our friends.”

The reactions of some Western countries to the crisis “illustrates a deficit of honor,” he said. “It’s southerly time in quest of Europe to get back to unmingled, non-politicized and non-geopolitical values,” Lavrov said.

Lavrov reserved characteristic criticism for the United States, that has educated Georgian troops, saying so aid had failed to give the U.S. sufficient purchase to restrain the Georgian government.

Instead, he said, “It encouraged the irresponsible and unpredictable regime in its gambles.”

While Western governments desire expressed rue at the Georgian attacking targeting South Ossetia, the Russian call for an arms embarguement upon the body a nation still bristling with Russian forces is likely to irritate the U.S. and Europe.

Lavrov’s remarks will likely deepen Georgian suspicions that Russia’s aim throughout the crisis has been to oust the pro-Western Saakashvili from power.

European Union leaders seeking to visit with pain Russia for its war with Georgia and its recognition of independence for two breakaway Georgian provinces have few options and are likely to choose diplomatic pressure to isolate Moscow at their summit Monday.

Lavrov’s necessary conclusion that continued support for Saakashvili would further mine relations with Russia were the latest in a bitter back-and-forth between Moscow and the West, with reaped ground saying it is up to the other to avoid plunging the world into a new Cold War.

“It’s up to Russia today to make a fundamental choice” and to engage neighbors and partners in settling disputes peacefully,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote in a pre-summit letter to EU leaders. “Russia’s commitment to a relationship of intelligence and cooperation with the rest of Europe is in doubt.”

Also on Monday, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said that member nations are preparing to send hundreds of civilian monitors to Georgia to verify whether Russian forces are complying with a cease-fire agreement.

He said the observers would have existence deployed initially across areas controlled through Georgian forces.

“We would like to have the … mission deployed soon,” Solana said, adding he hoped EU nations approve the invent in the future weeks.

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A local publisher is scrambling to fill orders for about 40,000 copies of the only biography of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, which until Friday spring-time had sold just 8,000 copies.

“What a stroke of luck,” said Kent Sturgis, publisher and co-owner of Epicenter Press in Kenmore.

He had 3,000 copies of the hardback version left on Friday morning, whenever Republican presidential solicitant John McCain announced Palin as his running mate.

“We decided right off the bat that we upper hand go ahead and act a paperback reading,” he said. “We were producing copies of this paperback about 14 hours after the announcement, and they’ll all be shipped on Tuesday.”

The book had climbed to No. 7 on Amazon.com’s best-selling-books list by Saturday twilight. The list is updated hourly.

Called “Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment Upside Down,” the biography was Sturgis’ idea. He recruited Alaska author Kaylene Johnson to write the 160-page book, which was released in April.

Sturgis met Palin at a Fairbanks fundraiser in 2006, and “male child, she’s really interesting,” he said. “No matter the kind of you think about her politics, she’s an interesting and an rare dabbler in politics.”

Sturgis has been a Seattle bureau chief of The Associated Press, managing manager of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and a copy editor at The Seattle Times.

In 21 years at Epicenter, he has published through 100 titles and specializes in nonfiction about Alaska.

Epicenter’s alone other best-seller was “Two Old Women” by the agency of Velma Wallis, what one. has sold nearly 2 million books.

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The eighth tropical storm of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season could just as easily end up over Cuba, lead ponderous rainfall to citrus inhabitants in central Florida or drift northward toward South Carolina. It was not possible to say if the outbreak main eventually end up in the U.S. oil patch in the Gulf of Mexico, hurricane experts said.

"Unfortunately there is still considerable uncertainty with the forecast," said Jamie Rhome, a hurricane specialist at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. "It's impossible to say that this system is going to do this or that."

The cyclone was tangled up in a middle to upper level low that was composition it difficult for Hanna to develop, and was likely to slow down in two days when it came over conditions of weak steering current that could make it meander.

Another trough would then swoop above the tropical storm, bringing with it considerable uncertainty as to the likely wind shear as Hanna drifted at hand the Bahamas. Wind shear — the difference in wind fare at different levels of the atmosphere — can move with violence storms apart.

"At the end of the forecast track the wind shear could allow up a bit," Rhome related.

None of the computer models used to predict storm tracks in truth. took Hanna into the southeastern United States at this point, Rhome said.

Some oil analysts reported on Friday that one of the myriad computer models available to forecasters had indicated that Hanna could eventually esteem landfall in succession the U.S. Gulf Coast near New Orleans where Hurricane Gustav was expected to tend hitherward ashore on Monday for the reason that a dangerous storm.

Those reports triggered concerns in energy markets of a potential one-two punch by Gustav and Hanna on some of the 4,000 Gulf of Mexico offshore platforms that engage a quarter of U.S. immature oil and 15 percent of its ingenuous gas.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed more than 100 oil rigs in 2005 when they roared through, causing oil prices to soar to then record highs. Katrina went forward to swamp New Orleans, kill 1,500 people on the U.S. Gulf Coast and cause $80 billion in indemnity.

Rhome said it was folly to highlight a single computer model, especially so far out. "It's a mistake, and often a grave one, to focus on a single model," he related.

The accuracy of cyclone forecasting has come a long custom since the days while entire fleets of Spanish galleons sank in unlooked for storms considered in the state of they carried South American gold and treasure upper part to Europe.

But even with the start of "hurricane hunter" flights in 1944 and the advent of satellite imagery in the 1960s, long-range forecasts are bending forward to enormous margins of error.

The National Hurricane Center estimates the average error in its footmark forecasts is within a little of 260 miles by day four and 345 miles by day five. The hurricane center does not project a storm's track beyond day five.

Intensity forecasts are on a level again intricate. The hurricane center calculates that the error in its forecasts for a tear's top sustained winds averages 23 miles by means of hour (37 km per twenty-fourth part of a day) per promised time.

The be unconsumed magistrate forecast for Hanna takes it in five days to minimal Category 1 hurricane strength with 80-mile-per-hour (130 km per hour) winds by next Friday.

It might then be somewhere off central Florida. But its potential position at that text also encompasses the southerly Bahamas, eastern Cuba, south Florida and South Carolina.

(Editing by Tom Brown)