- Financial Times

Brunswick Group is an international PR firm, with almost a third of the FTSE 100 top firms as clients, they are the biggest financial communications consultancy in the UK. They paid more than £5,000 to the Labour Party for 'tickets for dinners' in 1999-2000 and gave £9,000 in August 2001. The company also donated the services of an employee to the Government to help work on the Financial Services and Markets Bill - legislation which will regulate business in the City and which would provide invaluable information to Brunswick s clients.

The Brunswick Group was founded in 1987. They advise on media and investor relations, mergers and acquisitions, competition and regulatory issues, crisis management, international communications and corporate campaigns. Although Brunswick are reluctant to advertise client details, they represent firms including BT, Marks & Spencer and the Bank of Scotland and range from some of the world s biggest companies, retained on an international mandate, to small and unquoted businesses. They have offices in London, New York, Germany and Johannesburg.

Founder Alan Parker (son of former British Rail chairman Sir Peter Parker) owns 88% of Brunswick's Channel Islands holding company, Wynnstay, giving him control of the agency and a stake in the company worth an estimated £114m. Parker's personal assets are thought to be around £6m. In 2001, Parker recruited Bill Clinton's former aide, James Rubin, to Brunswick's political affairs unit - red-star-research.

In March 2004, the controversy over the exaggeration of the oil and gas reserves of Shell Oil resulted in the resignation of the then chairman, Philip Watts, and Walter van de Vijver, who was responsible for exploration and production. In an attempt to manage the crisis Shell hired the Brunswick Group to help it manage the crisis. "Brunswick has recently come on board, but we don't really say much more about what they do," sourcewatch

Scenario - LONDON - The government faces a dilemma: It needs people to stay home, feel safe and sympathetic...If it becomes common knowledge that secret state managed terror operations involve black-ops such as bombings, kidnappings, internment & torture, actually being carried out by UK/US Global war on terror coalition to manipulate the Energy markets, the Government, already under pressure from a war in Iraq & unpopular anti-terror laws, will have to face a military/civilian confrontation due to mass protest on the streets and eventually resign under public & international outrage

Thu, Dec. 08, 2005 - Associated Press CRANE, Texas - An explosion at a West Texas gas plant near Crane on Wednesday night could be seen as far as 20 miles away and shook homes in Odessa. There were no injuries or deaths in the explosion at the compressor station in Crane County, KOSA-TV in Odessa reported Wednesday.

"The workers had left a few hours earlier," said Darrell Johnston, acting battalion chief of the Odessa fire department. "They were very lucky."

In Crane, members of the Tabernacle Baptist Church were in the middle of Wednesday night services when they felt the blast. "We didn't know what to think," Lee White told the Odessa American for its Thursday editions. "We heard it and we were stunned. We all just kind of looked at each other. We didn't know if it hit the building, part of the roof caved in or what."

Johnston said the fire apparently started in three massive holding tanks, which contained about 10,000 gallons each of drip gasoline, which is an untreated, unrefined gasoline directly from the ground. "There was some liquid runoff that caught a cooling tower on fire," Crane Fire Chief Gary Collier said. "And there were some associate fires caused by the explosion that were pretty easy to put out." Johnston said that the explosion also blew shrapnel into the air. "There was debris all over the plant" he said. "Those containers were an inch thick. There was a lot of heavy metal flying around." dfw.com

Friday, December 16, 2005 - PALO PINTO, Texas - A rural area west of Fort Worth was shaken awake before dawn Friday when a natural gas well exploded near Possum Kingdom Lake, a sheriff's official said.

The pipeline exploded just before 2 a.m. Friday near the intersection of U.S. 180 and Texas 16, about 12 miles west of Palo Pinto. The sound from the blast shook residents for miles around an area, and the flash was visible for 100 miles, Palo Pinto County sheriff's dispatcher Linda Ezell told Associated Press Radio.

The blast formed a large crater and ignited secondary fires for a mile around, but just one worker at a nearby drilling rig was slightly injured, Sheriff Ira Mercer told Dallas-Fort Worth television station WFAA. The secondary fires were been extinguished, but the residual gas continued to burn throughout the predawn hours, Mercer said. Crews from nearby fire departments, the Texas Forest Service and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have been dispatched, he said.

The site was about 60 miles west of Fort Worth. - foxnews

Friday, December 16, 2005 - ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - An explosion ripped through a smelter at a nuclear power plant outside the northern city of St. Petersburg, badly injuring three people, Russia's nuclear agency said Friday.

Rosenergoatom said radiation levels were not affected as the reactor in that part of the Leningrad nuclear plant was undergoing repairs and not in operation at the time. But Thursday's blast raised questions about safety at an onsite scrap metal operation. The blast caused molten metal to burst out of the smelter, where a private company was reprocessing scrap metal, said a plant spokesman, Sergei Averyanov. Averyanov blamed the explosion on violations of production rules.

The Leningrad nuclear plant is in the town of Sosnovy Bor, 400 miles northwest of Moscow and 50 miles west of St. Petersburg, the chief city in the region with 5 million people. The plant has four units, or reactors, and the smelter is located in the complex containing the second one. The second unit was shut down for major repairs in July, the agency said.

"There were no violations of safety levels and operating conditions of the energy units of the Leningrad nuclear plant," Rosenergoatom said in a statement.

One of the reactors at the 30-year-old plant is the same type as the one at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that exploded in Soviet Ukraine in 1986, in the world's worst nuclear accident. The station is the main supplier of electricity to St. Petersburg, formerly known as Leningrad, and there are plans to transport some of its power to Finland. Two of the injured had burns over 90 percent of their bodies, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

In March 1992, an accident at the Sosnovy Bor nuclear plant leaked radioactive gases and iodine into the air, according to nuclear watchdog groups. Sosnovy Bor, a center of nuclear technology, was founded 25 years ago and has 60,000 people. The educational level and living standard there is higher than the average in Russia. Almost everyone in Sosnovy Bor is connected with nuclear technology, and most are not native to the region. - Fox News

By Lisa Lambert WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Rescuers sent into a West Virginia mine after last week's fatal explosion found indications that the explosion might have occurred in a part of the mine that was shut down, a member of the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration said on Wednesday.

"I defer to the investigation team to make sure they see the same things our people did," Ray McKinney, the administrator for coal mine safety and health for the agency, told reporters.

McKinney said it was a "logical assessment" that the explosion happened in the shut-off area.

Twelve men died in the Jan. 2 accident in the Sago mine in Tallmansville. The only survivor, Randal McCloy, is hospitalized in a partial coma.

At the end of a 2-mile-long passageway into the mine were 40-inch-thick seals that had blocked off a decommissioned region of the mine, McKinney said. The seals were installed about three weeks before the explosion, he said.

When rescuers reached that part of the mine, they found the barriers were destroyed, apparently having been blown outward in an indication that the blast came from a closed-off area behind the seals.

By law, seals in mines are checked every seven days. They can be installed for a variety of purposes, McKinney said.

Rescuers then turned down a corridor where they suspected the men were trapped. There, they did not find any wreckage or debris that might have blocked the men's exit or trapped them.

Twelve of the miners were found behind a safety curtain they'd put up at the end of the corridor, McKinney said. One additional man was found earlier and apparently was killed by the initial concussion, he said.

The mining agency announced this week that it is working with state officials to determine the cause of the accident, while members of Congress are calling for their own investigation.

A Senate Appropriations subcommittee will hold a hearing next week on the safety of the West Virginia mine and on mining hazards.

The Sago mine, which employs about 145 miners and produces about 800,000 tonnes of coal annually, was owned by Anker Coal until it was sold to International Coal Group Inc. last November. The mine was issued dozens of citations by federal regulators in recent months, including some for the accumulation of combustible materials such as coal dust and loose coal. -alertnet.org

Gunmen using speedboats have clashed with Nigerian soldiers as they attacked an oil platform operated by Shell in the Niger Delta. A Shell spokesman said five workers were injured in the attack on the Benisede oil station in Bayelsa state. There are unconfirmed reports that some soldiers defending the platform and gunmen died in the attack.

On Wednesday gunmen kidnapped four foreign workers from another Shell oil rig in the Niger delta region. The hostages, who are still being held, come from the UK, the US, Honduras and Bulgaria, a Shell spokeswoman said.

Production cut

Elsewhere in the Delta last week, a major pipeline that feeds an export terminal was ruptured by militants. The kidnappings and explosion, the latest in a string of violent incidents in the troubled region, have slashed Shell 's production there by some 220,000 barrels a day - almost 10% of Nigeria's average output of 2.6m barrels.

In a statement about the latest attack, Shell said "heavily armed persons" in attacked the platform early on Sunday. "The attackers invaded the flow station in speedboats, burnt down two staff accommodation blocks, damaged the processing facilities and left," it added.

The injured members of staff have been taken to hospital, the company reported.

Evacuation

Soldiers guarding the platform returned fire, Brig Gen Elias Zamani, commander of a special task force assigned to the area, said. According to Reuters news agency a number of soldiers and assailants died in the attack. In response to the security problems, Shell has said it has begun evacuating more personnel from the Benisede facility and from and neighbouring flow stations.

The Nigerian army, which has thousands of troops in the Delta, has been unable to prevent attacks by militants who object to the country's oil wealth leaving their region. Nigeria is Africa's leading oil exporter and the fifth-biggest source of US oil imports. - bbc

UK Spies: Marc Doe. Christopher Pirt. Paul Crompton. Andrew Fleming - er...don't give up the day job...

BEIJING, Feb 2 (Reuters) - A gas explosion at a Chinese coal mine has killed at least 23 miners, state media reported on Thursday, in the latest accident to hit the world's deadliest mining industry.

Another 53 people were hospitalised after inhaling toxic gases from the blast at the Sihe Coal Mine in the northern province of Shanxi, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Nearly 700 miners were working underground at the time of the explosion on Wednesday, the report said, citing an unnamed official with the provincial coal mine safety supervision bureau. Search and rescue work ended early on Thursday.

The government has been trying to clean up China's mining industry, which killed more than 5,500 in the country in 2005, but a spate of accidents has made a mockery of safety campaigns.

Booming demand and high prices for coal -- which accounts for about 70 percent of China's energy -- mean regulations are often ignored, production is pushed beyond safe limits and mines that have been shut down reopened illegally.

The central government says local officials, who have turned to mines as a source of revenue, are sabotaging the campaign to close unsafe mines.

China produces about one-third of the world's coal but accounted for more than 80 percent of global coal mine deaths in 2004 and the death rate at its mines is 100 times that for pits in the United States.

Shanxi, where Wednesday's blast happened, is China's leading coal producing province and the Sihe Coal Mine, part of the state-owned Jincheng Mining Group, is one of its largest collieries, producing 10.8 million tonnes a year.

Shanxi has already closed more than 4,000 coal mines and punished some 1,200 involved in illegal mining, Xinhua said, citing the Shanxi provincial government.

Despite the clean-up efforts and central government orders for officials to pull out of investments in mines to avoid collusion with mine owners, mining accidents in Shanxi alone killed 468 people last year, Xinhua said. - alertnet.org