wikimedia tangelo

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Year's Best Meteor Shower Peaks This Week

Stargazers are about to get their annual celestial treat: A bright meteor shower, the Geminids, will grace skies worldwide this week, with a peak in activity on Thursday (Dec. 13).

No telescope or binoculars are required to see the show ? just use your bare eyes. The moon will set before the meteors come out to play around 10 p.m. local time, meaning the sky should be nice and dark for optimal viewing. There could be as many as 100 to 150 meteors an hour to gape at, for those patient enough to spend a few hours in a dark area and let their eyes adapt to starlight.

The Geminids, unusually among meteor showers, are the leftovers of an asteroid (most showers originate with comets). They are caused when rubble from the asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere, lighting a path through the sky as it burns up.

The fact that the Geminid-causing debris comes from an asteroid and not a comet makes the particles denser and more durable than the typical cometary particles that make up other showers, said NASA's Bill Cooke. [Graphic: How Meteor Showers Work]

"It makes them stronger. They can survive lower in the atmosphere," said Cooke, the lead for NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

A typical Geminid particle, he said, is about 1/25 of an inch (1 millimeter) in size and can survive as low as 35 miles in altitude. Yet the full story of how these particles came to be is shrouded in mystery.

Collision one of several theories

For skywatchers looking up, the Geminids appear to emanate from a point in the sky in the constellation Gemini.

But more properly, the origins of this shower come from the debris of an asteroidcalled 3200 Phaethon. As Earth runs into the debris stream during the planet's orbit around the sun, some of the particles burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

A stream of dust broke off this 3-mile-wide (4.8 kilometers) asteroid several centuries ago, likely from a collision with another space rock, Cooke said. The stream remained in space for centuries, out of the firing range of Earth's orbit.

Then, around the 1830s, the gravity of Jupiter, which shifted the stream over the centuries, perturbed the rocky stream enough that the Earth ran into it. More disturbances from Jupiter have pushed the stream closer to Earth, resulting in more meteors.

The collision theory is one of several hypotheses for the Geminids' beginnings. Some astronomers say the stream began when Phaethon broke off from the asteroid Pallas, but the orbits of the meteoroid particles don't neatly fit with the theory.

The term "meteoroid" refers to rocks in space that have not entered Earth's atmosphere. When they hit the atmosphere in a blaze of light, they're referred to as "meteors," then "meteorites" if they reach the ground.

Another hypothesis: Phaethon sheds debris when it gets close to the sun in its orbit, and is blasted by the sun's heat. Observations from NASA's twin STEREO spacecraftgave credence to the idea in 2009, but the amount of dust seen was not enough to keep the stream replenished over time.

Regardless of the Geminids' origins, Cooke said the single biggest threat to the shower is not the amount of dust, but its orbit.

If Jupiter's gravity interferes with the stream in a certain way, it's possible the debris could be diverted away from Earth. But that's not expected to happen any time soon, Cooke added.

Meteor showers more popular

Cooke said Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media are making the public more aware of when meteor showers occur.

Also, television and other mainstream media outlets tend to broadcast meteor events. When Cooke spoke to SPACE.com on Friday (Dec. 7), he was fielding several media calls about a fireball spotted over Texas.

Cooke said he welcomes the interest, but also tries to educate those who speak with him.

"One of the biggest misconceptions is a lot of people think that the [Geminid] meteor ? always the bright ones ? will land near them. That's not true," Cooke said.

"That's an illusion. It's very rare, exceedingly rare, for a meteorite to land near an individual, and the Geminids won't produce meteorites. They will not make it to the ground. People don't have to worry about getting hit by falling Geminids."

Editor's Note: If you take a photo of this year's Geminids that you'd like to share with SPACE.com for a possible story or gallery, please send it, along with your comments, to Mike Wall at mwall-at-space-dot-com.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/years-best-meteor-shower-peaks-week-220252524.html

marchmadness mike d antoni nba trade rumors 2012 ncaa tournament schedule laurent robinson dantoni gillian anderson

Iran: We stole all secrets from U.S. drone

An Iranian military commander claimed Monday that the country has stolen all the secrets held by a high-tech American surveillance drone that crashed in Iran last year, according to Iranian news reports.

"All the intelligence in this drone has been completely decoded and extracted and we know each and every step it has taken," said Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Commander of the Aerospace Division for the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard, according to an English-language report by Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency.

Another Iranian outlet, Press TV, reported that Hajizadeh said that data gleaned from the drone showed that it was not spying on the Iranian nuclear program ? a story Hajizadeh said the Americans had spread "as an excuse for hostile practices."

The RQ-170 Sentinel drone, a classified unmanned surveillance craft produced by defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin, was on a CIA mission when it mysteriously crashed in Iranian territory last December, according to U.S. officials at the time. Days after the crash, Press TV broadcast video of what appeared to be the drone propped up but in good condition. Iranian officials said then they were going to set about analyzing the advanced aircraft.

At the time of the crash, American officials said that the drone had been operating over Afghanistan when its operators lost control, after which it floated into Iranian airspace. Iranian officials said their country's electronic warfare experts had been able to take control of the drone and bring it down -- a claim disputed by Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby, who said the drone was not taken down by "hostile activity of any kind."

READ: US Drone on CIA Mission Before Crashing Into Iran

The bat-wing shaped craft is designed to dodge enemy radar and slip unnoticed into hostile territory to gather information or support operations on the ground. It was reportedly used to keep tabs on the man believed to be Osama bin Laden during the Navy SEAL mission that took out the terror leader in Pakistan in May.

Hajizadeh also reportedly said today that a surveillance drone sent by Hezbollah to spy in Israel in October was "an old product of Iran" and featured none of the technology allegedly gleaned from the RQ-170.

Representatives from the CIA and the U.S. military did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this report.

ABC News' Luis Martinez and Martha Raddatz contributed to this report.

Stargazers needed: Astronomers asking for public's help

A group of astronomers is inviting the public to join their star-hunting team in a search of the bright Andromeda Galaxy.

The project aims to identify star clusters in our neighboring galaxy, also known as M31. All it takes to find the clusters in Andromeda is an Internet-enabled computer and a desire to help, said Anil Seth, the team's lead investigator. "No special training is required," he said.

The so-called "Andromeda Project," which began Wednesday (Dec. 5), will generate the largest sample of clusters from a single spiral galaxy when it is completed.

Scientists expect the project could identify 2,500 new star clusters when finished. This would provide useful goalposts to chart how the galaxy, which is on a collision course with the Milky Way, formed and evolved. [When Galaxies Collide: Q&A on Our Milky Way's Future]

"The general benefit is to better understand how spiral galaxies form," said Seth, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah.

"Andromeda is the nearest example of a [spiral] galaxy, except for the Milky Way," he said. "We can study in detail things we can't see in larger distances."

PHAT science

Seth's team is using images from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT), which will generate pictures of a third of the galaxy when the survey is completed next summer. (Getting the other two-thirds would take too much telescope time, Seth said.)

The massive project is taking up two months of Hubble Space Telescope time, making it one of the largest surveys completed by the telescope.? Around 20 institutions are involved with many different science goals; Seth's group has one of the projects.

At first, Seth's team manually identified 600 clusters in 20 percent of the images that had been taken so far. The process took months. They aimed to automate the rest of the search using a computer program.

But when the team asked the software to do the same thing, difficulties arose. Since the background of the galaxy varies behind the star clusters, this made it difficult for an automated program to do the job.

"We couldn't get to the point where we could pick out a large number of clusters we identified by eye," Seth said. "There were thousands of candidates that weren?t real clusters."

Around this time, the Zooniverse website caught wind of Seth's work and proposed a different approach: crowdsourcing the images. Zooniverse has several successful projects under its umbrella, including Galaxy Zoo, an effort to classify galaxies observed by Hubble and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Crowdsourcing was a new idea for most of the science team, but Seth said members enthusiastically embraced the idea. They spent half a year preparing some 12,000 images for public consumption, and hope to generate 50 to 100 views on each image by the summer of 2013.

Probing Andromeda's origins

Scientists have several methods to double-check the public's accuracy. These include inserting synthetic star clusters into the images as a test, as well as recycling several of the pictures the astronomers analyzed themselves.

With the information that comes out of this project, the team expects it can begin to answer two major questions about Andromeda: the age of the star clusters, and how stars formed within the galaxy.

"Clusters are good objects to study the formation history [of Andromeda] because they're all born at the same time," Seth said. "Rather than having a single star, we have hundreds of thousands of stars we try [identifying] because they're all the same age. We have a better handle on the age of objects."

More star cluster work is already on tap with the PHAT imagery. Seth's team has picked out Hubble images to analyze for information about how fast stars and clusters are moving.

For that work, the team is using the W.M. Keck Observatoryin Mauna Kea, Hawaii as well as the MMT Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. Seth estimated they have analyzed the spectra of more than 10,000 stars from PHAT.

Collaborators on the Andromeda Project include several American universities, Chicago's Adler Planetarium, Oxford University and the European Space Agency.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/help-needed-study-andromeda-galaxy-150958838.html

puerto rico diane sawyer Cnn.com Colorado Marijuana Washington Election Results foxnews drudge report

Black women battle obesity with dialogue, action

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Nicole Ari Parker was motivated by frustration. For Star Jones, it was a matter of life or death. Toni Carey wanted a fresh start after a bad breakup.

All three have launched individual campaigns that reflect an emerging priority for African-American women: finding creative ways to combat the obesity epidemic that threatens their longevity.

African-American women have the highest obesity rate of any group of Americans. Four out of five black women have a body mass index above 25 percent, the threshold for being overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, nearly two-thirds of Americans overall are in this category, the CDC said.

Many black women seem to be unaffected by being generally heavier than other Americans.

Calorie-rich, traditional soul food is a staple in the diets of many African-Americans, and curvy black women are embraced positively through slang praising them as "thick" with a "little meat on their bones," or through songs like the Commodore's "Brick House" or "Bootylicious" by Destiny's Child. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post earlier this year found that 66 percent of overweight black women had high self-esteem, while 41 percent of average-sized or thin white women had high self-esteem.

Still, that doesn't mean black women reject the need to become healthier.

Historically black, all-female Spelman College in Atlanta is disbanding its NCAA teams and devoting those resources to a campus-wide wellness program. In an open letter announcing Spelman's "wellness revolution," president Beverly Daniel Tatum cited a campus analysis that found many of Spelman's 2,100 students already have high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes or other chronic ailments.

"Spelman has an opportunity to change the health trajectory of our students and, through their influence, the communities from which they come," Tatum's letter said.

Jones, who underwent open heart surgery in 2010 at age 47 and now urges awareness about heart disease among black women, was met by an overflow crowd earlier this year when she convened a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation panel on black women and obesity.

"We have to get ourselves out of being conditioned to think that using soft words so we don't hurt peoples' feelings is doing them any favor," Jones said. "Curvy, big-boned, hefty, full-figured, fluffy, chubby. Those are all words designed to make people feel better about themselves. That wasn't helpful to me."

Jones once embraced being large and fabulous, at 5 feet 5 inches tall and 300 pounds. But under that exterior, she said, she was morbidly obese, suffering from extreme fatigue, nausea, lightheadedness, heart palpitations and blurred vision. Now, she advises women to make simple changes such as reducing salt intake, exercising 30 minutes a day, quitting smoking, controlling portion sizes and making nutritious dietary choices.

Nutritionist and author Rovenia M. Brock, known professionally as Dr. Ro, agrees with Jones. She said getting active is only about 20 percent of the fight against obesity. The rest revolves around how much people eat. "Our plates are killing us," she said.

Brock said "food deserts," or urban areas that lack quality supermarkets, are a real obstacle. She suggested getting around that by carpooling with neighbors to stores in areas with higher-quality grocery options or buying food in bulk. She also suggested growing herbs and vegetables in window-box gardens.

"Stop focusing on what's not there, or what you think is not there," Brock said. "We have to get out of this wimpy, 'woe is me' mentality."

While first lady Michelle Obama has encouraged exercise through her "Let's Move" campaign targeting childhood obesity, the spark for this current interest among black women may have been comments last year by Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, who observed publicly that women must stop allowing concern about their hair to prevent them from exercising.

Some black women visit salons as often as every two weeks, investing several hours and anywhere from $50 to several hundreds of dollars each visit ? activity that, according to the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association, helps fuel a $9 billion black hair care and cosmetics industry.

In an interview during a health conference in Washington last week, Benjamin said the damage sweat can inflict on costly hairstyles can affect women's willingness to work out, and she hopes to change that. She goes to beauty industry conferences to encourage stylists to create exercise-friendly hairdos.

"I wouldn't say we use it as an excuse, we use it as a barrier," Benjamin said. "And that's not one of the barriers anymore. We're always going to have problems with balancing our lives, but we could take that one out."

Parker, an actress, understands this dilemma well. Out of personal frustration over maintaining both her workout and her hair, she created "Save Your Do" Gymwrap ? a headband that can be wrapped around the hair in a way that minimizes sweat and preserves hairstyles.

"Not just as a black woman, but as a woman, since the beginning of time, beauty has been our responsibility," Parker said in an interview. Because of that, she said, exercise has become linked with vanity instead of health.

"We've turned exercise into a weight-loss regimen," Parker said. "No. Exercise is about being grateful for the body you have and sustaining the life you have. ... Take all the hype out of the exercise and think of it as brushing your teeth."

With their mutual family histories of diabetes and high blood pressure in mind, Carey, 28, and her sorority sister Ashley Hicks, 29, co-founded the running club Black Girls Run. Carey also considered it a new beginning after a bad breakup and a move across country. Since 2009, Black Girls Run has amassed 52,000 members who serve as a support system for runners.

Black Girls Run has about 60 groups nationwide that coordinate local races in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C, Houston and Greensboro, N.C. Most groups run at least five times a week. Next month, the running club will take its first "Black Girls Run ? Preserve the Sexy" tour to cities with high obesity rates. The tour includes health and fitness clinics with information on nutrition, hair maintenance and running gear.

"We found that when you want to get healthy and when you want to be active, it's intimidating," Carey said. "You don't know where to start. There's a little coaxing that has to go along with that."

Parker said once African-American women place value on their bodies and longevity, everything else will follow. It costs her nothing, she said, to walk around an outdoor track with her husband, actor Boris Kodjoe, or run up and down stairs with her headphones.

"One good step breeds another one," Parker said. "You're going to have one less margarita, one less scoop of Thanksgiving macaroni ... and yet you're not doing anything fanatical or dramatic."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/black-women-battle-obesity-dialogue-action-080327054.html

Costa Rica Earthquake sandra fluke kellie pickler costa rica kevin hart living social Earthquake Costa Rica

Women, want to have it all? Start your own company ? Quartz

Stacey Bendet Eisner, co-owner of clothing brand Alice + Olivia, and husband Eric Eisner, founder and CEO of Double E Pictures, attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference with one-year-old daughter Scarlet in tow. Getty Images / Kevork Djansezian

?Can women have it all?? The corporate response still seems to be ?a resounding ?no.? In many parts of the world, women are still waiting for employment legislation and office politics to change and for management to be convinced of the merits of flexible work hours so that women can have a better work-family balance.

But in the sphere of entrepreneurialism, the answer, according to some highly successful startup businesswomen, is ?yes.? These women believe that what is thought of a disadvantage in the male-dominated corporate world is an advantage as an entrepreneur.

Admittedly, there are problems with having it all when you have your own company?but there is the flexibility to start companies with different profiles from lifestyle companies to high-growth companies?depending the stage of your family?s development. There is no need to sacrifice family. Instead, women with children can be better entrepreneurs. And here is why.

Having a child makes women more creative and courageous?

The first thing women say when they have a baby is how dramatically things change and how their children naturally become center of their lives.

?My life totally changed when I had Alisa, my first daughter. I was miserable after leaving my job at the World Bank and moving back to Turkey. Nobody really supported me at the beginning and I was expected to go back into the corporate world,? says Ergem Senyuva Tohumcu, a London-based eco-entrepreneur and ambassador to Turkey for Al Gore?s Climate Reality Project.

The OECD Gender and Sustainable Development report says: ?Women gravitate towards self-employment because of a lack of alternative positions, blocked mobility or the inability to find a job that fits their skills after they have kids? Entrepreneurship and self-employment may sometimes be a survival strategy for those who cannot find any other means of earning an income.?

Entrepreneurs at their core turn disadvantages into advantages and create solutions for themselves or for others. In his must-read book ?The Courage to Create,? Rollo May also describes limitations as the source of creativity and courage, other essential aspects of entrepreneurship.

?I realized that giving a birth and raising a child could be the greatest talent a woman can have. This gave me more courage in life and made me realize that I urgently need to focus my energy into co-creating a world that was clean, pure and prosperous first for our kids and for our community. This is how I started my green living Web portal yesilist.com,? says Tohumcu.

Paul Graham from Y Combinator agrees. He says ?the self? is one of the strongest sources of ideas and calls startup ideas that grow naturally out of the founders? own experiences ?organic.? Graham thinks that the most successful startups almost all begin this way.

Having a child makes women better leaders

Pinar Kaprali Gorsev is a serial technology entrepreneur and co-founder of one of the first ISP companies in Turkey called turk.net. She began turk.net at 29 and had her daughter five years later in 2000. The same year, her company was sold for $40 million to Sabanci Group, Turkey?s leading industrial and financial conglomerate.

?Having a kid made me understand human beings better and how to be more flexible towards life. This has helped me have better relations with my employees. I have become more understanding than before. I can also understand the young generation better because of my daughter. This helped me create better human-centred new technologies,? says Gorsev. Having her daughter also made Gorsev a better leader, she says, which is a crucial skill in becoming a successful entrepreneur. Obviously, poor leadership causes much more entrepreneurial failures than successes, and understanding human behavior better makes mothers better leaders for sure.

Having a child provides women with a new network

Being a mother certainly changes women?s social networks. They begin interacting with other mothers to share tips on how to raise a children and how to adapt to this new lifestyle. ?I found the support in this mom?s network amazing. This is how I started my business. Everybody understands each other?s challenges so well. There is a constant support and a sharing of know-how in the network,? says Tohumcu.

A new name for women entrepreneurs with children has been coined by academia ?mumpreneurs,? or ?mompreneurs? depending on which side of the pond you hail from. In the UK, there is even tax break to encourage women with children to start their own businesses.?Jessica Alba?s?The Honest Company,??Julie Cole?s?Mabel?s Labels, Sarah Davis?FashionPhile.com, and Jessica Kim?s Babaco?are some of the pioneer ?companies started by mompreneurs. The rise of mompreneurs can even be seen from the?increasing number of women who trade on?eBay.

A successful tech entrepreneur Nilay Yuce, 30, founder of Lamagama Entertainment, an official game developer for Sony Entertainment, is currently eight months pregnant. ?I already started to see my women friends who have kids more often in order to understand what?s waiting for me. The support that I have got from my network increased. I feel more emotional, but surprisingly this makes me more tolerant in the office. I can already see that having a kid will make me a better entrepreneur, as I will take risks more responsibly. I realize that having a kid earlier would have been more helpful for my company. I didn?t need to postpone it until now.?

Having a child and having it all

When we talk about closing the gender gap, we cannot avoid discussing women?s concerns about the family-work balance. In her article for Forbes, Candida Brush misses the point of this concern. Fear of failure surely is the answer to why women perceive opportunities less than man until 45 but these are exactly the ages when women have children, either in their early 20s or by their late 30s where fear of failure mostly comes from worries about having it all.

From Silicon Valley perspective, where the competition is severe, there is an admission rate of 4% women, for example, at Y Combinator, a technology startup incubator. This extremely low rate created a lot of discussions?about why women were so noticeably absent;?however, it is interesting that none of these discussions try to include family concerns or embrace mumpreneurs.

Perhaps it is not Silicon Valley that is keeping women down. But using a different language that includes women with children and promotes mumpreneurs may have a major impact because of the prominent role Silicon Valley plays in the global entrepreneurial arena. A woman with children starting a lifestyle company one day could be the founder of a high-growth company when her kids have grown up.

Even the solutions and environment that Anne-Marie Slaughter describes in her article for The Atlantic Monthly ?Why Women Still Can?t Have It All? is very much a description of an entrepreneurial lifestyle, where flexibility and space for play and imagination are the core parameters for innovation.?Slaughter?s points on?the value of encouraging nonlinear thinking,?integrating women?s non-work lives with their work,?seeing the world anew through a child?s eyes or the new lifestyle that her child brought which broadened her world are all the same reasons why women should start companies especially after having a kid.

You can follow Gulay on Twitter at @gulayozkan. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.?

Source: http://qz.com/35457/women-want-to-have-it-all-start-your-own-company/

nashville weather jason varitek andrew breitbart dead sheriff joe arpaio limbaugh aaron smith wilt chamberlain

Slow Cooker Maple-Sauced Pears Recipe | Budget Savvy Diva

Did you pre-order Budget Savvy Diva?s Book Yet ?! Over 40 Recipes

Find out all the details HERE

Make sure to pin the recipe or REPIN IT!

Everyday at 1 pm PST/ 4pm EST Budget Savvy Diva posts a NEW RECIPE I might miss this time every now or then ? but I know you understand

Make sure to follow Budget Savvy Diva on Facebook

Find Copy Cat Restaurant Recipes HERE

Find Crock Pot Recipes HERE

Find Gluten Free Recipes HERE

Find more Recipes HERE

What You Need

6
pears

1/2
cup packed brown sugar

1/2
cup maple-flavored syrup

1
tablespoon butter or margarine, melted

2
teaspoons orange peel

1/8
teaspoon ground ginger

1
tablespoon cornstarch

2
tablespoons orange juice

What To Do

1 Set crock pot to high ? Peel pears. Core pears from bottom, leaving stems attached. Place in slow cooker so it stands upright
2 Mix remaining ingredients except cornstarch and orange juice in a bowl and pour over pears.
3 Cover and cook on high heat for 2.5 hours
4 Remove pears from cooker
5 Mix cornstarch and orange juice place into the crock pot ? Cover and cook on high heat setting about 10 minutes or until sauce is thickened. Pour Sauce Over Pears

Slow Cooker Maple-Sauced Pears Recipe

Serves: 6

6
pears
1/2
cup packed brown sugar
1/2
cup maple-flavored syrup
1
tablespoon butter or margarine, melted
2
teaspoons orange peel
1/8
teaspoon ground ginger
1
tablespoon cornstarch
2
tablespoons orange juice

Set crock pot to high ? Peel pears. Core pears from bottom, leaving stems attached. Place in slow cooker so it stands upright
Mix remaining ingredients except cornstarch and orange juice in a bowl and pour over pears.
Cover and cook on high heat for 2.5 hours
Remove pears from cooker
Mix cornstarch and orange juice place into the crock pot ? Cover and cook on high heat setting about 10 minutes or until sauce is thickened. Pour Sauce Over Pears

2.2.8

Other recipes you'll love:

Source: http://www.budgetsavvydiva.com/2012/12/slow-cooker-maple-sauced-pears-recipe/

West Nile virus symptoms snooki ll cool j amy schumer amy schumer Prince Harry Vegas pictures Avril Lavigne

Britain says won't stand in way of Nexen-CNOOC deal

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain will not stand in the way of a $15.1 billion takeover of Nexen by CNOOC, allowing the Chinese company to snap up the Canadian group's stake in a major North Sea field that helps set the Brent global oil benchmark.

While Canada approved the deal on Friday, Nexen's chief executive said on Monday China's biggest ever foreign takeover was nowhere near done.

A further decision on the transaction rests with a U.S. foreign investment panel which gets a say because Nexen has exploration and production assets in the Gulf of Mexico.

Britain's clearance of the deal is also important because Nexen has 43 percent of the Buzzard oilfield, Britain's largest and pumping about 200,000 barrels per day.

"We will not stand in the way," Mike Hawkins, head of oil and gas licence administration at Britain's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), told Reuters. "The licence does not change, no formal approval is needed," he said, adding the department has had discussions with CNOOC and Nexen.

Analysts and traders have long noted China's growing appetite for North Sea oil, which is key to determining global prices.

In addition to the CNOOC-Nexen deal, China's top refiner Sinopec is also buying 49 percent in the UK unit of Talisman for $1.5 billion.

Wood Mackenzie consultancy estimated both firms would directly own 13 percent of all UK liquids production if both deals went through.

Including production, which Nexen and Talisman operate, the two handle around 300,000 bpd, according to Reuters calculations, or almost a third of the dwindling UK North Sea oil output.

Oil from Buzzard, although only 0.2 percent of global supply, plays a crucial role in setting prices because it is the largest contributor to the Forties oil blend, one of four North Sea crude streams making up the Brent oil benchmark.

Forties usually sets the value of dated Brent, a benchmark used for pricing more than half of the world's crude, including oil from Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Dated is part of the underlying market for Brent crude futures.

China buys about 2 million bpd of crude priced off dated Brent, including West African crudes.

U.S. LAST MAIN HURDLE

In a statement released early on Saturday, Nexen and CNOOC said the deal's closing remained subject to "the receipt of other applicable government and regulatory approvals."

On Monday, a source familiar with the matter highlighted the ruling by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, as the main regulatory decision still remaining.

In late November, CNOOC and Nexen said they withdrew and resubmitted their application for CFIUS approval and discussions with the committee were taking place "with a view to completing the CFIUS review process as expeditiously as possible."

The panel has the power to negotiate or impose conditions, including divestitures and security-control agreements to mitigate any national security threats, possibly forcing the combined company to sell interests in the Gulf.

Nexen's production there averaged 14,000 bpd in the third quarter, equivalent to just a fraction of its North Sea output.

The U.S. has been traditionally more wary than Canada of Chinese investment and in 2005 it blocked CNOOC's bid for Unocal Corp because of national security concerns.

Britain's DECC official said the energy ministry was considering any asset purchase in the North Sea to ensure the new operators have technical and economic requirements to manage the fields, including plans for decommissioning.

"We are open for business and keen to attract further investment for exploration and development in the North Sea," he said.

(Writing by Dmitry Zhdannikov; editing by James Jukwey)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/government-says-wont-stand-way-nexen-cnooc-deal-104434290--finance.html

cispa baltimore ravens space shuttle new york courtney upshaw russell wilson catch me if you can delmon young arrested