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Israeli authorities today deported an American journalist who was working as an editor for a Palestinian news agency.
Jared Malsin, who is Jewish and in his late 20s, was detained at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport eight days ago as he returned from a holiday in Prague.
His girlfriend, a Lutheran church volunteer who flew back with him, was deported two days later., but Malsin was held in detention at a cell in the airport while he began a legal challenge to his deportation order.
Early today Malsin, who has worked with the Ma'an news agency for two years as its English news editor, spoke by telephone to a colleague to say he was being deported and was then put on a flight to New York. "He was not in a good place. He sounded very confused," said George Hale, a staff writer at Ma'an.
Sabine Hadad, a spokeswoman for the Israeli interior ministry, said Malsin had refused to answer questions and co-operate with security staff when he landed at the airport last week. "It is the minimal right of every immigration authority to ask questions or to clarify things that are not clear about every person who wants to enter Israel," she said. "He refused to co-operate and we told him if he continued to refuse he would not enter Israel."
Hadad said they did not know Malsin was a journalist until they were contacted by the press about his detention.
However, Hale said Malsin was interrogated repeatedly and was asked about articles he had written from the occupied West Bank that were critical of Israeli policies. Hale said Malsin had briefly overstayed his last tourist visa, but was registered as a journalist with the Palestinian Authority and with the authority's labour ministry. He had applied for an Israeli government-issued press card, which most foreign journalists here carry, but was told it would not be granted because he was based in Bethlehem, in the West Bank.
"They knew he was a journalist," said Hale. "We are in contact with Israeli spokespeople going about our daily work and we have never had someone so much as held up, much less deported. My opinion is that this is a mistake. I can't believe they didn't call it off."
Court documents seen by Ma'an showed that Malsin's interrogators said he was denied entry to Israel at the airport because he refused to co-operate, lied to border officials, gave unclear reasons for arriving and violated his visa terms.
Hale said he was concerned and puzzled about a document that Malsin signed on Tuesday, after his lawyer had left him, in which he annulled his legal challenge to the deportation order. After that the Israeli judge on the case closed the deportation file, meaning it can no longer be challenged.
After Malsin was first held at the airport Ma'an described his detention as arbitrary and "an affront to journalists not only in Palestine, but in Israel and abroad." Ma'an scrupulously maintains its editorial independence and aims to promote access to information, freedom of expression, press freedom, and media pluralism in Palestine. It has no other agenda," it said in a statement. .

Settlers arrested for torching mosque
January 18, 2010
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Israeli security forces arrested residents of a West Bank settlement in connection with last month's torching of a Palestinian mosque.
Ten settlers were arrested at two yeshivas in the northern West Bank community of Yitzhar in a late Sunday night raid.
Five are accused of burning down a mosque in the nearby village of Yasuf, allegedly in retaliation for an Israeli government-imposed freeze on building in the settlements. Two of the five reportedly are minors.
More than 100 security officers were involved in the raid and arrests, according to reports. Yitzhar residents told Israeli media that the police and security services officers used excessive force.
In the December mosque attack, arsonists struck before dawn on a Friday, burning furniture, prayer rugs and holy texts, and defacing the mosque's walls. The attack led to retaliatory violence, including the stabbing of an Israeli woman at a bus stop. The arson attack was internationally condemned. Source;
http://jta.org/news/article/2010/01/18/1010206/settlers-arrested-for-torching-mosque

Muslim cemetery in West Bank vandalized hours after Jews seen in area

A Muslim cemetery near the West Bank town of Nablus was vandalized on Tuesday just hours after Jewish worshippers were seen in the vicinity. Food remnants were left on a number of graves, three tombstones were damaged, and anti-Arab graffiti was spray-painted elsewhere in the Muslim cemetery in the Palestinian town of Awarta. The discovery was made hours after Israel Defense Forces soldiers, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Israeli settlers were seen entering the cemetery.

Some Jewish scholars believe that Ithamar and Eleazar, two sons of Aaron the High Priest, and Pinhas, Eleazar's son, are interred at the Awarta cemetery. Israelis are forbidden from entering Awarta, although the IDF occasionally organizes group trips for which it provides security. On Tuesday a large contingent of Orthodox Jews and Israeli settlers made a pilgrimage to the site under the protection of IDF troops. Awarta residents were startled to discover Wednesday morning that the Muslim tombstones alongside the Jewish gravesites were desecrated. A fact-finder with B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, interviewed local residents and photographed the damage left behind at the cemetery. One section featured graffiti written in Russian, which said: "Arabs are gay. I f---ed your mother and your father and your donkey."

Source;http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1143955.html

Settlers defile Palestinian graves under IDF watch
Jewish settlers desecrate graves, wreak havoc in Palestinian village

"Death to Arabs" was just one of the hateful messages left by Jewish settlers on Muslim graves after a destructive rampage on a cemetery and village near Nablus Tuesday.
The defilement was carried out, according to residents of the village, under the IDF's watch.
The settlers destroyed graves, slashed tires of some 20 cars and smashed the windshields of five other cars after carrying out an annual ceremony in the village.
Each year, with Israel Defense Force protection, settlers arrive at the West Bank village of Awarta to hold a celebration for the sons
of Aharon, Moses' brother, who are buried there according to Jewish tradition.
According to Central Command sources, only a small group of the 500 settlers attending the celebration was responsible for the destruction, which included graffiti saying "Kahane" (the leader of extreme right-wing Kach movement who advocated the expulsion off all Arabs from the area) and "Death to Arabs".

"We couldn’t pray in the morning because of the settlers. They have destroyed tombstones in the cemetery and we are afraid that next time their actions may be more severe," said Awrata resident Muhammad Abd A-Salam.

According to Abd A-Salam, no one from the IDF has shown up to investigate the matter, despite being notified.
In response to a Ynetnews inquiry, an official IDF announcement said that as soon as the soldiers noticed what was going on, they removed the settlers from the site and prevented them from causing further damage.
"The IDF views such incidents very severely," said the announcement.

Under some of the most beautiful parts of rural New York State in the pre-Jurassic era formation called the Marcellus Shale is an unimaginable fortune in natural gas. Getting that gas to market has become an obsession of Wall Street and the biggest gas drilling companies in the world. In this gas rush, New York is fast becoming a geological science experiment that many experts fear will have profound, dire environmental and health consequences. The drilling companies use a witch’s brew of water, pressure and chemicals to force the gas from the shale. It is the secrecy of what is in that brew that has New Yorkers worried and many suspicious. Even the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has not yet identified all of the compounds in products proposed for use in fracturing shale.

Now, the world’s largest drilling fluid supplier is licensing new technologies that have never before been used on a large scale as they work to develop more effective ways to extract natural gas. These new fluids will include nanotechnology, according to the largest supplier of drilling fluids in the world. This potential application of nanotechnology, a branch of science involving the technological manipulation of particles about one-tenth the size of a human cell, has not been thoroughly vetted and tested in natural gas wells.
“What we have done in our group, for example, is to develop nanoparticles that can be used with water-based fluids so that you can put them in water and drill with them,” said Mukul Sharma, a professor in the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at University of Texas. “And the advantage of that is that these nanoparticles have the same dimensions as the pores in the shales, so they tend to plug these pores.”
Gas shale development requires the use of oil-based drilling fluids because water-based drilling fluids interact with the shale causing it to expand or contract leading to instability of the wellbore, according to Sharma. Oil-based drilling fluids are expensive and can be harmful to the environment. New developments may reduce the need for oil-based drilling fluids. Sharma and his colleagues applied silica particles about five to 40 nanometers in diameter to different kinds of water-based drilling fluids to plug pores in shale samples reducing water invasion. He and his colleagues filed patents for the use of nanoparticles in drilling fluids earlier this year.
“We’re licensing these things with the intent of applying them,” said Jim Freidheim, M-I SWACO corporate director of fluids research.
M-I SWACO, the largest drilling fluids supplier in the world, licensed this technology a couple of months ago, according to Sharma. None of the drilling fluids M-I SWACO sells commercially utilize these nanoparticles yet, but the company has a “significant effort” on nanotechnology underway with the University of Texas and Rice University, said Freidheim. The use of drilling fluid involving these developments in field operations is at least six months away, he said.
“It’s like we’re conducting an experiment with some of these nanotechnologies,” said Richard Charter, government relations consultant for Defenders of Wildlife. “Nanotechnology is a whole area of – I wouldn’t call it toxicity – but impacts on living organisms which is not yet understood at all.”
The environmental, legal and financial issues surrounding natural gas extraction are complex. Environmentalists fear increased natural gas production has a huge risk of ruining some of the most pristine watershed, park, farm and recreational land in the United States. Investors and some landowners see dollars signs. The share prices of gas companies participating in the Marcellus Shale gas rush are rising even as the price for natural gas is dropping. The price the drilling companies are paying landowners for leases is also rising.
Landowners who do not want to take part in the drilling can be forced into participating under New York law. They may be held liable if the gas company damages the environment dependent on what option they select when selling mineral rights. Vast amounts of fresh water will be turned into waste by the drilling process.
Sedimentation of marine, mud and clay deposits from an ancient river delta formed the Marcellus Shale across the Appalachian Basin around 350 to 415 million years ago. It exists up to 9,000 feet below ground – mainly beneath present day New York, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio – and covers an area of about 54,000 square miles. The compression and heating of organic matter with the Marcellus Shale over millions of years formed hydro-carbons, including natural gas dispersed throughout the formation.
“The Marcellus is going to require some large frac jobs – they’re going to pump a lot of water into this rock to break it,” said Gary Lash, State University of New York Fredonia geosciences professor.
Drillers create artificial fractures in shale to release natural gas, predominately using a method called hydraulic fracturing. During hydraulic fracturing well operators inject a mixture of water and chemicals – about two to nine million gallons of water with chemicals making up about one to five percent of the total volume – into wells at extremely high pressure to crack and prop open the shale. The degree of risk posed by the chemicals in fracturing and drilling fluids depends on their concentrations and the nature of exposure.
Drillers prefer horizontal wells over vertical wells in the Marcellus Shale for multiple reasons. First, horizontal wells provide a better return on investment. Although horizontal wells cost approximately 80 percent more than vertical wells, they are nearly 400 percent more productive. Additionally, horizontal wells allow drillers to receive the maximum benefit from natural fractures in the Marcellus Shale. Drillers intersect more natural fractures when drilling horizontally, compared to drilling vertically, because most of the existing fractures are orientated vertically in the Marcellus Shale. Out of the total drilling permits applications the DEC received in 2007, about 10 percent were for horizontal wells.
The DEC released a draft assessment on potential risks from the use of horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the New York region of the Marcellus Shale on Sept. 30. This draft assessment includes proposed measures to ensure safe operations and mitigate environmental impacts from this type of drilling. The DEC has set an effective moratorium on the issuance of drilling permits utilizing these methods of extraction in the Marcellus Shale until the completion of the public comment period, scheduled to end Dec. 31.
“There’s this huge ecological gem that is about to get industrialized,” said Wes Gillingham, Catskill Mountainkeeper program director. “This is probably one of the biggest landscape changes that the East has seen in a really long time.”
Gillingham and others with similar concerns fear an influx of drilling in the Marcellus Shale will disrupt a thriving ecosystem, including four mountain ranges and 176 lush state parks frequented by tourists. Around 200 nesting birds and 40 rare animals and plants – like bald eagles, bobcats and broom crowberry – inhabit Sam’s Point Preserve alone, located at the highest point of the Shawangunk Mountains. Water bodies, including 7,500 lakes and ponds and 50,000 miles of rivers and streams, are home to fish – like brown trout, smallmouth bass and bluefish. Hundreds of miles of coastline hug the eastern side of the state; vineyards and farms are scattered throughout the landscape.
Oil and gas extraction supplies half a billion dollars to New York’s economy annually. While last year, tourists spent approximately $53 billion in the state, and New York farmers brought in a total of about $4.4 billion. But it is what Wall Street sees as the potential of New York’s gas industry that has resulted in investments in drilling companies participating in the Marcellus Shale despite current low natural gas prices. From 2000 to 2008, the number of active oil and gas wells in the state nearly doubled from 6,845 to 13,687. New York produced 50.32 billion cubic feet of gas last year. Estimations of the total natural gas content in the Marcellus Shale range from 168 trillion to 516 trillion cubic feet. According to the DEC, about 15 active vertical gas wells and no horizontal wells exist in the New York region of the Marcellus Shale. Texas billionaire George Mitchell, responsible for natural gas production in the North Texas Barnett Shale, is financing wells for Alta Resources, and Statoil and Range Resources Corp. invested $1.25 billion in Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s assets in the Marcellus Shale, according to Bloomberg.com.
Tourism is the second largest economic driver, next to farming, in Ulster County. Richard Remsnyder, director of Ulster County Tourism, said it is “quite an economic development engine” in the county and helps to keep the tax rate down. He said drilling is “highly unlikely” to occur in Ulster County because it is located in the New York City watershed. The New York City water supply serves approximately 9 million people, or half the state’s population. This unfiltered-water supply – fed primarily through surface water from 19 reservoirs and three controlled lakes – delivers about 1.1 billion gallons to the City daily. Chesapeake Energy Corp., which holds leases for about 5,000 acres in the City watershed, announced on Oct. 28 that it will not drill in this area. This announcement is not legally binding. Remsnyder said if drilling were to occur in Ulster County, it would probably impact tourism. Campers may not look at the landscape favorably due to activities associated with drilling, he said.
A variety of potential dangers accompany gas production. Toxic mud and fluids from drilling on site and around the well pads, in addition to wastewater produced during drilling that resurfaces, could contaminate soil and surface water. The transport of fracturing fluids and wastewater to and from the site on public roads may result in tanker accidents having similar effects. Problems associated with casing around drill bits – like improper sealing, breaks or leaks from pressure – may threaten groundwater when well operators drill through water-bearing formations. And Bruce Baizel, oil and gas accountability senior staff attorney for Earthworks, said hydraulic fracturing may also contaminate groundwater due to the existence of natural fractures in the Marcellus Shale. Artificial fractures may track up to existing fractures allowing fluids to travel through them and contaminate water above the natural gas bearing zone when fracturing with high pressure, he said. According to Yancey Roy, the DEC director of communications, it is unlikely fluid will flow out of the Marcellus Shale for the same reasons gas is trapped in the rock: “It has very low permeability.”
“Working with industry and regulators on a task force regarding hydraulic fracturing, it became clear that they don’t know how to control those fractures very well,” said Baizel. “They sort of hope and rely on the formations above and below to buffer those fractures.”
Larry Haskell, head of the Joint Landowners Coalition, which formed so landowners could share information on offers to lease their property for drilling, said environmentalists are “poorly educated” and fail to do an “ample job” of researching their information and the media has presented a slanted view against natural gas production. Haskell said he is willing to lease his mineral rights to gas companies and that groundwater contamination from gas drilling is unlikely. Gas companies do a good job of casing wells, he said. Well casing consists of a series of metal tubes or pipes placed inside one another to transport gas to the surface, prevent blowouts and the collapse of the wellbore, and protect ground water from contaminants involved in gas production, like those in drilling fluids. Haskell said potential for contamination to surface water or soil at drilling sites exists, but he is confident the DEC will handle the problem appropriately.
“We’ve gone into a snag here where the extremists continually try to stop anymore drilling in New York State,” said Haskell. “They call themselves environmentalists, we do not consider them to be the environmentalists – we’re the environmentalists.”
But not all New Yorkers are as willing to lease their land for gas drilling. Nicholas Riolo has lived in Earlville, N.Y., for about 18 years. He said Earlville is a very “rural” area with “nice, wholesome” people, but it is a “low-income” area compared to the rest of the state. Around June 2002, a landman, or salesman, for Nornew, Inc. – with a printed gas lease in hand – approached Riolo at his home requesting he lease his land. Riolo declined the offer because he felt it was an unworthy investment. Over the next six years on several occasions, landmen from Nornew, Inc. came to his home proposing that he lease to them. According to Riolo, they attempted to bypass him by getting his wife to sign a lease when he was not home.
“My outlook of it is they are a used-car salesman,” he said, “they’ll promise you the world, and they’re not standing up to the promises they make.”
New York state law authorized Nornew, Inc. to extract gas from beneath Riolo’s property in the absence of a lease, due to the Compulsory Integration Statute. The Compulsory Integration Statute empowers gas companies that own the mineral rights to 60 percent of the land in a spacing unit, the area of the targeted-rock formation for natural gas extraction, to obtain gas from the remaining subsurface area of the unit without the property owners’ consent.
Workers from th eSouthwestern Energy use horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to tap natural gas resources from the Mississippian Fayetteville Shale. Photo: Arkansas Geological Survey
“This whole issue of gas drilling is so new here that even lawyers, like myself, who are quote unquote experts in the environmental arena just have no knowledge or background with these drilling laws,” said Riverkeeper staff attorney James Simpson.
When the DEC issues a well permit, it schedules a public hearing to determine how property owners without gas leases in the spacing unit will integrate with the other properties in the unit. The well operator issues an election form to effected parties with the following three compulsory integration options at least 30 days before the hearing: integration as a royalty owner, integration as a non-participating owner and integration as a participating owner. Property owners have 21 days after they receive the form to elect an option. Those choosing to integrate as either a non-participation owner or a participating owner can be held liable for environmental damage or destruction to other properties.
“We went to Texas and retained an attorney down there,” said Joint Landowners Coalition head Haskell. “For the simple reason, that they have been drilling a lot of gas and a lot of oil wells down in that area, and they have the expertise.”
The Joint Landowners Coalition consists of 24 neighborhood coalitions from nine south-central counties in New York, representing over 15,000 households. Each neighborhood coalition in the Joint Landowner’s Coalition has its own attorney to handle the gas leases. Haskell’s immediate coalition is the Central Broome Landowners Association. He said their attorney works in conjunction with a Texas attorney. Gas companies and landholders from some coalitions put money in escrow when they agree on a lease. Many of the coalition attorneys do not receive compensation for their services until the deeds are cleared on the leases and money from the escrow account is dispersed to landholders. A dollar amount is fixed per acre, and the attorneys’ compensation depends on the number of leased acres.
Haskell said he and other property owners have fought over issues with environmentalists, specifically the full disclosure of chemicals used to fracture shale. He said he wants the chemicals listed on site but fails to see the necessity of making this information public knowledge. Revealing this information stirs public fears, according to Haskel. The DEC considered the Coalition’s proposal to keep the full disclosure of chemicals used to fracture shale inaccessible to the public, he said. “A lot of these – so called contaminants – are used in everyday households.”
Research on wastewater from gas drilling has revealed that the flowback water contains more chemicals than those solely found in household products. For example, the DEC identified high levels of radium-226, a radioactive element, in 13 samples of wastewater from gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, according to an article in ProPublica. The Marcellus Shale contains natural occurring radioactive material. It also contains material which produces acid, like sulfides and pyrite. This poses the question of whether natural sources from the shale or products involved in gas production led to the existence of radium-226.
The Sept. 30 draft contains a list of chemicals service companies and chemical suppliers submitted to the DEC for use in fracturing operations and another list containing chemicals that were detected in flowback water from drilling in Pennsylvania and West Virginia wells. Anthony Hay, director of Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology, and Amy Risen, a graduate student in the program, identified chemicals coming out of the Pennsylvania and West Virginia wells that were not listed in the draft. According to Hay, these chemicals were “quite toxic.” Two chemicals they highlighted are 4-nitroquinoline N-oxide, a chemical mostly known for its use in inducing tumors in laboratory animals, and benzene, a known carcinogen.
Hay identified concentrations of benzene in the most contaminated well at 500 times the maximum allowable contaminant level for drinking water established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. According to Hay, it is possible the benzene is coming from natural sources in the ground. But he said it is “extremely” unlikely that the 4-nitroquinoline N-oxide could be attributed to natural ground sources based on the concentrations that have been reported. Hay said 4-nitroquinoline N-oxide is not widely studied and there is little-to-no knowledge of how it behaves and the risk it poses.
“The Department of Health is seriously studying the environmental impact study to ensure that both public and private water supplies are protected,” said Jeffrey Hammond, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Health. But the health department cannot protect the public if it does not know the composition of all the compounds the drilling companies want to use.
Dennis Holbrook, executive vice president for Norse Energy Corporation, which has been engaged in exploration of natural gas in central New York since 1996 and drilled over half of the horizontal wells in New York last year said that the companies try to keep as much information as possible secret .“When you start getting into the detailed particulars, that’s something that sort of falls back on the companies that actually create the product, particularly the composition that they have,” Holbrook said. “And they’ve tried to treat that sort of like the…old Secret Potion #7 for Coca-Cola.”

Alison Sickle discusses the environmental impacts of drilling.
The DEC draft assessment contains the complete composition of components in 152 products, out of 197 products, submitted to the Department for proposed use to fracture shale. It has identified 260 unique chemicals in the products, but 40 additional compounds need further disclosure, according to the draft. Roy from the DEC said that before the Department issues drilling permits for natural gas wells, applicants must disclose all chemicals intended for use.
Some who have reviewed the draft give the DEC credit. Baizel said it is the most thorough state-prepared document of this nature he has examined. Analyses in the draft cover many issues, like the effect of water withdrawal for hydraulic fracturing on stream flow and methods of waste product disposal. Examples of mandatory mitigation measures include on-site, liquid-storage setbacks from surface waters and heightened oversight at drilling sites.
“In a broad sense, I think we believe that it’s a valid attempt on the part of the regulator to safeguard the public and to encourage what they think could be a very significant economic benefit to the state,” said Holbrook.
Other individuals who have reviewed the draft express concern. Katherine Nadeau, water and natural resources program associate for Environmental Advocates of New York, said the DEC can make “exceptions from permit to permit.” The draft proposes that permit applicants for horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing provide additional information on applications. It includes mandatory measures to mitigate environmental impacts for all drillers, but the Department determines other terms of a drilling permit, including additional mitigation measures, according to information supplied in the application. Nadeau said this will make it difficult to see terms included in each permit. The Freedom of Information Law requires the DEC to provide the public with the terms of drilling permits upon proper request. Obtaining copies of all the drilling terms would be costly and time consuming.
Many environmentalists are concerned the draft failed to address the combined effects of gas production from multiple wells in one region. “The Department needs to make a reasonable worst-case assessment of how much drilling is likely to be taking place at the same time in particular regions and then analyze what the cumulative impacts of that level of activity would be on, for example, water resources,” said Kate Sinding, Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney.
Some New Yorkers question the ability of New York water treatment facilities to handle an increase of wastewater from an influx in drilling. According to a 2008 report by the DEC, New York needs approximately $36.2 billion over the next 20 years to upgrade its current municipal wastewater facilities. The draft identifies several water treatment facilities that could consider accepting wastewater from gas production because they have approved pre-treatment programs. The water treatment facilities listed in the draft must perform an analysis and possibly modify their State Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits before receiving any wastewater, according to Roy.
A tower drilling horizontally into the Marcellus Shale Formation for natural gas. Photo wikicommons / Ruhrfisch
Pete Grannis, the DEC commissioner, said at the New York State Assembly hearing on oil and gas drilling last year that the Department will “certainly” need additional staff if it receives a large number of applications for drilling permits using horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing. The DEC currently has 17 inspectors in its Division of Mineral Resources who have a wide range of duties beyond monitoring drilling company compliance with state laws. Federal exemptions to industrial drilling limit the EPA’s ability to assist state regulators using statutes including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.
“If the states are under financial duress, they don’t have time or money or personnel to do risk assessments for all of these chemicals that are not even well characterized,” said Cornell University’s Hay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_Formation

Exxon Mobil moved to bolster its U.S. natural gas reserves by announcing a $41 billion agreement Monday to acquire XTO Energy, a 23-year-old independent oil and gas company.
Analysts called the acquisition a bet on future demand for natural gas as the nation looks for energy sources with lower greenhouse-gas emission levels than coal and oil. It also reflects growing confidence among utilities and industry that recent advances in exploiting natural gas from widespread deposits of shale rock have unlocked vast supplies of gas for wider use at reasonable prices.
The deal reflects the "long-term energy view, which would be that natural gas would be the fastest-growing fuel over the next 30 to 40 years," said Deutsche Bank oil analyst Paul Sankey. "We're moving from a 20th century driven by gasoline to a 21st century driven by electricity, and the way you're going to generate it is through natural gas as much as anything."
"Natural gas . . . is the transition fossil fuel," said Larry Goldstein, a trustee with the Energy Policy Research Foundation.
The deal, which is subject to XTO shareholder approval and regulatory review, would be the fifth-largest acquisition of a U.S. energy company since 1995. It comes as global leaders meet at this week's Copenhagen summit focused on ways to slow climate change. Under its co-founder and chairman, Bob Simpson, a former accountant, XTO has specialized in buying up natural gas properties, including unconventional shale gas prospects and gas fields beyond their prime but with years of steady output ahead. And XTO has used financial devices to hedge against the risk of fluctuating prices.
To date, XTO has accumulated about 14 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves. The company produces more than 4 percent of total U.S. natural gas. The acquisition would double Exxon Mobil's U.S. natural gas reserves and boost Exxon's worldwide natural gas reserves by 10 percent, a hefty chunk for a giant that has dominated the industry for more than a century.

"Bob Simpson is a very clever guy," said Fadel Gheit, oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Sons. "He's like a guy betting on real estate in the run-down part of town. Eventually this place turns into a good place to live." The result, Gheit said, is that "Bob Simpson has created more value than any living person. The company's value is up 29-fold in 10 years."
Exxon Mobil agreed to pay $31 billion in stock and to assume $10 billion in XTO debt, even though gas prices have been sharply down for much of the year. The price represents a 25 percent premium over XTO's recent stock price, and the stocks of other big and medium-size independent domestic oil and gas companies jumped after the news. Exxon Mobil would issue 0.7 shares of stock in exchange for every share of XTO stock. XTO's stock jumped 15 percent Monday, to $47.86 a share.
Simpson, 61, would benefit handsomely from the deal. The XTO chairman, who relinquished the chief executive post last year, earned $65.5 million for the year in salary, bonus, stock awards and options. He owns 6.8 million shares of XTO Energy stock, now worth $325 million. (Only 14 months ago, Simpson was forced to sell 30 percent of his holdings when he faced a margin call.) His nephew is also a senior executive at the company.
Gheit said XTO Energy's expertise in exploiting shale gas resources in the United States would also help Exxon Mobil develop similar resources in areas it owns in Poland, Hungary and Germany.
XTO produces substantial amounts of gas from the Barnett shale region of Texas and has started producing in the Bakken formation in North Dakota. It is also stepping up drilling in the Marcellus region, which stretches through much of Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia.
But some analysts worried about Exxon Mobil's ability to hang on to XTO's skilled employees. "Exxon Mobil is buying one of the highest-regarded management teams in U.S. [exploration and production], and a major challenge could be retaining talent in a big and process-driven organization," said Paul Sankey, research analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities.
Analysts also attributed Exxon Mobil's decision to buy XTO Energy to the challenges of operating overseas. Exxon Mobil has exited Venezuela after a dispute with President Hugo Chávez and has been pressed by other governments eager to make sure their state-owned oil companies control their domestic resources. Source;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/14/AR2009121403505.html

Why men use prostitutes
The reasons why many men pay for sex are revealed in the interviews that make up a major new piece of researchRead the research project's report on men who buy sex (pdf)

I don't get anything out of sex with prostitutes except for a bad feeling," says Ben. An apparently average, thirtysomething, middle-class man, Ben had taken an extended lunchbreak from his job in advertising to talk about his experiences of buying sex. Shy and slightly nervous, he told me, "I am hoping that talking about it might help me work out why I do it."
I, too, was hoping to understand his motives better. Ben was one of 700 men interviewed for a major international research project seeking to uncover the reality about men who buy sex. The project spanned six countries, and of the 103 customers we spoke to in London – where I was one of the researchers – most were surprisingly keen to discuss their experiences.
The men didn't fall into obvious stereotypes. They were aged between 18 and 70 years old; they were white, black, Asian, eastern European; most were employed and many were ­educated beyond school level. In the main they were presentable, polite, with average-to-good social skills. Many were husbands and boyfriends; just over half were either married or in a relationship with a woman.
Research published in 2005 found that the numbers of men who pay for sex had doubled in a decade. The ­authors attributed this rise to "a greater acceptability of commercial sexual contact", yet many of our ­interviewees told us that they felt ­intense guilt and shame about paying for sex. "I'm not satisfied in my mind" was how one described his feelings after paying for sex. Another told me that he felt "disappointed – what a waste of money", "lonely still" and "guilty about my relationship with my wife". In fact, many of the men were a mass of contradictions. Despite finding their experiences "unfulfilling, empty, terrible", they continued to visit prostitutes.
I interviewed 12 of the men, and found it a fascinating experience. One told me about his experience of childhood cruelty and neglect and linked this to his inability to form close ­relationships with anyone, particularly women. Alex admitted sex with ­prostitutes made him feel empty, but he had no idea how to get to know women "through the usual routes". When I asked him about his feelings ­towards the women he buys he said that on the one hand, he wants ­prostitutes to get to know and like him and, on the other, he is "not under ­delusions" that the encounters are anything like a real relationship.
"I want my ideal prostitute not to behave like one," he said, "to role-play to be a pretend girlfriend, a casual date, not business-like or mechanical. To a third person it looks like we're in love."
I felt compassion for Alex. No one had shown him how to form a bond with another human being and he was searching for something that commercial sex was never going to provide.
But another of the interviewees left me feeling concerned. Darren was young, good-looking and bright; I asked him how often he thought the women he paid enjoyed the sex. "I don't want them to get any pleasure," he told me. "I am paying for it and it is her job to give me pleasure. If she enjoys it I would feel cheated." I asked if he felt prostitutes were different to other women. "The fact that they're prepared to do that job where others won't, even when they're skint, means there's some capability inside them that permits them to do it and not be disgusted," he said. He seemed full of a festering, potentially explosive misogyny.
When asked what would end ­prostitution, one interviewee laughed and said, "Kill all the girls." Paul told me that it would take "all the men to be locked up". But most of them told the researchers that they would be ­easily deterred if the current laws were implemented. Fines, public ­exposure, employers being informed, being issued with an Asbo or the risk of a criminal record would stop most of the men from continuing to pay for sex. Discovering the women were ­trafficked, pimped or otherwise coerced would appear not to be so ­effective. Almost half said they ­believed that most women in prostitution are victims of pimps ("the pimp does the ­psychological raping of the woman," explained one). But they still continued to visit them.
An upcoming new law will make it illegal for men to pay for sex with a trafficked or pimped woman – and a punter's ignorance of a woman's ­circumstances will be no defence. Critics have suggested that this is ­unfair, that a man can't possibly know whether a woman is being exploited. Our interviews challenged this ­notion. The men knew, to some extent, about abuse and coercion in prostitution – they weren't operating under the ­convenient illusion that women enter the trade because they love sex. More than half admitted that they either knew or believed that a majority of women in prostitution were lured, tricked or trafficked.
More than one third said they thought the prostitutes they visited had been trafficked to London from another country, and a small number said they suspected that they had ­encountered a trafficking victim based on the woman's inability to speak the local language or on how young or vulnerable they appeared. "I could tell she was new to the country," said one man. "To be new in a country and be a prostitute – it can't be a choice . . . She looked troubled."
Another said that he had "seen women with bruises, cuts and eastern European accents in locations where lots of trafficked women and girls are". One man suspected that an African woman he had met was ­trafficked ­because "she was frightened and ­nervous. She told me she had been tricked. I had sex with her and she seemed fine with the sex. She asked me to help her, but I said there was little I could do. She might have been lying to me."
One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would "need" to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, "Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead." Another put it like this: "A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape." I concluded from this that it's not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it's sometimes men themselves.
Half of the interviewees had bought sex outside of the UK, mostly in Amsterdam, and visiting an area where prostitution is legal or openly advertised had given them a renewed dedication to buying sex when they returned to the UK. Almost half said that they first paid for sex when they were below the age of 21. "Dad took me and my older brother," said David. "He paid. Maybe he wanted to make sure we weren't gay. We went to a brothel. Dad didn't do it, and I don't think he told my mum."
Another man paid for sex during a stag trip to Thailand with eight of his friends. He was disappointed. "It was a Russian girl, it wasn't the ­escort experience. She didn't want to talk, just lay on the bed and wanted to do the [sex] act only."
Many men seemed to want a real relationship with a woman and were disappointed when this didn't develop: "It's just a sex act, no emotion. Be prepared to accept this or don't go at all. It's not a wife or girlfriend." ­Others were clear that they paid for sex in order to be able to totally control the encounter, including Bob, who said, "Look, men pay for women because he can have whatever and whoever he wants. Lots of men go to prostitutes so they can do things to them that real women would not put up with."
Although some of the men said they thought the women they bought ­enjoyed the sex, many others admitted that they thought the women would be feeling "disgusted", "miserable", "dirty" and "scared". Ahmed said he thought the woman might feel "relief that I'm not going to kill her".
Only 6% of the men we spoke to had been arrested for soliciting ­prostitutes. "Deterrents would only work if ­enforced," said one. "Any negative would make you reconsider. The law's not enforced now, but if any negative thing happened as a consequence it would deter me." Perhaps the new law will make Albert think twice about paying for sex. He told me, "If I'd get in trouble for doing it, I wouldn't do it. In this country, the police are fine with men visiting prostitutes." Read the research project's report here (pdf)
All names have been changed. Why do you think men pay for sex? Do you think more should be done to stop them? Email your views to women@guardian.co.uk or write to Women, The Guardian, Kings Place, London N1 9GU

LAS VEGAS (AP) - The owner of a brothel more than two hours' drive from Las Vegas said she hopes to hire Nevada's first legal male prostitutes within a month, now that state health officials have approved a method to test men for infectious diseases.
The world is ready for women, or even other men, to legally buy sex, said Shady Lady Ranch owner Bobbi Davis. Plus, being the first to offer male service could boost business in tough economic times, she said.
"With so many other male revues going on in Vegas, we thought it was time to give this a try," Davis told The Associated Press.
Until now, men have been effectively barred from legally plying the world's oldest profession in Nevada by the specificity of a state health law requiring prostitutes to undergo frequent cervical testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
The health board approved a regulation to allow urethral testing for men - a crucial rule change by the state agency with ultimate power over whether prostitutes can or can't work.
For more than 25 years, no licensed female prostitute in Nevada has contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, said George Flint, a Reno wedding chapel owner and longtime lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Owners Association.
"My concern is that we continue to maintain that kind of record," he said.
Davis, Flint and Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo all acknowledged Friday that Davis still needs county approval to become the first of the state's 24 legal brothels to offer a lineup of men.
"We're going to look at it. We have some concerns," said DeMeo, who serves as a voting member of both a county health commission and a board that oversees alcohol, gambling and brothel licenses.
"The ramifications of this are going to be statewide," he said. "We're going to have to deal with it at our other six brothels in Nye County if they want to offer the same service. We want to make sure we protect customers and make sure the industry is regulated with clarity and understanding."
Prostitution has been legal in rural Nevada counties since 1971 under strict state health board oversight but is against the law in the Las Vegas and Reno areas.
Flint said he feared the idea of male prostitutes serving male clients could spur a legislative backlash. He said he works to make the brothel industry socially acceptable to both libertarians and conservatives.
"I think the Legislature is really going to give me some heartburn over this," Flint said in a telephone interview after appearing before the state Health Board in Carson City on Friday to endorse the Shady Lady proposal.
"But I think it's an inevitability," he added, "and the brothel association has reluctantly agreed to support this as a test."
Davis said she wants to add two men to the three women she currently has living and working at her compound of trailers off U.S. 95 about 150 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
She said the women usually charge about $300 per hour for the five to 20 customers who visit on any given night.
"We don't know how to structure the men's pricing yet," Davis said.

Ministers blamed for 'stupendous incompetence' after taxpayers left with huge bills for bungled projects
A series of botched IT projects has left taxpayers with a bill of more than £26bn for computer systems that have suffered severe delays, run millions of pounds over budget or have been cancelled altogether.
An investigation by The Independent has found that the total cost of Labour's 10 most notorious IT failures is equivalent to more than half of the budget for Britain's schools last year. Parliament's spending watchdog has described the projects as "fundamentally flawed" and blamed ministers for "stupendous incompetence" in managing them.
Further evidence has emerged over the failings of Labour's most costly programme, the mammoth £12.7bn IT scheme to revolutionise the NHS. The Independent has learnt that just 160 health organisations out of about 9,000 are using electronic patient records delivered under the scheme. The vast majority of those were GP practices. New figures have also revealed that millions of pounds have been paid out in legal fees. The taxpayer has footed a £39.2m bill for "legal and commercial support" for the National Programme for IT (NPfIT).
Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, said in 2001 that everyone would have access to their health records online by 2005, but it is understood that the Department for Health is still "years away" from fulfilling the pledge.
Government departments right across Whitehall have been guilty of overseeing embarrassing IT failures. A project that was meant to save the Department for Transport (DfT) about £57m eventually cost £81m, and workers at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) were forced to brush up on their language skills when computer systems gave them messages in German.
Another ill-fated IT scheme, designed to allocate subsidies to farms, cost the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs about £350m and left British farmers more than £1bn out of pocket. Last year the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warned that the system was already "at risk of becoming obsolete". In 2004, the Department for Justice gave the go-ahead for the National Offender Management Information System (C-Nomis) to be rolled out to prisons and the probation service in an attempt to make sharing information about offenders easier. But in 2007, when the estimated cost doubled to more than £600m and senior officials questioned the validity of the project, it was abandoned - after £155m had been wasted.
The MoD's Defence Information Infrastructure project is currently running more than £180m over budget and 18 months late, and is now set to cost £7.1bn. Last year, Edward Leigh, chairman of the PAC, said: "No proper pilot for this highly complex programme was carried out, and entirely inadequate research led to a major miscalculation of the condition of the Department's buildings in which the new system would be installed."
Other botched IT projects include the identity cards scheme; the Libra system for modernising magistrates' courts; an attempt to move the Government's GCHQ computer systems into a new building which ended up costing more than £300m; the Benefit Processing Replacement Programme; and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Prism system.
IT experts blamed ministers for being too easily wooed by suppliers. Insiders said a lack of expertise within the Government about the technology industry meant they were willing to believe claims made by major IT firms before contracts were awarded.
Several projects are now under renewed threat of being cut back or abandoned altogether as Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, has targeted them as an area of government spending that can be reined in as he attempts to tackle Britain's record £175bn deficit.
Tony Collins, an expert on the Government's IT failures, said Labour had displayed an "irrational exuberance" for IT projects that has often led them to throw good money after bad at failing schemes. "There are too few people in the hierarchy of Labour who understand IT enough to understand that it is not a talisman - there is nothing magical about it."
David Cameron, the Tory leader, has signalled a move away from big IT projects, suggesting he will use technology to increase the transparency of government. "It is easy to make these noises out of office," said Mr Collins. "Once you've got civil servants giving you a host of reasons why you should not be more open, I fear the Tories will sink into the same depths of secrecy that Labour has found itself in."
Botched projects: The cost of failure
£12.7bn National Programme for IT (NHS)
It was meant to revolutionise the way the health service worked. But far from heralding a new age of efficiency, the National Programme for IT is now widely perceived as the greatest government IT white elephant of history. As well as the huge costs involved, suppliers have walked away, projects are running years behind schedule, while medical professionals have complained that they were never consulted on what they wanted the new system to achieve.
£7.1bn Defence Information Infrastructure (DII)
It seemed like a good idea at the time. In 2005, the Ministry of Defence decided to offer a contract to a consortium of suppliers to replace the hundreds of different computer systems being used by the military with a single system that would be used by the army, navy and air force, as well as the MoD itself. It was to be used by 300,000 people across 2,000 sites. However, it is running more than £180m over budget and 18 months late. A parliamentary inquiry also warned that forces' reliance on older systems put them at risk of a security breach.
£5bn National Identity Scheme
Originally budgeted at £3bn, the Government's plan for new identity cards, containing biometric data and linked to a central database, soon came under heavy criticism from civil liberty campaigners. As the costs spiralled, so the Home Office began to water down the aims of the scheme to assuage the critics. In July, Alan Johnson announced that the cards would no longer be compulsory, while moves to force all airport workers to use the cards were also abandoned.
£400m Libra system (for magistrates' courts)
An attempt to bring records used by magistrates courts into the digital age backfired when trying to introduce one universal IT system to all courts descended into a costly mess. Fujitsu originally bid £146m to deliver the Libra system in 1998. However, the project proved more complicated than anticipated, and costs have now been put at more than £400m.
£350m Single Payment Scheme system (SPS)
The Single Payment Scheme system was designed in 2003 to be a sophisticated way of giving farmers their subsidies, by mapping their land and working out their level of payment. But failures with the IT systems being used mean that farmers were left short-changed. In 2006, around £1.28bn of the £1.5bn subsidies destined for British farmers still had not been given out. The Rural Payments Agency overseeing the project was ordered to make 23 major changes to the system. Despite the £350m spent on the technology, the Public Accounts Committee warned last year that it was already "at risk of becoming obsolete".
£300m GCHQ "box move" of technology
When the Government's intelligence organisation, GCHQ, decided to move its complex computer systems into a new building in 1997, the projected £41m cost was so small that officials believed it could be absorbed within existing budgets. That was until the Curse of the Government IT Project struck. Costs of the so-called "box move" soon began to rise out of control. In 2003, the National Audit Office (NAO) put the costs at more than £300m. Edward Leigh, Tory chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, called the original budget "staggeringly inaccurate".
£155m National Offender Management Information System (C-Nomis)
In an attempt to make sharing information about offenders easier, the Department for Justice gave the go-ahead for the National Offender Management Information System (C-Nomis) to be rolled out to prisons and the probation service. As the estimated cost doubled to more than £600m and senior officials questioned the whole point of the project, it was abandoned in 2007, with £155m already spent.
£106m Benefit Processing Replacement Programme
In June 2006, the Department for Work and Pensions confidently assured Parliament that new funding for its Benefit Processing Replacement Programme (BPRP) had been approved. So it came as a surprise to many when it emerged just three months later that the project had been quietly scrapped. Little information has emerged on why BPRP was abandoned, but the Government has admitted that £106m had already been spent on it before it pulled the plug.
£88.5m Prism IT project
Undeterred by past failures, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) thought it would be a good idea in 2002 to order a new computer system for their 200 offices around the globe. The result was the Prism IT project, seemingly a bargain at just £54m. However, delays and costs have risen, while the contractor was even forced to temporarily halt the scheme in 2005 while an investigation took place into its various problems. The system has not proved a hit with staff. One wrote in 2004: "In all the FCO's long history of ineptly implemented IT initiatives, Prism is the most badly designed, ill-considered one of the lot."
£81m Shared Services Centre
To officials at the Department for Transport, the Shared Services Centre seemed to good to be true: not only would it integrate the human resources and financial services of the department and its various agencies, it would even save the taxpayer £57m. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed as the scheme became another example of an IT project going horribly wrong. Workers at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) were forced to brush up on their language skills as computer systems gave them messages in German. It will now cost £81m, a failure in management that the Public Accounts Committee described as a display of "stupendous incompetence".
TOTAL: £26.3bn

An exclusive class of customer deserves a good deal of credit for the Strip’s first increase in reported gambling revenue since 2007 — high rollers who play a game that most Americans don’t pronounce correctly.
Baccarat, the high-stakes card game favored by James Bond, accounted for nearly 20 percent of the Strip’s gambling revenue in November, the Gaming Control Board announced last week. Strip casinos reaped $92.7 million from baccarat players that month — a 136 percent increase from a year ago.
In November, baccarat players wagered a whopping $690.8 million at Strip resorts, about 14 percent of all the money bet in those casinos and an 84 percent increase compared with November 2008.
It was the latest evidence of a trend.
While Strip casinos made less money on most of their games last year, baccarat was an exception, and its momentum has been building. From August through November, each month’s baccarat revenue was more than 30 percent higher than it had been in the same month of 2008. Baccarat wagers rose by more than 40 percent in those months.
The trend was not lost on the Hard Rock Hotel. The larger high-limit room it opened the week before New Year’s Eve includes a secluded area designed to accommodate more baccarat tables than in years past.
But off-Strip, baccarat is a rarity. The game is mainly found in the high-limit rooms of the Strip casinos that cater to the wealthiest gamblers.
Baccarat can be an expensive business for casinos, given the money they have to spend to attract high rollers, which can include flights to and from the casino for the gambler and his family, complimentary suites, meals, gifts and other perks. Working against a small house edge of less than 2 percent, baccarat players can leave a big dent in a casino’s bottom line if they get lucky, especially if they are “whales” betting $100,000 a hand. Most casinos don’t offer baccarat for that reason — and because the number of people who play baccarat in the United States is relatively small.
Tens of thousands of people gamble at slots and blackjack tables in Las Vegas every year, but baccarat players number in the mere hundreds. Many of the Strip’s baccarat tables are empty much of the time and are mostly used on weekends or days that coincide with holidays or special events such as prizefights and major concerts.
A period that has consistently produced some of the most baccarat action for the Strip is one coming up next month — Chinese new year. Therein lies a key to what has been happening with baccarat on the Strip.
Beginning about four years ago, several Strip resorts started opening sister casinos in Macau, a province on the South China Sea. Macau casinos are dominated by baccarat tables in the same way that U.S. casinos are filled with slot machines.
Macau is the world’s most lucrative gambling destination thanks primarily to baccarat players. At Las Vegas Sands’ three Macau casinos, for example, the top high rollers, many of them baccarat players, wagered $16.7 billion in the third quarter of last year — about a billion more than gamblers wagered in all of the games offered on the Las Vegas Strip during that same period.
Most casino revenue on the Strip still comes from slot machines. But it’s a smaller percentage today than it was a few years ago, when the economy was booming and the masses had more to spend.
In 2005, the year before Steve Wynn opened Las Vegas’ first satellite casino in Macau, baccarat generated 11 percent of the Strip’s gambling revenue. For last year through November, the figure was a little more than 16 percent.
The combination of the Macau connection and the economic health of China and Hong Kong is boosting business at the Strip’s baccarat tables, according to industry experts.
While the U.S. recession contributed to the worst year on record for MGM Mirage, the corporation’s chief marketing officer, Bill Hornbuckle, said its business from international visitors, driven by Asian gamblers, may have hit a new high.
For Las Vegas Sands, it’s a tale of two worlds — baccarat versus everything else. Despite poor earnings from its Venetian and Palazzo resorts in Las Vegas, the company reported record third-quarter earnings from its Macau casinos, where it offers more baccarat than other games. And while the company’s other Las Vegas business segments tumbled, “premium” baccarat players at its Strip casinos wagered 4 percent more than during the same period a year ago.
On the Strip, Las Vegas Sands and the other casino giants are tight lipped about their high rollers, so ascertaining how many of their baccarat players come from Asia is difficult.
But Joel Simkins, a gaming stock analyst with Macquarie Securities, says Las Vegas casino operators cultivating customers in Macau “have more of an incentive to get them to come to Las Vegas.”
In Macau, access to high rollers is largely controlled by junket operators — third-party hosts who demand hefty commissions that eat away as much as 40 percent of the revenue that casinos get from VIPs, and casinos pay 33 percent less on their revenue in Nevada than they do in Macau, Simkins explains.
Las Vegas-based casino companies in Macau have had some success in attracting Chinese gamblers to the Strip, Hornbuckle said last week just before leaving for Macau, where his company opened a resort in December 2007.
“We have (marketing) people focused on those parts of the world that have not suffered the crisis that we have” in the United States, he said. China, the world’s largest emerging market, is the prime example.
Unfortunately, Asian baccarat players aren’t a big enough market segment to rescue the Strip from the downturn. Still, casino operators expect they will become a bigger profit center as casino companies work with tourism officials to boost the number of mainland Chinese who travel to Las Vegas.
Official statistics are unavailable, but visitors from China probably make up fewer than 300,000 of Las Vegas’ annual visitor traffic of more than 30 million people, Hornbuckle said. These visitors have to obtain travel visas from their government and those visas are hard to get. As a result, most of the tourists are members of China’s wealthy elite, and, Hornbuckle said, they have a significant effect on tourism disproportionate to their numbers.
Especially if they are baccarat players.

Understanding the game
Origins: Baccarat, pronounced bah-kah-rah, is a card game believed to have been introduced to France from Italy during the reign of Charles VIII of France, who ruled from 1483-1498.
Outcomes: It is a simple game with only three possible outcomes — player, banker or tie. In the variation played in Las Vegas and Macau casinos, the casino banks the game at all times but has a low house edge. Players may bet on either the player or the banker, which are designations for the two hands dealt in each game. The object is to bet on the hand that totals closer to nine.
The basics: The cards are dealt face down, one to the “player” first, then to the “banker.” And then the same again, so there are two cards each. Both cards in each hand are then turned over and added together and the dealer calls the total. The player and banker can then draw a single card or stand pat. The hand with the highest total wins. Tens and face cards all are worth zero points; all other cards are worth their face values, with the ace worth one point. If a total is more than 10, the second digit is the value of the hand. For example, a 9 and a 6, which total 15, make up a five-point hand.