US rig count up 13 to 1,831

HOUSTON -- Oilfield services company Baker Hughes Inc. says the number of rigs exploring for oil and natural gas in the U.S. rose by 13 this week to 1,831.

The Houston firm said in its weekly report Friday that 1,517 rigs were exploring for oil and 310 for gas. Four were listed as miscellaneous. A year ago there were 1,771 active rigs.

Of the major oil- and gas-producing states, Louisiana gained nine rigs, Texas increased by seven, California gained three and New Mexico increased by one.

Ohio lost four and Alaska, Arkansas and Oklahoma fell one apiece.

Colorado, Kansas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming were unchanged.

The U.S. rig count peaked at 4,530 in 1981 and bottomed at 488 in 1999.

BMW extends recall worldwide to half-million cars

BERLIN -- German automaker BMW is issuing a worldwide recall of many models of cars with certain six-cylinder gas motors after identifying a problem with a bolt used in the engine.

The company said Friday that a recall started in China last week has now been extended worldwide, affecting 489,000 vehicles, including 156,000 in the U.S.

BMW says in rare cases one of four bolts holding the cover on the engine's variable camshaft timing system breaks, which can then cause other bolts to fail. That means oil begins leaking from the unit, causing the timing system to become sluggish. It can eventually lead to complete engine failure.

The company says customers will be notified if their models are affected and that the repair takes a few hours at most.

Former Hawks All-Star Lou Hudson dies at 69

ATLANTA -- Dominique Wilkins hopes young fans take the time to learn about Lou Hudson.

Wilkins says they'll discover "Sweet Lou" was one of the best shooting guards in NBA history.

Hudson, a smooth-shooting star for the Hawks who averaged more than 20 points during 13 NBA seasons, died Friday. He was 69.

He died in Atlanta, where he was hospitalized and listed in grave condition last month after a stroke, the Hawks said.

Hudson was a six-time All-Star while with the Hawks in St. Louis and Atlanta, often playing away from the national spotlight.

"Young people today don't know how good Lou Hudson really was," Wilkins, a Hall of Famer, told The Associated Press. "He was a hell of a player. The guy could score with the best in history. He was a phenomenal basketball player.

"He should be a Hall of Famer and it's amazing to me he's not. He was one of the best (shooting) guards and that's a fact. You go back and look at his career and look at the numbers and see what he did and you understand."

Hudson was the first face of the Hawks franchise in Atlanta. He then passed the torch to Wilkins.

"At the beginning of my career, he became a very close friend," Wilkins said. "He gave me a lot of positive advice about how to play the game. One thing he told me early on, he said you work very hard when you're trying to score points. He said look at the game like this: 'If you score three buckets a quarter, how many points is that?' I said 24. He said, 'That's right and you haven't even worked hard yet to get to the free throw line. That's the way you should look at the game.'

"He said, 'The game should be easy for you because of the way you play the game with your ability,' and that stuck with me my whole career."

Hudson, who at 6-foot-5 could play guard and forward, averaged 20.2 points for his career. He spent 11 seasons with the Hawks and finished with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1979.

His No. 23 was retired by the Hawks, joining Bob Pettit and Wilkins as the only other Hawks players so honored.

"His jersey is not retired for nothing," Wilkins said. "Only three jerseys are up there, so you know he had to be a heck of a player to have his jersey hanging in that building."

His No. 14 was retired by the University of Minnesota, where he was one of the school's first black players.

"Lou Hudson holds a special place in the Hawks family, in the hearts of our fans and in the history of our club," Hawks co-owner Michael Gearon said. "As a fan growing up with this team, I'm fortunate to say I was able to see almost every game Sweet Lou played as a member of the Hawks.

"He was an integral part of successful Hawks teams for over a decade, and is deservedly recognized with the ultimate symbol of his significance to the franchise with the number 23 hanging inside Philips Arena."

Beginning with the 1969-70 season, Hudson averaged at least 24 points in five straight seasons. In his years with the Hawks, he averaged at least 20 points seven times. He set a career high with his 27.1 points per game in 1972-73.

He scored 57 points against Chicago on Nov. 10, 1969, matching the franchise record also set by Pettit and Wilkins.

Hudson was a first-round pick by St. Louis in 1966 and made the NBA all-rookie team. He missed part of his second season while serving in the Army.

Following the team's move from St. Louis, he scored the first points for the new Atlanta team in 1968. He helped lead the Hawks to the 1970 Western Division championship.

Hudson, a native of Greensboro, N.C., is also a member of the North Carolina, Georgia and Atlanta sports halls of fame. He was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys in 1966 even though he didn't play college football.

Hudson suffered his first stroke in 2005 and later campaigned for the "Power to End Stroke" organization.

He is survived by his wife, Madeline (Mardi), his daughter, Adrienne, and his former wife, Bernadette.

Funeral arrangements have not been announced.

Palladium highest since 2011 on supply concerns

The price of palladium is the highest it's been since the summer of 2011 as traders worry about supplies of the industrial metal.

The actively traded June contract for palladium rose $14.50, or 1.8 percent, to settle at $806.80 an ounce Friday, the highest price since August 2011.

Traders are worried that the tensions between the West and Russia over Ukraine will lead to disruptions in shipments of palladium from Russia, a major producer of the metal. Palladium is used in making catalytic converters for cars.

Other metals ended mixed.

Gold for June delivery fell $1.50 to $1,319 an ounce. May silver fell 15 cents to $19.95 an ounce and May copper edged down less than a penny to $3.04 a pound.

Energy prices were mixed. Crude oil edged up 34 cents to $103.74 a barrel. Wholesale gasoline edged up less than a penny to $3.01 a gallon and heating oil fell half a penny to $2.93 a gallon. Natural gas fell four cents to $4.62 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Agricultural commodities fell.

Soybeans fell 19 cents to $14.63 per bushel, corn fell three cents to $4.99 a bushel and wheat fell two cents to $6.60 a bushel.

Al-Qaa priest champions humanity toward refugees

AL-QAA, Lebanon: Nearing the end of a long day, the priest sits back on a sofa in his living room as a late evening town committee meeting gets underway.

He should be leading the discussion, but yet another busy day of work has exhausted him, and instead his eyes glaze over slightly. As the head priest in Al-Qaa, a Greek Catholic town 10 km from the Lebanese border with Syria, Elian Nasrallah has assumed the role not just of spiritual leader but also logistics handler. Al-Qaa’s proximity to the border has led to an influx of 8,422 refugees to the town, according to figures released by UNHCR at the end of March.

His self-declared list of responsibilities – which includes running the town’s medical center and acting as principal of a school for Syrian refugees, religious instructor and fundraiser – has become so long that he is increasingly accused of monopolizing the town’s resources, lacking transparency and taking town decisions on his own.

Known to locals as “Abouna” (our father), Nasrallah has a short, slightly rotund frame and a head of white hair overshadowing remaining patches of gray. He never has to stray far from his home while in Al-Qaa; next door lies the church and directly behind is the two-floor building housing the medical center and refugee school.

Nasrallah rises between 6:30 and 7:30 a.m. He often travels to Beirut to fundraise or meet with donors, but on the day The Daily Star visits, he is staying in Al-Qaa and is dressed in a freshly pressed suit to give a non-governmental organization a tour.

By 8:30 a.m., he’s in the town’s medical center pacing frantically around the corridors. He enters and exits rooms with haste, often leading or following a new person, as if he’s recreating a scene from The Benny Hill Show. His phone never stops ringing.

After a brief meeting, he’s back in the medical center, simultaneously delegating tasks to volunteer staff and showing the NGO workers around. Before lunch, he takes time to celebrate his adult daughter’s birthday, gathering staff and visitors to enjoy pineapple juice and chocolate cake.

Then it’s back to his home, where the NGO workers are invited for a meal of local delicacies, including hummus, fried cauliflower, meat, tabbouleh, pickled Armenian cucumbers and arak. A dessert of fresh apricots with thin apricot jam and strong coffee follows, as full stomachs and satisfied smiles radiate around the table.

After his visitors leave, Nasrallah is back out the door to administer afternoon classes to Syrian refugee children. Lined up outside the school under the afternoon sun, the kids are marched inside to take classes in French, English, math, reading and writing.

Nasrallah motions to the overcrowded classrooms, each one filled with around 30 students and one teacher. “We need more tables and chairs,” he says.

Nasrallah explains that many children are from families with little or no education. When he is interrupted by two little girls running down the hallway he calls after them, “Come. Show me how you should walk in the hallway.”

The kids continue their classes, but Nasrallah is needed elsewhere; it is 4 p.m. and time for the young villagers’ religious lessons at church. Afterward, he will meet committees of locals and refugees to discuss the town’s most pressing affairs.

“There are so many things he does,” says Carole Naameh, a volunteer nurse at the town’s medical center. “He only takes Sundays off.”

Even on Sundays, he leads Mass, using the opportunity to ask for donations for his various causes.

When he recently came down with a virus that gave him a fever and put him in a Beirut hospital for a week, he continued to keep things ticking from afar.

“He had a 48 degree fever but his phone was never shut off,” Naameh adds. “He was constantly calling us telling us to do this or do that.”

But despite his saintly daily schedule, some of the town’s residents accuse the priest of being more in tune with the devil on his shoulder.

“The priest is a thief, a liar and a stooge,” Saadeh Awad yells.

Awad and others accuse the priest of a lack of transparency concerning the town’s financial affairs and making important decisions that affect the community all on his own.

Sitting in his shop with a small sticker on the front door that reads “No Sectarianism” in Arabic, Wajih al-Towm says the priest fails to take into account locals’ feelings. “If somebody wants to fix a glass panel in the church, he won’t allow it. He wants to be in charge of all the town’s affairs and no one else is involved. He doesn’t let the municipality or the mayor or anybody get involved.”

While falling just short of accusing the priest of blatant corruption, he says the priest’s opaque financial dealings have led many to think he pockets donated money. “Pass that responsibility to another group because as long as you monopolize it, people will have doubts.”

“About 80 percent of the town is against him,” adds resident Abdo Kallas, who echoed the other claims.

Asked about the accusations, the priest responds calmly, “When I’m at the medical center or the school, am I working alone?”

He says that some in the town are unhappy with the number of Syrians residing there. Nasrallah, however, says he feels responsible for the refugees.

“I started the school, I started the medical center. Humanity holds me responsible,” he concludes.

Decades on, Lebanon still struggles to heal war wounds

BEIRUT: Almost 40 years after the eruption of the country’s Civil War, many Lebanese are still haunted by the atrocities that were committed during the intense rounds of fighting.

According to experts and civil society members, there is still a lingering danger that a large number of the 15-year-long war’s participants have not learned from their mistakes.Yet despite this, there is a sense of optimism about not only the prevailing anti-war sentiment, but also the younger generation’s ability to steer clear of their elder’s mistakes.

After minor altercations over the decades following independence, Lebanon’s Civil War erupted on April 13, 1975, when Christian gunmen killed 27 Palestinians on a bus in Beirut’s Ain al-Rummaneh suburb. It dragged on until 1990 and killed at least 150,000 people.

“The vast majority of Lebanese people recognize the horrors that the Civil War inflicted, and vivid memories still live with them,” said Imad Salamey, associate professor of political studies at the Lebanese American University.

“Many are still missing, injured and have horrible experiences of being evicted. This is a constant reminder and it prevents people from slipping into Civil War, at least on a public level,” he added.

Although the political elite are extremely aware of the dangers of another conflict, Salamey said, “there cannot be a 100 percent guarantee, especially where external factors are concerned.”

For Assaad Chaftari, an ex-fighter with the Lebanese Forces and a peace activist who often speaks against war, many major factors have not changed since the Civil War began, such as the division between communities – even if organizations go by different names now – racism, the clan spirit and the proliferation of weapons.

“Our critical thinking is inactive, we are not using it,” Chaftari said, adding that individuals tended to listen to one political opinion and immediately assume that all others were wrong.

“Our racist and political revolutions are not healthy,” he added. “Politicians forget about their divisions when they go to their sessions and embrace each other, but their partisans don’t necessarily follow this.”

Lama El Awad, program officer at the Lebanese Center for Civic Education, agreed that sectarianism was still very much existent in the country, perhaps even more than before.

The LCCE this week screened a 23-minute documentary on the Lebanese Civil War with The Forum Civil Peace Service Lebanon program, in addition to releasing a training manual aimed at encouraging discussion about the 15-year conflict, its consequences and how to acquire the skills to deal with the collective memory of war.

“In terms of the country’s situation, of course there is always potential for a civil war [to erupt], because of the vertical divisions between the political parties, and the people are still following the politicians and heeding their every call,” Awad said.

Wadad Halwani, the head of the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon, said if the Lebanese did not reconcile with the past, they would not be able to live a stable present or build a safer, more prosperous future.

The committee was formed in 1982 by a group of families whose relatives were kidnapped or forcibly disappeared during the Civil War. Halwani’s husband Adnan was one of those kidnapped. Friday witnessed the ninth anniversary of the tent sit-in outside the Gibran Khalil Gibran Garden in Beirut calling for the truth about the whereabouts and conditions of Lebanese detained in Syrian prisons.

“If we don’t learn from our mistakes, they can be repeated in the future,” Change and Reform Bloc MP Ghassan Moukheiber, who was at the sit-in Friday, told The Daily Star.

“[The issue of the kidnapped and disappeared] is a window on the past, and I think that we did not handle the past properly, and it is this issue that can help us redeem ourselves,” he stated.

For Halwani, the war continues to make its presence known every day in Lebanon, and not simply in the form of security breaches, bombs, gunfights and cars rigged with explosives.

“There is also the inflammatory rhetoric that is riling up the people,” Halwani said. “This inflammatory rhetoric is unfortunately affecting many smart minds and souls.”

The younger generation’s involvement in the fighting in neighboring Syria was also dangerous, as it could spark an internal conflict, experts agreed.

The frightening thing, Salamey said, were those men coming back to Lebanon with the idea that sectarian-driven conflict is necessary for the country.

Chaftari echoed Salamey’s concerns, saying that these young fighters were in an environment of violence, killing and death.

“A lot of them return, and there is a fear that they will bring back the mentality of the battlefield to their neighborhoods and towns,” he said.

But regardless of all these issues, there remains an air of optimism in the country.

“I think at least the Lebanese political system learned a lot from the war days, and that’s why there is a determination not to go back to the war,” said Abdallah Bou Habib, Lebanon’s former ambassador to the United States.

“Despite the differences, despite the outside pressures, in the end they [politicians] want to get together.”

According to Bou Habib, also director of the Issam Fares Center for Lebanon – a Beirut-based think tank, the country has been continuously teetering on the brink ever since the war ended, but has always managed to narrowly avoid another full-blown conflict.

From political assassinations, the 2006 war with Israel, clashes between supporters of Hezbollah and the Future Movement in 2008, and now the conflict in Syria, many events have shaken the country’s stability since 1990.

“As of now, we have been able to handle the regional issues well,” Salamey said. “We were able to form a government, manage serious security breaches and stabilize the security situation.”

For the moment, the general sentiment remains strongly against another civil war, and there have been no real international forces pushing for confrontation in Lebanon, he said.

He was also relatively optimistic about the emerging generation.

“It is much more aware due to intensive and massive experience with the media through social media,” he said. “They [young men] are very capable of simulating experiences the older generation could not. There is a transcendence [of] memory and experiences.”

What is needed is more transparency and less ambiguity when it comes to the reasons and consequences associated with the Civil War, experts agreed.

Unless the horrors are recognized, there is always the possibility of repeating the same mistake.

Ibrahim urged to take cases of detainees in Syria

BEIRUT: Families and relatives of Lebanese believed to be detained in Syria called on Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim Friday to take over their cases after his success in getting a number of kidnapped people released from the war-torn country.

“We call for referring the file to Director-General of General Security Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, who proved highly meritorious in dealing with such cases,” said the families’ spokeswoman, Sonia Eid.

Dozens of people gathered outside the Gibran Khalil Gibran Garden in Downtown Beirut Friday for the ninth anniversary of the tent sit-in calling for the truth to be uncovered regarding the whereabouts and conditions of Lebanese detainees in Syrian prisons and those who were forcibly disappeared during the Civil War. Many of the Lebanese believed to be held in Syria were arrested during the Syrian army’s presence in Lebanon between 1976 and 2005.

Ibrahim helped secure the release of nine Lebanese pilgrims who were held by Syrian rebels for over a year starting in May 2012, as well as the release of the Maaloula nuns last month.