Vijay Singh — the second-ranked golfer in the World Rankings — won the rain-delayed Shell Houston Open today by two strokes with a 72 hole total of 277, 11 under par. Singh shot a 69 in the final round to hold off 48 year old Scott Hoch, who shot a 68 and finished in second place at 279. Here is the final leaderboard.
Citgo Petroleum Corporation. is expected to announce today that it plans to relocate its headquarters from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Houston. In addition to the economies of being located among Houston’s many major energy companies, the move makes sense because most of Citgo’s vendors, and the customers of Citgo’s parent — Petroleos de Venezuela SA — are located in Houston. Update: Here is the Chronicle story on the move.
Citgo is the nation’s fourth-largest retailer of gasoline, with 13,500 outlets. It also operates three oil refineries in the United States and owns a 42 percent interest in another refinery in Houston. The company will move approximately 700 jobs to Houston, leaving about 300 in Tulsa. As an inducement to make the move, Citgo will receive a $5 million grant from the state of Texas and $30 million in low-interest loans from the cities of Houston and Corpus Christi, where Citgo operates a major refinery.
John McClain, the Houston Chronicle’s National Football League writer, apparently believes that the NFL is a bit like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, where “all of the children are above-average.” In today’s Chronicle here and here, McClain rates 23 out of the 32 NFL teams as having better than average selections at this past weekend’s NFL Draft.
Houston-based Service Corporation International, the world’s largest funeral and cemetery company, announced late last week that it had entered into a memorandum of understanding to settle the securities class action lawsuit that has been pending in U.S. District Court in Houston against SCI and certain of its current and former officers since January 1999. The suit alleges that SCI made misrepresentations concerning its prearranged funeral business and other financial matters. The settlement is for $65 million, with SCI’s insurers ponying up $30 million of the settlement payment.
Randall Parker over at FuturePundit points to an interesting Erin Anderssen and Anne McIlroy article in the Canadian Globe And Mail that summarizes recent research on child development and human violence. They report that Richard Tremblay has found that two year old babies are more physically aggressive than teenagers or adults but are simply too uncoordinated to do much damage to others:
Consequently, are human beings born pure, as Rousseau argued, and tainted by the world around them? Or do babies arrive bad, as St. Augustine wrote, and learn, for their own good, how to behave in society?
Richard Tremblay, an affable researcher at the University of Montreal who is considered one of the world leaders in aggression studies, sides with St. Augustine, whom he is fond of quoting.
Dr. Tremblay has thousands of research subjects, many studied over decades, to back him up: Aggressive behaviour, except in the rarest circumstances, is not acquired from life experience. It is a remnant of our evolutionary struggle to survive, a force we learn, with time and careful teaching, to master. And as if by some ideal plan, human beings are at their worst when they are at their weakest.
St. Augustine was obviously much closer to the truth.
Read the entire post, as Mr. Parker includes a number of interesting links relating to the subject of this research. Hat tip to Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolutions for the link.
This NY Times article reports on a couple of remarkable public meetings just outside London last week in which radical Islamic fascist clerics suggested that Tony Blair should be killed and that an Islamic flag should be hanging outside No. 10 Downey Street. The article notes as follows:
Stoking that anger are some of the same fiery Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Friday, Abu Hamza, the cleric accused of tutoring Richard Reid before he tried to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner with explosives hidden in his shoe, urged a crowd of 200 outside his former Finsbury Park mosque to embrace death and the “culture of martyrdom.”
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On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden’s offer of a truce ? provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months ? Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.
“All Muslims of the West will be obliged,” he said, to “become his sword” in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, “It is foolish to fight people who want death ? that is what they are looking for.”
One chapter in Sheik Omar’s lectures these days is “The Psyche of Muslims for Suicide Bombing.”
Call me old fashioned, but I am appalled that these clerics — one of who is already under investigation for a serious crime — could spew this type of subversion without apparent qualm. The reason they can get away with it is explained later in the article:
Though the British home secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to strip Abu Hamza of his British citizenship and deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while Abu Hamza keeps calling down the wrath of God.
Despite tougher antiterrorism laws, the police, prosecutors and intelligence chiefs across Europe say they are struggling to contain the openly seditious speech of Islamic extremists, some of whom, they say, have been inciting young men to suicidal violence since the 1990’s.
The authorities say that laws to protect religious expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of foreigners, they say they are often left to seek deportation, a lengthy and uncertain process subject to legal appeals, when the suspect can keep inciting attacks.
That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective means, such as mouse-trapping Islamic radicals with immigration violations in hopes of making a deportation case stick. “In many countries, the laws are liberal and it’s not easy,” an official said.