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Geopolitics

In Libya, Western Oil Companies Root For The Rebels

In Libya, Western Oil Companies Root For The Rebels

It is unlikely European oil companies ENI, Repsol and Total will be able to return to their operations in Libya if Muammar Gaddafi's regime remains intact.

(Rul)

The future of Western oil companies in Libya appears increasingly linked to the outcome of the rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi.

Spanish Repsol, French Total and Italian ENI all have facilities in the country. "Their governments are de facto at war with the Libyan regime," says Samuel Cisznuk, Middle East energy analyst at IHS Cera. "An eventual return to normality will be very difficult if the regime currently in place does not collapse."

Colonel Gaddafi has threatened to nationalize Western-owned oil installations on Libyan soil and hand them over to Russian and Chinese companies. ENI, which is 30 percent owned by the Italian state, produces 270,000 barrels per day in Libya. Its Libyan operation is its biggest foreign subsidiary and accounts for nearly 14 percent of its global output. "The Italians have the most to lose," says one expert.

Washington implemented a raft of economic sanctions on Libya last week. Worried about its future, ENI challenged sanctions proposed by the European Union to stop oil exports out of Libya.

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Society

Brazil's Evangelical Surge Threatens Survival Of Native Afro-Brazilian Faith

Followers of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion in four traditional communities in the country’s northeast are resisting pressure to convert to evangelical Christianity.

image of Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Agencia Publica
Géssica Amorim

Among a host of images of saints and Afro-Brazilian divinities known as orixás, Abel José, 42, an Umbanda priest, lights some candles, picks up his protective beads and adjusts the straw hat that sits atop his head. He is preparing to treat four people from neighboring villages who have come to his house in search of spiritual help and treatment for health ailments.

The meeting takes place discreetly, in a small room that has been built in the back of the garage of his house. Abel lives in the quilombo of Sítio Bredos, home to 135 families. The community, located in the municipality of Betânia of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is one of the municipality’s four remaining communities that have been certified as quilombos, the word used to refer to communities formed in the colonial era by enslaved Africans and/or their descendents.

In these villages there are almost no residents who still follow traditional Afro-Brazilian religions. Abel, Seu Joaquim Firmo and Dona Maura Maria da Silva are the sole remaining followers of Umbanda in the communities in which they live. A wave of evangelical missionary activity has taken hold of Betânia’s quilombos ever since the first evangelical church belonging to the Assembleia de Deus group was built in the quilombo of Bredos around 20 years ago. Since then, other evangelical, pentecostal, and neo-pentecostal churches and congregations have established themselves in the area. Today there are now nine temples spread among the four communities, home to roughly 900 families.

The temples belong to the Assembleia de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the World Church of God's Power, the latter of which has over 6,000 temples spread across Brazil and was founded by the apostle and televangelist Valdemiro Santiago, who became infamous during the pandemic for trying to sell beans that he had blessed as a Covid-19 cure. Assembleia de Deus alone, who are the largest pentecostal denomination in the world, have built five churches in Betânia’s quilombos.


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