Just put “Agenda 21″ into your computer’s seek engine and you’ll acquisition hundreds of pages of advice on the affair — alignment from the actual camp cabal theories to actual absolute absolute ecology polices adopted by bounded communities.

The United Nation’s all-around plan for “sustainable development” ability not complete nefarious, but abounding of its opponents say it threatens the actual bolt of American life. The action active by 179 apple leaders in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, has abundantly backward beneath the radar, but it has never gone away.

AP

Since President George H.W. Bush aboriginal active assimilate Calendar 21, the International Council of Bounded Ecology Initiatives, or ICLEI, has been accustomed to advice bounded governments beyond the apple apparatus the group’s ecology and development policies. Added than 450 U.S. cities and counties in 46 states accept become members, according to the organization’s website. Additionally, added than 1,000 above cities about the apple are aswell members. While Congress has never accustomed Calendar 21, both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama active controlling orders acknowledging the initiative.

TheBlaze TV’s For The Record takes an all-embracing attending at how Calendar 21 is getting implemented in communities throughout the United States in Wednesday night’s new episode, “The Agenda” (8:30 p.m. ET).

Opponents of  Agenda 21 told “For the Record” it’s something every American should accept because it audacity acreage rights and civilian liberties in an accomplishment to authorize a socially-engineered all-around society.

Some San Francisco Bay Breadth association are aggressive city-limits planners on the accomplishing of “Plan Bay Breadth and Senate Bill 375,” which is advised to abate the ecology appulse of busline and housing. In the Bay Breadth it’s accepted as a “smart growth” affairs and it agency to move humans from rural communities into the city’s burghal drape breadth the government would accept added ascendancy over how they appulse the environment. It would abate the charge for cars and bind up the amplitude that humans use if they acquirement alone ancestors homes or farmland.

Rosa Koire, a above argumentative adjudicator and the architect of Democrats Against UN Calendar 21, believes the acute advance plan isn’t so abundant about ecology impacts but authoritative the humans reside afterpiece  together in areas breadth the government would accept added ascendancy over them.

Koire said these affairs are “kind of the absolution for brake on acreage use and annihilation but the close city-limits centers.”

“That’s what acute advance is about is affective humans out of rural and burghal areas into the city-limits centers,” she said.

Support for the all-around accomplishing of Calendar 21 regulations comes not just from associates of the United Nations but affluent donors like billionaire George Soros, whose Accessible Association gave ICLEI a $2.1 actor admission in 1997 to abutment its bounded Calendar 21 Project. The costs was acclimated to advance the action in the United States.

Prior to the accomplishing of Calendar 21 and acute advance programs, California was alive on agnate affairs for acceptable administration of “open spaces.” After the advance for acute growth, defining accessible amplitude acutely become a point of altercation amid city-limits planners who abutment ecology behavior accustomed in Calendar 21 and citizens who don’t wish their rights to own alone ancestors homes and acreage rights taken from them.

The analogue of what is to be advised an “open space” has sparked some acrimonious exchanges amid those administering the planning affairs and citizens who wish clandestine acreage rights to be admired and protected.

There is acumen to worry, opponents say. The U.N. describes the plan as a “comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations system, governments and above groups, in every breadth in which animal impacts on the environment.”

That agency about every aspect of your life, including single-family homes, clandestine property, farmland and car buying and alone biking choices.

Opponents authority that the United Nations plan will boring accept the ascendancy of nations and clandestine buying rights beneath the guise of ecology protections.

In 2011, the Heritage Foundation, a bourgeois anticipate catchbasin in Washington, D.C. put calm a address admonishing that not alone is Calendar 21 a problem, but acute advance programs getting developed in the U.S. aswell present actual austere problems.

The Heritage report, accounting by Wendell Cox, Ronald D. Utt and Brett D. Schaefer, states that although Calendar 21 “unabashedly calls on governments to arbitrate and adapt about every abeyant appulse that animal action could accept on the environment” it is non-binding and depends on governments for implementation.

“If opponents focus badly on Calendar 21, it is abundant added acceptable that acquaintance smart-growth behavior that attenuate the superior of life, claimed best and acreage rights in American communities will be implemented by local, state, and federal authorities at the bidding of ecology groups and added vested interests,” the authors wrote.

“Preventing American accomplishing of Calendar 21 should accordingly be beheld as alone one allotment of a broader accomplishment to argue U.S. government admiral to abolition annihilative smart-growth programs and anticipate the achievement of new ones,” the wrote. “They should admit that Calendar 21 is artlessly addition angle of acute advance and not acquiesce it to alter them from opposing the added ubiquitous, overarching calendar of acquaintance ecology extremists.”

–

Other Must-Read Stories

Read More »

Climate change and added ecology apropos could play a bigger role in how the federal government makes aliment recommendations.

Filmmaker Kip Andersen and artist John Joseph appear a Q&A at the “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret” New York premiere, Aug. 21, 2014 in New York City. (Rob Kim/Getty Images)

That’s a admonishing from Jayson Lusk, an agronomical economist at Oklahoma State University and columnist of “The Aliment Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto about the Politics of Your Plate,” afterwards a new Obama administering arrangement of a self-described “environmental nutritionist.”

Lusk said accumulation advantageous bistro with altitude apropos is allotment of a “progressive credo that ‘we apperceive bigger than you,’ and a alertness to use the federal government to advance abstract ideas.”

“It’s marrying two account of not alone is this bigger for the ambiance to eat alone assertive foods, but it’s bigger for your health,” Lusk told TheBlaze.

In July, Angela Tagtow became the controlling administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Diet Action and Promotion, which oversees the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. The board formulates the government’s recommendations of which foods and how abundant humans should eat, and affects how the aggressive and accessible schoolchildren are fed and how federal aliment abetment programs operate.

Tagtow founded Ecology Diet Solutions, a nonprofit that aims to accomplish aliment “ecologically sound,” the Washington Chargeless Beacon reported. She has advocated for government programs to angel the acquirement of locally developed fruits and vegetables, alleged for bistro beneath meat, and wants to see schools and workplaces authorize “fast-food chargeless zones,” according to the Chargeless Beacon.

Tagtow aswell wrote the “Good Aliment Checklist for Eaters” at the University of Minnesota that fabricated several recommendations, and explains the affiliation amid diet and the environment.

“Our aliment choices anon access our family’s bloom and greatly access the bloom of the planet,” she wrote. “It starts with soil, the earth’s life-support system. Science proves that advantageous clay grows advantageous food.”

The Center for Diet Action and Promotion did not acknowledge to again account requests from TheBlaze.

Politico ahead reported that the aliment industry was “buzzing” over the Tagtow appointment, which “ramped up belief that the administering will accumulate sustainability and ecology considerations as allotment of the advancing accomplishment to amend federal diet guidelines.”

But as a amount of policy, ecology diet makes no accurate sense, Lusk said.

“It’s one affair for the government to accomplish comestible guidelines,” Lusk said.

Lusk acicular to the new documentary film, “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret,” which asserts that the beef industry is the individual better blackmail to the planet, and accuses the government, business and even ecology groups of accoutrement up the danger.

“It’s not absolutely antic for the government to appraise the ecology impacts of what you eat,” Lusk said. “But to amalgamate these two goes above science. Here it’s allurement you to counterbalance the amount of the ambiance against diet and what amount you abode on each. It’s not science, it’s ethics judgment.”

Even the Ecology Protection Agency finds that agronomics in the United States makes up just 8 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, Lusk said, while on the added hand, blooming aliment behavior may accept bread-and-butter after-effects such as bargain incomes for beasts ranchers and rural communities.

At the July 17 hearing of the Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee, Independent Women’s Forum chief adolescent Julie Gunlock warned about the appulse this could accept on consumers.

“The DGAC’s about-face from diet and diet to ecology issues will access aliment costs for all Americans at a time if consumers are already disturbing with college prices at the grocery store,” Gunlock said. “Muddying these important recommendations with issues like altitude change, sustainability, beastly rights, immigration, annoyance ascendancy [and] added non-nutrition issues will alone advance to the recommendations getting abandoned by the American public.”

–

Follow Fred Lucas (@FredVLucas3) on Twitter

Read More »

In this June 25, 2012 book photo, a aggregation works on a gas conduct rig at a able-bodied website for shale based accustomed gas in Zelienople, Pa. (Photo: AP/Keith Srakocic)

Tests and accurate experts accept already claimed that abounding bloom and ecology apropos angry to hydraulic fracturing for accustomed gas, generally accurate by opponents of the process, abridgement accurate backing. Now, yet addition abstraction has begin that wells near fracking sites did not acquaintance baptize contamination.

Duke University and associates of the U.S. Geological Survey examined 127 bubbler baptize wells for affirmation of abuse from methane gas or chemicals. With added than 4,000 new gas wells accomplished in Arkansas’ Fayetteville Shale aback 2004, advisers were looking for the attendance of contagion from drilling, or from by itself occurring gas or ultra-salty liquids that bleed up through above-mentioned faults.

What they begin was that Arkansas homeowners “typically had acceptable baptize quality, behindhand of whether they were abreast shale gas development,” Robert Jackson, a assistant of ecology sciences at Duke, said in a statement.

Romanian protesters holds a banderole during a affirmation adjoin hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in Bucharest April 4, 2013. Around 300 protesters aggregate in Bucharest’s University Square in beef adjoin the conduct technique, which uses top burden injections of water, beach and chemicals to able accessible bedrock and absolution oil and gas trapped inside. Hundreds of Romanians rallied in several cities to beef adjoin shale gas drilling, delivery apropos over ecology abuse and bloom hazards. (Photo: DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images)

“Only a atom of the groundwater samples we calm independent attenuated methane, mostly in low concentrations, and the isotopic fingerprint of the carbon in the methane in our samples was altered from the carbon in abysmal shale gas in all but two cases,” Avner Vengosh, assistant of geochemistry and baptize superior at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said, according to the university’s columnist release.
This would announce that the methane resulted from biological action not from shale gas contamination, Vengosh said.

The a lot of amorous critics and supporters of fracking often call the action in extremes, suggesting it is either inherently alarming for the ambiance or that it poses around no accident at all. But Vengosh acclaimed that generalizations about fracking in Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Colorado don’t accomplish accurate sense.

Environmentalists date a beef to accompany with a fundraising accident by U.S. President Barack Obama on May 13, 2013 in New York City. Hundreds of demonstrators marched to beef the architecture of oil pipelines and calling for the end of hydraulic fracking for oil and gas. (Photo: Getty Images/John Moore)

“Each basin will accept its own dynamics and its own rules,” he said of the achievability of contamination, abacus that differences in able-bodied architecture and regulations play a role, too.

In the advancing agitation over fracking, the Battle aggregation has apparent a alertness to address both absolute and abrogating studies. In 2011, Battle advisers begin college concentrations of methane gas abreast conduct sites in Pennsylvania, and accompaniment regulators denounced the allegation even as ecology groups animated them.

During fracking, ample volumes of water, forth with beach and chancy chemicals, are injected into the arena to breach bedrock afar and chargeless the oil and gas trapped inside. In some areas fracking has been abhorrent for air abuse and gas leaks that accept broke able-bodied water, but the Obama administering and abounding accompaniment regulators say the convenance is safe if done properly.

A affiche bulging job and bread-and-butter advance accompanying to “fracking” is acclimated by assembly while answering questions from reporters apropos oil conduct in Illinois, at the Illinois Accompaniment Capitol Tuesday, April 30, 2013, in Springfield, Ill. (Photo: AP/Seth Perlman)

Deb Nardone, a backer for the Sierra Club, said that there “are traveling to be geological differences” in altered areas, the Associated Columnist reported. But she said what that agency is that analysis should be done in anniversary breadth afore conduct begins, to analyze accessible problems. Nardone aswell questioned whether over time the Arkansas baptize wells ability alpha to appearance abuse from drilling. “It would be absorbing to appear aback at this afterwards 5 years,” she said of the study.

One adumbrative from industry agreed with some aspects of the Arkansas study, but questioned others.

“It does acutely allege to the charge to anticipate about these things from a bounded and bounded perspective,” said Andrew Place, the acting administrator of the Center for Sustainable Shale Development, a Pittsburgh-based affiliation amid industry, ecology groups, and philanthropies that is announcement college standards for conduct in the Marcellus Shale, which covers Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and New York.

Place questioned the advancement that the Marcellus Shale is abnormally altered from the Fayetteville Shale, acquainted that Marcellus wells are about two or three times the abyss of those in Arkansas. Place said there are 6,000 anxiety or added of altered bedrock layers amid Marcellus gas wells and apparent aquifers, and appropriate that makes a “pretty compelling” case that abuse doesn’t drift unless wells are break constructed.

“Well case can be done right,” Place said.

Vengosh said the Arkansas allegation don’t beggarly that contagion can’t happen, aback adulterated able-bodied architecture or areas with altered cartography could could cause altered results.

The Associated Columnist contributed to this report. 
–

Related:

Fracking Ability Accept New Baptize Problem… and It’s Not Pollution
‘What the Frack!’ Colorado School Kids Made to Participate in Anti-Fracking Assembly
The Abstraction About Fracking and Earthquakes That Environmentalists Probably Won’t Like

Read More »

The House on Tuesday anesthetized legislation that would acceleration up the approval action of cross-border oil, gas and electricity projects with the advice of 17 Democrats, admitting a veto blackmail from Admiral Barack Obama.

The North American Activity Basement Act is a bipartisan bill that has 12 GOP cosponsors and 8 Democratic cosponsors, and it anesthetized the House Tuesday in a 238-173 vote. It would accumulate the approval of cross-border activity projects by eliminating the charge for presidential approval, and acute the approval of projects 120 canicule afterwards the achievement of an ecology appulse review.

President Barack Obama has threatened to veto a House activity bill, but 17 Democrats voted for it anyhow on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The bill prompted Obama to affair a veto blackmail Tuesday that said it would advance to faster activity basement development at the amount of cardinal safety, ecology and adopted action concerns.

“By preventing the befalling for the all-important appraisal of all factors accordant to the civic interest, the bill would actualize cogent action risks and actualize acknowledged ambiguity for allowing applicants,” the White House said in a release.

That account added that because the bill would “circumvent… accurate processes” for acknowledging cross-border projects, “if presented to the president, his chief admiral would acclaim that he veto this bill.”

The bill would not accurately administer to the long-delayed Keystone XL pipeline, although opponents say Keystone applicants could use it to abide new applications that would again be covered by the faster procedures. Supporters of the bill said Keystone is an archetype of why these projects charge to be accustomed added quickly.

“This bill would ensure that important projects would not be ashore in limbo already absolutely vetted,” said House Activity & Commerce Board Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.). “These cross-border projects would no best face added red band and advancing delays artlessly because they cantankerous a civic border.”

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on Upton’s committee, sided with the White House, and said the bill would acquiesce all projects to be rubber-stamped.

“The bill makes an end-run about the Civic Ecology Action Act,” Waxman argued. “Under this bill, instead of administering an ecology analysis of a accomplished activity that crosses the bound with Canada or Mexico, the NEPA analysis would be bound to just the baby area of the activity bridge the border.”

But Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.), a abiding adherent of the Keystone pipeline, said delays in activity projects are affliction U.S. civic security.

“This is an affair of civic security, and we’re traveling to yield as abounding whacks at aggravating to get this anesthetized as it takes!” he said.

Read More »

In this photo taken on Monday, Aug. 6, 2012, workers install a motored solar console at a architecture website of a top absorption photovoltaic (HCPV) ability bulb in Hami city-limits in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (Photo: AP)

Those who adopt to delay on “green energy” alternatives until they can attempt on the chargeless bazaar afterwards aborigine abetment acceptable already apperceive the drawbacks of the new technology: it is costly, inefficient, and in some cases, poses added abuse to the ambiance than accepted activity sources.

It’s absurd you’ll apprehend that from anyone in the media alfresco of Fox News or allocution radio, admitting — until now. On Saturday, the Associated Press published a lengthy, absolute section on the “hazardous waste” created as a aftereffect of solar energy.

The commodity begins:

Homeowners on the coursing for sparkling solar panels are absorbed by ads abounding with images of aboriginal landscapes and ablaze sunshine, and words about the technology’s allowances for the ambiance – and the wallet.

What barter may not apperceive is that there’s a dirtier side.

While solar is a far beneath communicable activity antecedent than atramentous or accustomed gas, abounding console makers are about grappling with a chancy decay problem. Fueled partly by billions in government incentives, the industry is creating millions of solar panels anniversary year and, in the process, millions of pounds of attenuated carrion and attenuated water.

To actuate of the material, the companies have to carriage it by barter or abuse far from their own plants to decay accessories hundreds and, in some cases, bags of afar away.

The deposit fuels acclimated to carriage that waste, experts say, is not about advised in artful solar’s carbon footprint, giving scientists and consumers who use the altitude to barometer a product’s appulse on all-around abating the consequence that solar is cleaner than it is.

After installing a solar panel, “it would yield one to three months of breeding electricity to pay off the activity invested in active those chancy decay emissions out of state,” said Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose Accompaniment University ecology studies assistant who conducts carbon brand analyses of solar, biofuel and accustomed gas production. [Emphasis added]

Chart shows the bulk of decay generated from solar companies in California that was alien to added states for disposal. (Photo: AP)

The commodity again discusses solar console companies in California, which leads the U.S. market:

The accompaniment annal appearance the 17 companies, which had 44 accomplishment accessories in California, produced 46.5 actor pounds of carrion and attenuated baptize from 2007 through the aboriginal bisected of 2011. Roughly 97 percent of it was taken to chancy decay accessories throughout the state, but added than 1.4 actor pounds were transported to nine added states: Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Nevada, Washington, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.

Several solar activity experts said they have not affected the industry’s absolute decay and were afraid at what the annal showed. ​[Emphasis added]

But what about Solyndra, the solar console aggregation that larboard taxpayers on the angle for $535 actor and angry its accessories into avant-garde art afterwards traveling bankrupt?

In this May 26, 2010 book photo, President Barack Obama, accompanied by Solyndra Chief Controlling Officer Chris Gronet, right, and Controlling Vice President Ben Bierman, left, looks at a solar console during a bout of Solyndra, Inc. (Photo: AP)

The Associated Press relates:

Solyndra…reported bearing about 12.5 actor pounds of chancy waste, abundant of it carcinogenic cadmium-contaminated water, which was beatific to decay accessories from 2007 through mid-2011.

Before the aggregation went bankrupt, arch to added analysis of the solar industry and political fallout for President Barack Obama’s administration, Solyndra said it created 100 megawatts-worth of solar panels, abundant to ability 100,000 homes.

The annal aswell appearance several added Silicon Valley solar accessories created millions of pounds of baneful decay afterwards affairs a individual solar panel, while they were developing their technology or fine-tuning their production. [Emphasis added]

But the Associated Press adds in aegis of solar energy: “While abundant of the decay produced is advised toxic, there was no affirmation it has afflicted animal health.”

The commodity concludes with the affirmation that solar activity is still bigger for the ambiance than deposit fuels, and it’s bigger that the baneful carrion end up in decay accessories than in the air or water.

The alone claiming is accepting the solar console companies to be accessible with the bulk of decay they produce.

The controlling administrator of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which began in 1982 and array companies on their ecology impact, commented: “We acquisition the all-embracing industry acknowledgment amount to our appeal for ecology advice to be appealing afflictive for an industry that is advised `green.’”

–

Related:

Your Money Hard at Work: Solyndra Tubes Angry into Avant-garde Art
Another Solyndra? Third Broke ‘Green’ Activity Aggregation Comes Under Congressional Scrutiny
President Obama Issues Major ‘Green Energy’ Controlling Order

Read More »

The White House seeks to assure that Center for American Progress architect John Podesta’s close action to the Keystone XL activity won’t appulse the accommodation authoritative on the matter. But isn’t removing himself from any added issues he and CAP has bidding opinions on.

FILE – In this Monday, Aug. 10, 2009, book photo, Center for American Progress Action Fund Admiral & CEO John Podesta speaks at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0, at The Cox Pavillion in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Eric Jamison, File) AP Photo/Eric Jamison, File

Because the activity would amplitude from Canada through the United States, the activity that proponents appraisal would actualize at atomic 20,000 jobs and aftermath at atomic 800,000 barrels of oil, is beneath analysis by the State Department. But eventually it will be up to the White House to adjudge on State’s recommendation.

Podesta, who is abutting the administering as a new presidential counsel, has removed himself from any White House approval or disapproval of the pipeline.

But White House agent Josh Earnest told reporters Wednesday that “recuse” wasn’t the appropriate word.

“There is no advancement of a battle of absorption banking or contrarily as it relates to Mr. Podesta’s angle or opinions on this matter,” Earnest said. “Mr. Podesta approached Mr. [Dennis] McDonough, the arch of staff, and appropriate to him that Mr. Podesta shouldn’t plan on the action authoritative action of the Keystone pipeline.”

Earlier this year, the State Department appear a basic address on Keystone XL adage the activity was absurd to could cause cogent ecology impact.

“This is a action action that has been in abode for several years now and accepting in in the action at the end or abreast the actual end doesn’t assume to be the best way to backpack out that process,” Earnest said. He added, “His angle on this are able-bodied apperceive but there are humans who accept been searching at this for a amount of years and are examination this from a array of perspectives. We wish to accomplish abiding the action aftereffect reflects the president’s angle in an candid way.”

Earnest took several questions on Podesta, and why it was he took himself out of accommodation authoritative on this amount but not assorted added action positions from the advanced anticipate catchbasin Center for American Progress that the administering will be considering.

“There’s no agnosticism he has bidding his angle on added things,” Earnest said. “Many of those angle are absolutely bluntly beneath arguable and aren’t as abundant of a lighting rod as this accurate affair is.”

Earnest fatigued afresh that Podesta is demography himself out of Keystone accommodation authoritative and was not pressured to break out.

“Those angle were about bidding afore he started alive here,” Earnest said. “So it is his appearance that it is bigger if his able-bodied apperceive angle are not injected at the actual end of that process.”

The House anesthetized a bipartisan bill this summer to body the pipeline, which has abutment from organized activity and business groups. However, ecology groups argue the activity construction.

Podesta served as White House arch of agents for Admiral Bill Clinton and was aswell ran Obama’s alteration aggregation if the admiral was adopted in 2008. He founded CAP in 2003 to be a action balance to the Heritage Foundation, a bourgeois anticipate tank.

–

Other Must-Read Stories

Read More »

People wish jobs and for the government to yield added from the wealthiest boyhood of Americans, big surprise.

A new poll conducted by United Technologies and The National Journal surveying the American people’s abutment of key account laid out in Admiral Obama’s State of the Union abode endure anniversary begin that the administrator in arch could await on cutting abutment for his angle to tax American companies operating abroad, and added than boilerplate advance to tax anyone who earns at atomic $1 actor at a minimum amount of 30 percent of their anniversary income.

“By a whopping 76-percent-to-19-percent margin, Americans agreed with Obama’s angle to ‘impose a minimum tax on money American companies acquire from their operations away to abash them from creating jobs across and animate them to actualize jobs in the U.S.’  When it comes to the alleged Buffett Rule—named for billionaire broker Warren Buffett—65 percent surveyed agreed with the hypothesis that Congress should “establish a new aphorism that anyone who earns at atomic $1 actor annually have to pay at atomic 30 percent of their assets in taxes,’ while just 31 percent disagreed. “

While the Admiral can adhere his hat on accessible abutment to access taxes on millionaires and businesses exporting jobs abroad, those surveyed were black with the President’s accommodation to snub the Keystone XL pipeline and the bags of jobs it could create, due to ecology concerns.

“One affair the admiral did not acknowledgment in his accent was his position on the Keystone XL activity to backpack oil from Canada to the United States. Supporters of the activity say it will affluence America’s assurance on Mideast oil and actualize jobs. Opponents abhorrence the ecology appulse of architecture a pipeline. What about you—do you abutment or argue architecture the Keystone XL pipeline?’ Sixty-four percent of respondents advantaged its construction, while alone 22 percent against it.”

The two autonomous issues both affiance to actualize jobs and action political accretion for anniversary party, abutment for the Buffet Aphorism demanding the affluent to aid Democrats, abutment of the activity to aid Republicans. Either way, respondents are in acceding that the issues are acceptable not traveling to be apparent any time soon, with an agitative 70 percent of those surveyed adage it was not too acceptable or not at all acceptable that the admiral and Congress would accede on the above account Obama presented.

Read More »

IVANPAH DRY LAKE, Calif. (AP) — Workers at a advanced solar bulb in the Mojave Arid accept a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun appliance — “streamers,” for the smoke alias that comes from birds that burn in midair

Federal wildlife board who visited the BrightSource Activity bulb endure year and watched as birds austere and fell, advertisement an boilerplate of one “streamer” every two minutes, are advancement California admiral to arrest the operator’s appliance to body a still-bigger version.

This October 2013 photo provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows a austere Yellow-rumped Warbler that was begin at the Ivanpah solar bulb in the California Mojave Desert. Workers at a advanced new solar bulb accept a chat for the birds that fly over the plant’s five-mile acreage of mirrors, “streamers,” for the breath of smoke as the birds burn in mid-air and abatement singed to the ground. (AP/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

The board wish the arrest until the abounding admeasurement of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now ambit from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an able for the Center for Biological Diversity ecology group.

The deaths are “alarming. It’s harder to say whether that’s the breadth or the technology,” said Garry George, renewable-energy administrator for the California affiliate of the Audubon Society. “There needs to be some caution.”

The bird kills mark the latest instance in which the adventure for apple-pie activity sometimes has careless ecology harm. Solar farms accept been criticized for their impacts on arid tortoises, and wind farms accept dead birds, including abundant raptors.

New estimates for the Ivanpah solar plant, an avant-garde year-old $2.2 billion solar activity with Google as a aloft investor, say bags of birds are dying yearly, broiled by the concentrated sun appliance from the added than 300,000 mirrors. (AP/Chris Carlson, File)

“We yield this affair actual seriously,” said Jeff Holland, a agent for NRG Solar of Carlsbad, California, the additional of the three companies abaft the plant. The third, Google, deferred animadversion to its partners.

The $2.2 billion plant, which launched in February, is at Ivanpah Dry Basin abreast the California-Nevada border. The abettor says it is the world’s better bulb to apply alleged ability towers.

More than 300,000 mirrors, anniversary the admeasurement of a barn door, reflect solar appliance assimilate three boiler architecture anniversary looming up to 40 belief high. The baptize central is acrimonious to aftermath steam, which turns turbines that accomplish abundant electricity for 140,000 homes.

The website uses over 300,000 mirrors to focus sunlight on boilers’ tubes aloft 450 bottom ability architecture heating baptize into beef which in about-face drives turbines to actualize electricity. (AP/John Locher)

Sun appliance beatific up by the acreage of mirrors are ablaze abundant to amaze pilots aerial in and out of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Federal wildlife admiral said Ivanpah ability act as a “mega-trap” for wildlife, with the ablaze ablaze of the bulb alluring insects, which in about-face allure insect-eating birds that fly to their afterlife in the acutely focused ablaze rays.

Federal and accompaniment biologists alarm the amount of deaths significant, based on sightings of birds accepting singed and falling, and on retrieval of carcasses with accoutrement broiled too acutely for flight.

Ivanpah admiral altercation the antecedent of the alleged streamers, adage at atomic some of the puffs of smoke mark insects and $.25 of aerial debris getting afire by the solar rays.

Wildlife admiral who witnessed the phenomena say abounding of the clouds of smoke were too big to appear from annihilation but a bird, and they add that they saw “birds entering the solar alteration and igniting, appropriately become a streamer.”

U.S. Fish and Wildlife admiral say they wish a afterlife assessment for a abounding year of operation.

Given the credible calibration of bird deaths at Ivanpah, authorities should thoroughly clue bird kills there for a year, including during anniversary afoot seasons, afore acceding any added permits for that affectionate of solar technology, said George, of the Audubon Society.

The assessment on birds has been surprising, said Robert Weisenmiller, administrator of the California Activity Commission. “We didn’t see a lot of impact” on birds at the first, abate ability architecture in the U.S. and Europe, Weisenmiller said.

The bureau is now because the appliance from Oakland-based BrightSource to body a mirror acreage and a 75-story ability belfry that would ability aloft the beach dunes and brook washes amid Joshua Tree National Park and the California-Arizona border.

The proposed bulb is on a flight aisle for birds amid the Colorado River and California’s better lake, the Salton Sea — an area, experts say, is richer in aerial activity than the Ivanpah plant, with adequate aureate eagles and alien falcons and added than 100 added breed of birds recorded there.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service admiral warned California this ages that the power-tower appearance of solar technology holds “the accomplished accident potential” of the abounding solar projects beginning in the chastening of California.

The commission’s agents estimates the proposed new belfry would be about four times as alarming to birds as the Ivanpah plant. The bureau is accepted to adjudge this autumn on the proposal.

While biologists say there is no accepted achievable way to barrier the amount of birds killed, the companies abaft the projects say they are acquisitive to acquisition one — belief whether lights, sounds or some added technology would alarm them away, said Joseph Desmond, chief carnality admiral at BrightSource Energy.

BrightSource aswell is alms $1.8 actor in advantage for advancing bird deaths at Palen, Desmond said.

The aggregation is proposing the money for programs such as those to castrate and alter calm cats, which a government abstraction begin annihilate over 1.4 billion birds a year. Opponents say that would do annihilation to advice the arid birds at the proposed site.

Power-tower proponents are angry to accumulate the deaths from banishment a abeyance in the architecture of new plants if they see the technology on the border of acceptable added affordable and accessible, said Thomas Conroy, a renewable-energy expert.

When it comes to powering the country’s grids, “diversity of technology … is critical,” Conroy said. “Nobody should be arguing let’s be all coal, all solar,” all wind, or all nuclear. “And every one of those technologies has a continued account of pros and cons.”

Read More »

Home Depot and Lowe’s are beneath blaze for affairs pesticides that some accept are partly to accusation for killing billions of the nation’s honey bees.

Getty Images

Petitions with bags of signatures are getting delivered to the home-improvement retailers this week, demanding they stop affairs the pesticides—called neonicotinoids—along with any plants in the aliment that accept been advised with them. Neonicotinoids are the a lot of broadly acclimated chic of pesticides in the world.

“There’s a growing physique of science advertence that the pesticides are a key agency in contempo all-around bee deaths,” said Lisa Archer, administrator of the aliment and technology affairs at the ecology group, Friends of the Earth.

Archer said her group, which is arch the address effort, activated plants for auction at Lowe’s and Home Depot and added than bisected had the pesticides. She said because there were no labels on the plants or pesticides that they could be adverse to bees, consumers were larboard in the aphotic about the dangers.

Home Depot was acquainted of the pesticide affair afore the address accomplishment began, said Ron Jarvis, carnality admiral of affairs and sustainability at the retailer.

“We’ve been in acquaintance for months with several ecology groups about neonicotinoids,” Jarivs told CNBC by phone. “Now we’ve been in acquaintance with Friends of the Earth.”

Jarvis said Home Depot has been alive on an addition to neonicotinoids for some time and several of the retailer’s suppliers are already application the replacements. He said that anti-pesticide petitioners who accept been in the aliment this anniversary accept been actual polite—and that anytime anyone has an affair with a Home Depot product, it is taken seriously.

Lowe’s has not fabricated any accessible statements or responded to affair requests from Friends of the Earth, said Archer. (Calls to the company’s accumulated offices were not alternate in time for this story.)

Another celebrated bee die-off

Bees and added pollinators are analytical in producing—through the pollination of plants—two-thirds of the aliment crops bodies eat every day. It’s estimated that amid $20 billion and $30 billion in American agronomics assembly depends on honey bees and added pollinators.

—

RELATED:

Pacific storm eases California drought, but accompaniment has continued way to go

How the Pacific could be California’s aridity fix
US banal futures bead added afterwards claims, retail sales
Lisa was alleged a ‘slut’ by bank’s big abstracts hijinks
Ackman talks Herbalife, P&G, Target, Air Products

—

But the bees are dying by the billions. The accepted name for what’s killing them is Colony Collapse Disorder.

Last year, U.S. beekeepers appear accident 40 to 100 percent of their hives, and they are acceptable adverse addition winter of celebrated bee die-offs, according to the Friends of the Earth.

©2014 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. Mark Koba.

Read More »

Author Neil Swidey is absolution a new book this Tuesday blue-blooded “Trapped Beneath the Sea,” a chance about how a multi-billion dollar, multi-year, acknowledged and authoritative daydream of a activity to body an about 10-mile continued engineering curiosity of a adit abysmal beneath Boston Harbor fell on the amateur of 5 dejected collar Americans–some of whom never fabricated it back, and others whose lives would never be the same.

Read on for an absolute extract from the book, and be on the anchor for Blaze Books’ assay and account with columnist Neil Swidey tomorrow.

Prologue

JULY 21, 1999

He was about to activate a miles-long expedition into the dank, aphotic intes­tines of the earth, but DJ Gillis wouldn’t go until he’d activate a section of twine.

Two of the added authentic had already arranged themselves into the “man cage,” a tubular bassinet of chicken metal that would be bargain by crane down a 420-foot shaft. But they couldn’t go afterwards DJ, and he wasn’t about to be hurried.

“C’mon, DJ,” one of the guys shouted. “Let’s go!”

DJ abandoned the calls as he searched an accessories trailer, coursing through bags of rain accessory and crates of tools. The summer sun was alpha its ascend aloft Deer Island, a peninsula that hangs down from the arctic like a breach into Boston Harbor, crimper in foreground of Logan International Airport.

DJ’s boss, a hard-charging guy by the name of Tap Taylor, was continuing abreast the man cage and accident his patience. “Let’s go!” Tap yelled.

The two of them had a abutting if burnable relationship. Tap’s atypical focus was architecture his babyish New Hampshire bartering diving business into something bigger, and he anticipation annihilation of log­ging fourteen-hour accouterment every day of the week. Still, he had a bendable atom for DJ, alleviative the airy twenty-nine-year-old added like a kid brother than an employee.

Over the years, they had developed a accent as anticipated as the badinage amid an anchorman and weatherman on the eve of a big storm. DJ, a six-foot-two, absolutely congenital charmer, would appearance up backward to the job site, occasionally abandoned off by some albino or bistered he’d been partying with the night before. As DJ bald off yesterday’s clothes and put on his dive gear, Tap would curse, threat­ening to bang him off the job. But those outbursts consistently concluded the aforementioned way. Afore long, Tap would calm down and activate pumping DJ for data from his latest chance bent confined and bent beds.

“C’mon!” Tap shouted again.

“If you’re in that abundant of a hurry,” DJ barked, “then go with­out me!”

It was the morning of July 21, 1999, a Wednesday, and the ten­sion was thick, mainly because so abounding problems had alike on the activity that Monday and Tuesday. Accepting down the thirty-foot-wide shaft would be the simple part. The claiming would arise if the authentic had to accomplish their way to the end of a aphotic adit that began at the abject of the shaft and kept traveling and going, beneath the sea, for about ten miles.

Tap would be ecology the divers’ advance from boarded on Deer Island. He was in no affection for DJ’s accepted antics. In reality, nei­ther was DJ. The abandoned woman he had on his apperception appropriate now was the Virgin Mary. He bare the section of braid to tie a babyish religious badge to the abject of his harder hat. The egg-shaped badge had already be­longed to his grandfather, a carpenter who helped body the Pruden­tial Tower that authentic Boston’s skyline.

DJ had asked his mother for it the night before, canonizing the chance of how his grandfathering had kept the Miraculous Badge in his abridged the accomplished time he spent architecture that skyscraper, demography com­fort in the Blessed Virgin’s protection. Seeking abundance himself, DJ had calculating asked his mom, “Is that still around?”

“Yes,” she had replied cautiously. “Why?”

“I’m a little anxious about the job.”

As abundant as he had approved to downplay his growing anxiety with the adit project, DJ hadn’t been afraid to see abhorrence beam above his mother’s face. He had just torn one of the basal rules he’d abstruse aboriginal on in his career as a bartering diver, if he’d apparent oil rigs invert and cranes collapse: Never acquaint your ancestors the accuracy about the dangers of the job. It isn’t fair to dump that affectionate of anguish on them.

But this wasn’t like any job DJ had formed on before. Hell, it wasn’t like any job anyone had formed on before. And that challenge—to accomplish history in his field, to do the acutely undoable—was what had awash DJ on the adit appointment in the aboriginal place. With every­thing that had gone down in the endure few days, though, he was activity some buyer’s remorse.

Finally, he activate the twine, attached the Virgin Mary, and put on his harder hat as he strode over to the man cage.

Tap was still heated. “What the hell were you doing?” he snapped. “We’ve got a job to do here.”

DJ took off his hat and angry it over, so his bang-up could see the badge dangling from it. “I’m demography affliction of myself,” he said.

Tap’s beef instantly lifted. “It’s accepting that bad, huh?”

The man cage spun boring as it abashed down the shaft, like a affable whirlpool of baptize ambit about a drain. DJ was a talker, but now he acquainted no appetite to speak. He stared above the cage at the added two divers, guys he’d accepted for abandoned a brace of weeks. He had an es­pecially boxy time accepting a bean on the beneath of the two, Dave Riggs. While authentic tended to be a disorderly bunch, anguish beers and swapping belief afterwards their shift, Riggs didn’t alcohol and kept to himself. During one of their aboriginal canicule animate together, DJ had been accomplishing what he consistently did—telling lots of tales, brindled with color­ful words—when Riggs angry to him and said, “I’d acknowledge it if you didn’t use abhorrent accent aural my earshot.” DJ narrowed his eyes as he stared aback at Riggs in disbelief. Again he said the aboriginal affair that came into his head: “Are you f***ing badinage me?” He’d been a diver for seven years, and he’d never already arise above anyone who abashed a job website with a abbey pew.

He had a bigger affiliation with the added guy in the cage, Don­ald Hosford, accepted as Hoss to anybody except his mother. Hoss had a ropy, six-foot-five body and the asperous looks of anyone who ability arise in a annual ad for the Copenhagen bite he consistently kept wadded beneath his lip. He was abandoned twenty-four years old, but he formed with the aplomb and abiding movements of a acclimatized veteran. To DJ, Hoss embodied the cowboy spirit of the accomplished authentic he’d consistently looked up to: bold guys who could be asperous and even awkward on the job, but who consistently addressed a adult as “ma’am” and reflexively pulled out a armchair for her. Still, DJ anticipation to himself, the guy seemed so barbarous that, if allegation be, he could put a ammo in addition man’s forehead and again go appropriate aback to bistro his supper.

As the man cage neared the bottom, DJ anchored his eyes on a fat ven­tilation aqueduct that transported air from Deer Island, down the shaft, and into the tunnel. For years, a “bag line” had run all nine and a bisected afar of the tunnel, accouterment affluence of ambient air to the subterra­nean workers accepted as sandhogs, who were amenable for burrow­ing down under. Now the aqueduct concluded appropriate area the shaft did, at the actual alpha of the tunnel.

DJ had heard that the sandhogs had spent about a decade mining the tunnel—twice as continued as planned—and that the architect was tens of millions of dollars in the red. The actuality that he and the added authentic were getting alleged in during the final hour was itself affirmation that something had gone actively wrong. Afterwards all, the authentic were getting asked to accomplishment the job even admitting the ventilation, electric­ity, and busline systems—the basement that had kept the sandhogs alive—had already been removed from the tunnel.

DJ couldn’t acquaint if the project’s administration beheld his aggregation as their cav­alry or as the agnate of a Hail Mary pass. The few sandhogs still blind about on Deer Island absolutely seemed to resent the divers’ arrival, as admitting it adumbrated a declining on their part. If the authentic suffered a adjournment afterwards one of their accessories trailers was damaged, a adept sandhog had reacted with exasperation, asking, “How continued is it traveling to yield to fix it?” Hoss hadn’t absent a exhausted in putting the guy in his place. “Well, I’ll acquaint you what,” he had said, animated with a wad of bite billowing beneath his lip. “It ain’t gonna yield nine years.”

At the abject of the shaft, it was cold—about fifty degrees—and misty. There was a appropriate bulk of ablaze and air there, but if DJ let his eyes aberrate east into the tunnel, they bound got absent in the dark. To him, it looked like the actual centermost of a atramentous hole.

High aloft that hole, Deer Island was in the final stages of its conver­sion into one of the better and a lot of adult avenue assay plants in the country, the destination for every toilet even in the east­ern bisected of Massachusetts. On the southern end of the island stood the plant’s a lot of apparent component, a array of behemothic digester tanks that looked like aberrant eggs from some 1950s sci-fi cine set. Each egg was fourteen belief high, and fittingly, there were a dozen of them. But the a lot of complicated allotment of the project, the construc­tion of the Deer Island Outfall Tunnel, had taken abode far from view.

Imagine you are venturing into a adit that’s been apathetic into the basement beneath the ocean and that continues beeline out, hundreds of anxiety beneath the seafloor, for about ten miles. There is no light, besides the abreast afterglow advancing from the ball on your helmet. There is no sound, besides the baptize decrepit aerial or sloshing about your boots. A lot of important, there is no breathable air, be­sides what you brought in with you, a buoy pumping through a corrupt and into your facemask. At the end of the tunnel, you don’t even accept abundant allowance to angle up straight, aback it chokes down to just 5 anxiety in bore afore accident abruptly. It’s the world’s longest blocked tunnel, so there’s no way out added than axis about and authoritative the chancy expedition aback to area you started.

For perspective, accede that the centermost ocean point on earth, the Challenger Abysmal basin in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, lies 6.8 afar beneath the apparent of the water—a ambit about three afar less than the Deer Island tunnel’s absolute length. Granted, the appearance of Challenger Deep’s absorption is vertical, and the tun­nel’s is mostly horizontal. But because of the tunnel’s abhorrent con­ditions, its endpoint finer makes it further from the apparent than the abject of that trench.

All the carrion advised at Deer Island’s new bulb would ultimately accomplish its way to the end of that accumbent tunnel, again biking through a alternation of vertical pipes aggressive up to the ocean floor, afore getting appear into the sea. But that couldn’t appear unless DJ and the added authentic managed to get all the way out there first. They had been dis­patched on a hazardous, high-stakes mission to fix a botheration that had ashamed some of the world’s top engineering and architecture companies for years. If the authentic were successful, the abandoned adit could be flooded, acceptance billions of gallons of advised avenue baptize to activate abounding out to sea. Larboard unsolved, the botheration threatened to about-face the new adit into a $300 actor white elephant, if not ren­der the absolute court-ordered cleanup of Boston Harbor a multibillion-dollar decay of aborigine money.

Boston Harbor was already a civic embarrassment, a canal abandoned from American history but begrimed by the baking amounts of carrion and carrion dumped into it every day. Thanks abundantly to the Deer Island assay bulb and tunnel, it is now con­sidered one of the country’s cleanest burghal harbors, an actual ecology success story, with no curtailment of bookish affidavit extolling it as a civic model. The allotment of the chance that is hardly discussed, however—and the allotment that offers analytical acquaint for un­derstanding how actual ablaze humans can accomplish actual bad decisions—is how a all-inclusive engineering curiosity of a activity concluded with a scattering of authentic getting beatific into the atramentous with an improvised, abstinent plan. And how their mission angry into a agonizing chase to get out alive.

DJ and the added authentic were acclimated to danger. They were Navy SEAL–type guys who ran against it if everybody abroad was active away. Unlike their accepted assignments, this one wouldn’t crave them to plan while abysmal in water. But the altitude they would face in the adit were far added hazardous. They had been assassin because they knew how to do architecture plan in capricious settings area they had to accumulation their own breath air. And by this point, the long, abandoned adit had become an oxygen-starved, baneful tube.

It wasn’t harder for the authentic to ascertain the annoyed and finger-pointing advancing from the project’s above players. Yet DJ and the others were absolutely in the aphotic about the acuteness of the battles that had preceded their arrival. They didn’t apperceive that brinksman­ship amid the architect architecture the adit and the government bureau that endemic it had triggered the acute accommodation to band the adit of all its lighting and breathable air. And they absolutely had no abstraction the architect had warned, in an eerily clear-sighted announcement one year earlier, that if a dive aggregation were to be beatific in afterwards the tunnel’s blast had been removed, “the accident of accident would be ex­ponentially higher.”

As it angry out, the authentic were asked to do something so experi­mental, acute them to be so absolutely cut off from civilization, that they ability as able-bodied accept been animate on the apparent of the moon.

In added ways, though, they were artlessly continuing a attitude area blue-collar workers are the ones accepted to transform the admirable dreams of engineers and the promises of politicians into con­crete reality. True, they weren’t animate in the canicule of the Hoover Dam’s construction, if adjustment was bare and the accident of about one hundred artisan lives was beheld as an actuarially unremark­able assessment for such an aggressive undertaking. The beginning for accept­able animal accident had been bargain badly over the advance of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the authentic were animate at a time if designers and engineers—emboldened by new technology and pressured by governments and corporations to abode a growing population’s avaricious allegation for added fuel, transportation, and decay management—were blame the banned of the possible. And no amount how absorbing an engineer’s band-aid ability accept looked on a com­puter screen, it still appropriate a agglomeration of workers in harder hats to backpack it out.

These are the abundantly airy laborers who body our bridges and adjustment our pipelines, dig our tunnels and arrect our towers. While the designers and developers yield the bows at the banquets and award cuttings, the workers are the ones who accept the absolute risks. Yet they tend to beam into accessible alertness abandoned if groups of them are asleep or imperiled. In 2010 alone, eleven oil rig workers absent their lives on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, twenty-nine atramentous miners were incinerated in the Upper Big Branch access in West Virginia, and thirty-three miners were trapped for sixty-nine canicule in the San Jose chestnut and gold abundance in Chile. A year earlier, the Las Vegas Sun won a Pulitzer Prize for advertisement the deaths of twelve con­struction workers aural eighteen months during a agitated architecture bang forth the Vegas Strip—a artisan afterlife amount of one every six weeks.

Still, few humans apprehension the casualties if they come, as they about do, in increments of one or two. That’s about consistently the arrangement in the apple of bartering divers, a fraternity of just a cou­ple thousand full-time architecture workers who appear to do their architecture and adjustment underwater. At the time of the Deer Island mis­sion, a beginning government assay zeroing in on diver fatalities gar­nered little accessible absorption even as its allegation bouncing through the fraternity. The address from the Centers for Disease Control activate that bartering authentic were asleep on the job at a amount forty times college than that of the boilerplate worker.

The Deer Island adit was twenty-four anxiety in bore but became progressively narrower forth its final stretch. DJ took abundance in the actuality that at atomic the authentic wouldn’t accept to airing the absolute nine and a bisected miles. Instead, they would biking in two souped‑up Hummer Humvees. They bare two because abysmal central the adit there wouldn’t be abundant allowance to about-face a car around. So they acclimated a two-way bivouac to tow a additional Humvee adverse in the adverse direc­tion, which they would use for the acknowledgment trip. DJ admired the military-special-ops feel to the mission, even if the beatnik breath arrangement at the centermost of it fabricated him nervous.

Over by the Humvees, he activate the added two authentic who would annular out their team. Tim Nordeen was a croaking guy who had re­cently baldheaded down his bristling bristles into a bristles so it wouldn’t in­terfere with the allowance on his facemask. At thirty-nine, Tim was the oldest guy on the aggregation and had the air of anyone who’d accomplished abundant in activity to apperceive not to diaphoresis its little stresses.

Standing on the bonanza of one of the Humvees was foreman Billy Juse, who happened to be DJ’s abutting acquaintance and the abandoned affiliate of the aggregation he knew well. Billy had a slim, five-foot-nine anatomy and a aphotic mustache with edges as boxlike off as band cut with scissors. DJ admired to aggravate Billy about that thick, close landing band beneath his nose. “Hey, Billy,” he would say. “I forgot to accompany my cafeteria today. You apperception if I apple-pie off your mustache if you’re done eating? I’m abiding I can acquisition abundant larboard over in there to accomplish a sandwich.”

The aggregation would drive the Humvees as far into the adit as they could go. At that point, two authentic would affected out while the added three trudged on bottom to the actual end of the tunnel. The appointment alleged for DJ and Tim to abide in the Humvee. But afore the jour­ney began, Billy pulled his associate aside. He said his aback was affliction and asked DJ to about-face places with him.

“You’re a pussy,” DJ said.

“Maybe so,” Billy attempt back, “but I’m your boss.”

That was abandoned partially true, and they aggregate a animate laugh. They both usually answered to Tap, but it had already become pain­fully bright that on this job, even Tap wasn’t in charge.

After a slow, two-hour drive, the advance Humvee accomplished the nine-and-a-quarter-mile mark, above which it could go no farther. Billy and Tim remained active central the vehicle, ecology the breath­ing arrangement for all 5 divers, while DJ, Riggs, and Hoss began their expedition on foot.

The three guys remained connected, through about fifteen hun­dred anxiety of hose, to the air arrangement aback in the Humvee. The corrupt was alleged an umbilical because a diver could not survive afterwards it any best than a babyish in the abyss could survive afterwards hers.

It took DJ, Riggs, and Hoss twenty account to trudge, with their gear, about eleven hundred feet. Hoss positioned himself alfresco the final amplitude of the tunnel, just afore its amplitude shrank to 5 feet. His job was to watch over their access to the capital breath arrangement and use a communications wire to alarm in alternate updates to Tim aback in the Humvee.

DJ and Riggs slogged onward, duck-walking several hundred anxiety added to the tunnel’s end. Already there, Riggs took on the toughest assignment, shimmying abysmal into a slimy, angular adapter aqueduct to abolish a abundant assurance plug. With DJ’s help, he would allegation to echo that assignment in a alternation of pipes. To a lot of people, the claustrophobia central that cramped, atramentous amplitude so far from acculturation would be paralyz­ing. The aqueduct Riggs had to clamber through abstinent just thirty inches across—not abundant added than his shoulders. And he had to be accurate not to jostle the bulky breath accessory that was befitting him alive.

Not continued afterwards Riggs emerged from the pipe, Hoss noticed that the divers’ umbilicals had become alarmingly tangled. He instructed DJ and Riggs to get their hoses straightened out afore accomplishing annihilation else.

As Hoss began his own untangling effort, he looked up to see something startling. DJ was annoyed assimilate the adit floor, in a aberrant affectionate of automatic apathetic motion.

“Are you okay, DJ?” Hoss yelled, muffled, through his facemask.

Before he could accomplishment his sentence, Riggs went down next, falling on one knee in foreground of DJ.

Hoss al of a sudden acquainted addled himself, in a balmy and down-covered way, as admitting he had just tossed aback a few cocktails. He had abundant attendance of apperception to apperceive that balmy and down-covered was not how you capital to be activity if you were active beneath the sea, afar from land. “I allegation to alarm Tim,” he said.

When he accomplished Tim on the comm wire, Hoss apprenticed him for what the oxygen agreeable was in their capital breath supply. Any­thing beneath 19 percent meant trouble. Tim said he and Billy would check. A few abnormal after Tim alleged back. “Shi*, it’s 8.9!” he shouted, frantically.

Then the band went dead.

_________

Excerpted from TRAPPED UNDER THE SEA: One Engineering Marvel, 5 Men, and a Disaster Ten Afar Into the Darkness by Neil Swidey. Copyright 2014 by the columnist and reprinted by permission of Crown Publishers.

Read More »

KATMANDU, Nepal (AP) — An barrage swept down a aggressive avenue on Mount Everest aboriginal Friday, killing at atomic 12 Nepalese guides and abrogation four missing in the deadliest adversity on the world’s accomplished peak. Several added were injured.

The Sherpa guides had gone to fix ropes for added climbers if the barrage addled an breadth accepted as the “popcorn field” for its billowing chunks of ice at about 6:30 a.m., Nepal Tourism Ministry official Krishna Lamsal said from the abject camp, area he was ecology accomplishment efforts.

An afflicted survivor told his ancestors the aisle up the abundance was ambiguous just afore the barrage addled at an acclivity just beneath 21,000 anxiety (6,400 meters). As anon as the barrage hit, rescuers, guides and climbers rushed to help.

Rescue workers pulled out 12 bodies from beneath mounds of snow and ice and were analytic for the four missing guides, Lamsal said. Admiral had beforehand said three were missing.

(AP Photo/Kevin Frayer, File)

Four survivors were afflicted abominably abundant to crave airlifting to a hospital in Katmandu. One accustomed during the day, and three taken to the acropolis boondocks of Lukla could be abandoned Saturday. Others with beneath austere injuries were getting advised at abject camp.

The barrage addled advanced of the aiguille aggressive season, if hundreds of climbers, guides and abutment crews were at Everest’s abject affected advancing to ascend to the acme if acclimate altitude are at their a lot of favorable aboriginal next month. They had been ambience up camps at college altitudes, and guides were acclimation routes and ropes on the slopes above.

The bank of snow and ice hit just beneath Affected 2, which sits at an acclivity of 21,000 anxiety on the 29,036-foot mountain, said Ang Tshering of the Nepal Mountaineering Association.

One afflicted guide, Dawa Tashi, lay in the accelerated affliction assemblage at Grande Hospital in the basic backward Friday afterwards getting abandoned from the mountain. Doctors said he suffered several torn ribs and would be in the hospital for a few days.

Tashi told his visiting ancestors that the Sherpa guides woke up aboriginal and were on their way to fix ropes to the college camps but were delayed because of the capricious path. Suddenly the barrage fell on the accumulation and active abounding of them, according to Tashi’s sister-in-law Dawa Yanju.

The Sherpa humans are one of the capital indigenous groups in Nepal’s aerial region, and abounding accomplish their active as aggressive guides on Everest and added Himalayan peaks.

More than 4,000 climbers accept summited Everest back 1953, if it was aboriginal baffled by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. Hundreds accept died attempting to ability the peak.

The affliction recorded adversity on Everest had been a angry blast on May 11, 1996, that acquired the deaths of eight climbers, including acclaimed backwoodsman Rob Hall, and was after memorialized in a book, “Into Thin Air,” by Jon Krakauer. Six Nepalese guides were dead in an barrage in 1970.

Earlier this year, Nepal appear several accomplish to bigger administer the abundant breeze of climbers and acceleration up accomplishment operations. The accomplish included the celerity of admiral and aegis cadre to the abject affected at 17,380 anxiety (5,300 meters), area they will break throughout the bounce aggressive division that ends in May.

Read More »

“Big Army” is about to accommodated “Big Brother.”

U.S. Soldiers’ emails will be beneath cyber surveillance as allotment of a new Defense Department action to advice ascertain abeyant “insider threats” from traitors or terrorists operating central the military, according to the Aggressive Times.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is aggravating to architecture “a apartment of algorithms that can ascertain assorted types of cabal threats by allegory massive amounts of abstracts — including email, argument letters and book transfers — for abnormal activity,” according to a account from the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is allowance advance the system.

The catalyst for the arrangement comes in acknowledgment to the Fort Hood cutting and the advertisement of the Wikileaks abstracts online. Two army servicemen, Major Nadal Hasan and Private Bradley Manning, faces accuse for those incidents.

DARPA’s website describes the project, clearly accepted as the Anomaly Apprehension at Assorted Scales program, as “insider blackmail apprehension in which bad-natured (or possibly inadvertent) accomplishments by a trusted alone are detected adjoin a accomplishments of accustomed arrangement activity,” according to the agency’s website.

While DARPA clearly recognizes the program, its cadre will not accord added advice on its ambit and accessible added applications to the noncombatant world. A DARPA spokesman told Aggressive Times he was:

“Unable to accommodate added advice about the project, to cover whether the tracking will be bound to official government computers; if such ecology could begin; or how abounding troops ability be monitored during the development phase, which is slated to yield two years.”

The affairs will aswell clue soldiers’ downloads and keystrokes to actualize a account for of all-important “further investigations.”

Some aggressive experts accept threats central the Department of Defense from traitors, terrorists, and saboteurs are on the rise.

(h/t Military Times)

Read More »

There is a new amateur in the anytime arguable area tracking game. Amazon acquired apparent for a affairs that would track area users go with adaptable devices and use such advice to adumbrate area they’ll go next in adjustment to best ambition them with alone ads and coupons, according to CBS MoneyWatch (via CNET).

Erik Sherman for CBS letters that Amazon joins Google, Apple and Microsoft with its apparent that went through endure week. Sherman has added on what Amazon’s affairs would do:

The arrangement calculates a aisle and again predicts a set of acceptable next destinations. Again the arrangement takes bids from third parties that wish to forward business letters to displays forth the avenue the being takes, apparently ecology acceleration and administration to time displays for best adventitious of visibility.

Additional claims accomplish bright that the ad could aswell go to the adaptable accessory — including a bulletin to acquaint the being to attending over at a accurate display. Shades of a science fiction adventure (or Minority Report), area alone ads chase and arise on accessible displays wherever you go.

Sherman letters that in tracking location, this could beggarly specific food central of a mall. (Earlier this year two malls tracked smartphone signals to appraise barter movement through the capital and what they seemed to like/dislike.)

Amazon’s apparent states “mobile accessory users’ accepted and accomplished biking patterns may be analyzed to actuate a predicted next destination. For instance, by allegory the contempo movements of a adaptable accessory user a part of food in a arcade mall, it may be bent that a accurate abundance is a predicted next destination for the adaptable accessory user.”

Amazon gives the archetype of accouterment coupons, or the like, if the affairs senses a being is in a assertive store. As Sherman sums it up, here’s area it gets a bit creepy:

Location ties to function. If you apperceive what array of enactment is at a spot, you can alpha to accomplish added able guesses of what a being is doing. The added stops, the added affairs of putting calm a account of what a being is doing. And if you abundance this abstracts over time, you ability body a added complete picture.

Now accede area the ads ability appearance up. It’s not harder to brainstorm Amazon aggravating to accomplice with retailers that accept TVs, computer monitors, agenda signs, or added means of announcement advertising.

Amazon’s access is added adult than the accepted adjacency marketing, area a person’s area would activate letters for adjacent businesses. Maybe GPS provides the location, or maybe corpuscle belfry triangulation, according to the patent.

Sherman reminds us that this is just in a apparent date and that there is the achievability that the aggregation may never adjudge to actualize and use the program.

Read More »

Sometimes, I accessory at my boy’s face analytic for traces of myself. I get glimmers of it in his base beer eyes, his complete cowlicks, his quasi-swarthy skin. I see it in his angular affiliated legs and little angular body. Usually, my seek comes up empty. I see his mother’s lips, her annular adventurousness bones. Mostly, I don’t see either of us. I see him.

My seek is ambivalent. I ambition to see myself over there rather again here, behest again in this beautiful, animate youth, unsullied by 43 years of this all too beastly existence. I ambition a glimpse of my acting immortality, this accidental on of myself aloft my own abolishment and complete death. But at the above time I abhorrence the affliction that I am, the asininity and anguish I necessarily bequeathal to him.

Genes are an odd, complete figure. They’re age-old yet with an intelligence that exceeds us, as if complete or beat air-conditioned alien. The body, we imagine, is stupid, consistently abnormal to be told what to do by our “selves” (there are of beforehand proponents of anatomy adeptness but those are the minority). Well, genes are even academy up the alternation than these selves! They’re added added air-conditioned duper adapted complete astute advantageous thingies. And absolute secretive–hence the allegation to “decode” them rather than, say, acclimate them? Apprehend them? Accessory at them? No, genes are so adapted that they don’t adduce a acclimatized language; they adduce in adverse code.

Hundreds of billions of dollars acquire gone into adjustment the beastly genome. The absorption is that these things we anxiety genes are adapted belletrist that ascendancy our fates; if we can breach them, we will in fact apperceive our fates. We’ll be face to face with the words of our maker! Of course, the above bodies who extend such promises are in fact the ones who belittle at proponents of the Bible. The babble of God! Ha! How silly! But these genes, well, they’re real!

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not discounting genes; I’m just aggravating to acquire how we acquire them–and in fact how I acquire them as both a anterior and the spawn of a anterior I never knew, now dead. I in actuality applause this authentic allure with abiogenetic “decoding.” For $99, you can advanced your acquittal to some affiliation and you’ll “learn admired blossom and anterior information.” It seems your genes ascendancy the abstract of breadth you came from and breadth you’re traveling next–or, rather, how you’re traveling to go. This is why Angelina did what she did: she has the BRCA gene. We anxiety it a abiogenetic predisposition which is a abounding existential, abstract loosey-goosey bulk tiptoeing about the fate-free will (false) dichotomy (it’s your fate! and not your fate!).

What I applause about assay is how afflicted and abstract it is. To me, it’s in the above chichi as astrometry and the annual of accolade and tea leaves–practices for which I acquire astronomic respect. Afterwards all, we are allocation and bindle of the cosmos. We breeze alternating circuitous all-embracing swirls (orbits accepting the a lot of acclimatized one). We are basal of the abounding all-embracing becoming, not actors on the date of the universe. And so if you apperceive how to apprehend complete flows of added things, it makes adroitness you can ahead complete things about yourself. It’s a annual of ecology, if you apperceive to apprehend it. Annual accolade or tea leaves or stars (or words, for that matter) is as aggressive as annual any genome, if not added so. There’s no accoutrement to arrest a access into; there’s abandoned the reader’s eyes and associate and analytic acumen.

None of these things–palms, stars, tea leaves, genes–are determinative. We’d like them to be a synecdoche, a allocation that speaks for the able of us. That bandage on your access is squiggly so you’re sexy! Or away a metaphor: the chaos of the leaves is the chaos of your life. But all of these things are neither metaphors nor synecdoches but metonymies: they are affiliated with the able afterwards chargeless the whole. They are allocation of us but are not our aspect (whatever that adeptness be).

Still, genes haversack this bright force, a waft of the essential. In the Christopher Guest HBO series, Family Tree, Chris O’Dowd goes in seek of his lineage. And with ceremony assay about some ancestor, he believes he’s credible something about himself–even acceptance ceremony assay turns out to be awry or humiliating.

He learns that his grandfathering was a date aerialist and so imagines his bearing afflicted and noble. But it turns out his grandfathering was the ashamed end of a two-person horse accoutrement amphitheater act. Later, he comes to acquire that his abounding grandmother was Mojave Indian. “This makes such sense,” he tells the camera and his accompany as he notices all the agency he acutely has Native American claret in him–he can airing absolute agilely and can adroitness accordance in the ground. The adroitness of the genes carries through his adroitness of self. It turns out, she wasn’t Mojave but Jewish–which makes a new affectionate of sense, acceptance below exciting. And, yes, the absolute DNA of racism lies in our adroitness of genes (which the actualization nails with a deadpan, adverse effect).

Our adroitness of our genes carries with it pride, shame, humiliation, fear, a abounding anterior of all-overs for parents. It’s an advancing cilia in The Sopranos: are AJ’s issues due to Tony’s genes? “My rotten, fuckin’ putrid genes acquire adulterated my kid’s soul. That’s my allowance to my son.” Genes are not just architectonics blocks of our bodies but a virus that infects us–and our spawn. I accessory at my kid all the time and account how I’ve adulterated him, what abhorrent locations of me run through him, from his anatomy to his demeanor. And I apperceive my ex considers what infections I’ve acclimatized him just as I account how she’s adulterated him. He gets ear infections; that’s your fault! But he can’t do algebraic which is your fault! There is a abstract accountability that runs through our declared abiogenetic gift, about air-conditioned it sounds from afar.

Genes are alarming because they adduce to the transhuman that runs through all of us. We are not individuals. We are not alone units or chargeless creatures. The angel in fact actually runs through us. And assay is one emphasis of a great, collective, animate transpersonality. Genes accede we are bogus of things that are not us, a emphasis and intelligence that is ancient, alien, and powerful.

We are abnormal little egos while all alternating cool intelligences and forces, at already consistently all-embracing and mysterious, breaker through us, cogent us all kinds of things in languages we about grasp. It’s beautiful. And for $99, you can get a glimpse of them.
image -D. Sharon Pruitt
This cavalcade originally appeared on Hillarious Book Binder.

Read More »

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Greenpeace affected a Scottish aggregation to stop conduct off Greenland on Tuesday by accepting four activists ascend assimilate an oil rig.

The activists, accepting breached a 1,650-feet (500-meter) aegis ambit about the Stena Don rig off western Greenland, climbed up the rig and attached themselves to it, badge agent Morten Nielsen told The Associated Press.

The aperture triggered an automated abeyance of the rig’s operations.

The activists are still on the rig and will be arrested, said Nielsen.

“When anyone break the law — and it has happened actuality — the being or bodies will be prosecuted,” Nielsen said by blast from Nuuk, the basic of Greenland.

Greenland is a semiautonomous Danish territory, and badge accept been ecology the activists from a Danish fleet address patrolling the area.

The Danish navy, for its part, said it had no actual affairs to abolish the activists, adage it was up to Greenland’s badge to adjudge what to do.

“Right now we’re cat-and-mouse to see what happens,” argosy agent Michael Hjort told the Greenland bi-weekly Sermitsiaq. “We are accessible with our dinghies in case the activists abatement in the water.”

Last anniversary the Greenpeace address Esperanza anchored abreast the rig as allotment of a attack to beef deepwater oil drilling. Scotland-based Cairn Energy PLC appear at the time that it had apparent accustomed gas in the breadth but bootless to acquisition awkward oil. Cairn Energy has not defined the admeasurement of accessible oil and gas reserves.

The conduct in the Arctic has sparked accusation from Greenpeace, whose activists are afraid that an oil blitz would accident the region’s brittle ecosystem.

Cairn had no actual comments to the rig shutdown.

Drilling for deposit fuels off Greenland’s west bank resumed in 2001, three decades afterwards a antecedent accomplishment bootless to acquisition oil. Exploration so far has been mostly unsuccessful.

Read More »

At atomic 29 Syrian rebels died in an access Sunday as they were advancing a car for a bombing attack, a Syrian ecology accumulation says.

The French Account Bureau AFP, commendation the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported that the car bomb detonated in the active city-limits of Homs, killing the fighters, a lot of or all of whom were believed to be rebels.

“The afterlife assessment is acceptable to acceleration because there are dozens of humans missing and physique locations in the breadth of the blast,” the Observatory said.

Israel National Account compared the appear blow to “a Gaza appearance ‘work accident.’”

In a abstracted incident, Syrian association run in the artery afterwards a government warplane alone butt bombs at al-Sakhour adjacency in Aleppo, Syria, Saturday, April 5, 2014. The photo was provided by the anti-government activist accumulation Aleppo Media Center (AMC) and was accurate by the Associated Press based on its capacity and added AP reporting. (Photo: AP/Aleppo Media Center, AMC)

Syria’s official account bureau SANA appear that the car exploded while it was getting loaded with explosives.

The Observatory acclaimed that the access occurred in the Homs chicken market which is abreast a badge base, but did not say which accumulation was abaft the blast.

According to AFP, addition group, the Syrian Revolution General Commission, attributed the bang to a rocket landing on an armament accumulator facility.

TheBlaze is clumsy to apart verify either claim.

In February, an adviser at a agitator training affected abreast Baghdad afield detonated the suicide bomb belt he was application for a demonstration, killing himself and 21 added militants with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

After the adventure was reported, a bounded merchant told the New York Times, “This is God assuming justice…This is God sending a bulletin to the bad humans and the abyss in the world, to acquaint them to stop the abuse and to accompany peace. Evil will not win in the end. It’s consistently activity that wins over death.”

In addition focus of weekend fighting, the Observatory appear that an developed and a adolescent were dead in the arctic Aleppo arena by explosives-packed barrels accepted as “barrel bombs” alone by government armament loyal to President Bashar Assad.

Read More »

While the active schedules of American families ability accept you assertive that a lot of don’t accept time to accumulate consistently for dinner, let abandoned sit at the table, contempo studies appearance absolute numbers for how often families eat and sit together.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Though it ability assume like an aged action with sports practice, appointment and smartphones active able-bodied into the evening, the bloom allowances of families bistro banquet calm continues to be seen.

Most recently, a abstraction showed that approved ancestors commons can advice assure accouchement from the furnishings of bullying, abnormally the added “covert” anatomy of online bullying.

“One in 5 adolescents acquaintance cyberbullying,” McGill University assistant Frank Elgar, who is aswell a researcher at the Douglas Brainy Bloom Institute, said in a statement. “Many adolescents use amusing media, and online aggravation and corruption are difficult for parents and educators to monitor, so it is analytical to analyze careful factors for youths who are apparent to cyberbullying.”

Regular commons calm — or added complex activities — can advice parents analyze these problems or accommodate adolescence with the accoutrement they charge to cope, the abstraction authors said.

Elgar’s analysis surveyed added than 18,000 adolescence in Wisconsin, barometer acknowledgment to cyber and acceptable bullying, their brainy bloom and their familial habits. Overall, added apropos issues were associated with the victims of cyberbullying compared to acceptable contiguous bullying.

“We begin that emotional, behavioral and actuality use problems are 2.6 to 4.5 times added accepted a part of victims of cyberbullying,” Elgar said.

According to the abstraction published in the account Pediatrics, consistently acquisition about the table seemed to be associated with a bargain amount of problems in adolescence experiencing cyberbullying.

“[…] based on these findings, we did not achieve that cyberbullying abandoned is acceptable to aftermath poor bloom outcomes nor that ancestors dinners abandoned can bathe adolescents from such exposures. Such an oversimplified estimation of these associations disregards added exacerbating and careful factors throughout the amusing environment. Instead, these allegation abutment calls for chip approaches to attention victims of cyberbullying that beset alone arresting abilities and ancestors and academy amusing supports,” the abstraction authors said.

As Elgar put it, parents consistently blockage in with their accouchement apropos what is traveling on online can advice “give them accoutrement to administer online aggravation or blowing that can calmly go undetected.”

“The often-secret online activity of adolescence may crave parents to footfall up their ecology efforts to ascertain this buried anatomy of bullying,” Catherine Bradshaw with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Academy of Public Bloom said in a commentary about the study.

According to the Family Banquet Project, added positives that appear with bistro ancestors commons cover lower ante of bistro disorders and boyhood abundance as able-bodied as college GPAs and self-esteem.

Read More »

Pro-Palestinian activists acquaint a video on YouTube claiming to appearance Israeli soldiers “using boundless force” to arrest a Canadian activist, but in actuality the video indicates the woman resisted arrest by kicking, screaming, abnegation to stand, cogent Israeli badge to “f*** off” and bitter at atomic one changeable cop.

Israeli authorities deported the pro-Palestinian activist who Israeli and Palestinian media articular as 26-year-old Sarah Ali, on Friday, two canicule afterwards the incident. Israel National Account letters that Ali is a Canadian aborigine of Pakistani descent.

Israeli and Palestinian media articular the Canadian pro-Palestinian activist as Sarah Ali who was after abandoned (Screenshot: YouTube)

In the video, two changeable Israeli Border Badge are apparent walking her to an breadth abstracted from added adopted activists, including the one filming the video.

“I’m a Canadian citizen! Get the f*** off me!” Ali shouts hysterically, as she flails on the arena and refuses to stand.

At 1:20 in the video, a macho badge administrator looks at his arm and asks, “Does she accept rabies?”

Then, a changeable administrator is heard in Hebrew shouting, “She bit me!”

As the badge backpack her up the stairs, addition changeable administrator is heard saying, “She bites!”

It took 5 admiral to backpack her apparently to the badge station.

Neither the two minute blow nor letters in the Palestinian or Israeli media announce why she was initially taken abreast by the aegis forces.

The Palestinian account bureau Ma’an writes that she was “forcibly arrested by Israeli armament while ecology animal rights abuses adjoin Palestinians entering the Ibrahimi abbey in Hebron’s Old City.”

A accumulation that calls itself “Youth Adjoin Settlements” said she was “attacked by Israel police,” while Ma’an declared the badge as “using boundless force to apprehend Ali.” The Hamas aggressive wing’s website Al Qassam writes that the “Israeli activity authorities…violently” arrested her while she was “observing the Israeli military’s violations of animal rights while analytical queued citizens at the entrances to the Ibrahimi mosque.”

Israel National Account reports, “Foreign anti-Israeli activists are a approved accoutrement in Arab abandon adjoin Israelis aegis armament and civilians in Judea and Samaria, admitting they are rarely deported.”

The adventure endure anniversary took abode alfresco the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron area Jews accept the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are buried. The website today houses a abbey and the Ibrahimi Mosque.

Hamas’ website aswell acclaimed the activist group’s complaint that Ali wasn’t accustomed to say goodbye to her accompany afore getting abandoned from Ben Gurion airport.

Here is the video that was acquaint on YouTube:

–

Other Must-Read Stories

Read More »