WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is announcing the availability of up to $20 million in FY 2012 grant funding to establish clean diesel projects aimed at reducing harmful pollution from the nation’s existing fleet of diesel engines and improving air quality and Americans’ health. In addition to these grants, approximately $9 million will be available through direct state allocations. EPA estimates that for every $1 spent on clean diesel funding up to $13 of public health benefit is realized.

"Technology has evolved to make diesel engines more efficient and cleaner than ever," said Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. "These grants enable owners of older diesel vehicles to make investments that modernize their vehicles while making the air in their communities cleaner and healthier to breathe.”

This is the first competition since the Diesel Emission Reduction Program, also known as DERA, was reauthorized in 2011. The program cleans up existing diesel vehicles, many of which can be operated for decades, by targeting projects that utilize the most cost-effective clean diesel strategies. By reducing diesel emissions in areas that have significant air quality issues the program can have a direct impact on community health.

Diesel engines are durable, fuel efficient workhorses in the American economy. EPA has standards in place that make new diesels more than 90 percent cleaner. However, older diesels that predate these standards emit large amounts of air pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM). These pollutants are linked to health problems, including asthma, lung and heart disease, and even premature death. Nearly 11 million older diesels still operate throughout the nation’s transportation system.

States, tribes, local governments, and non-profits are eligible to apply for these grants. Projects can reduce air pollution from older school buses, transit buses, heavy-duty diesel trucks, marine engines, locomotives, and other diesel engines. The closing date for receipt of proposals is June 4, 2012.

DERA was enacted in 2005 and since it was first funded in FY 2008, EPA has awarded over 500 grants nationwide. These projects have reduced hundreds of thousands of tons of air pollution and saved millions of gallons of fuel. As part of EPA’s National Clean Diesel Campaign, many of these projects fund cleaner diesel engines that operate in economically disadvantaged communities whose residents suffer from higher-than-average instances of respiratory ailments.

Request for Proposals forms and related documents: http://www.epa.gov/otaq/diesel/prgnational.htm

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Cruise ship worker Fabian Zanzi claimed on a Chilean TV show, "Primer Plano," that the Hollywood star offered him $12,000 to have sex while on a cruise in 2009. It was unclear whether Zanzi had filed a legal action against Travolta, who is already the subject of a sexual assault lawsuit by two unidentified masseurs in Los Angeles.

"This is just another ridiculous claim by someone hopping on the bandwagon to get his 15 minutes of fame with a story about something that supposedly happened over three years ago," Travolta’s lawyer Martin Singer said in a statement on Friday.

"At that time Zanzi’s supervisors did not believe him, confined him to his cabin and subsequently fired him, according to media reports. Significantly, we never heard of this guy before. The fact that we are only hearing about him now through tabloid gossip stories three years later speaks volumes," Singer added.

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Mr. Terry Casey will take on the responsibility of the ongoing development and delivery of Galaxy, Pacific Controls ‘Platform of Platforms’ that delivers Smart ICT enabled Managed Services for Equipment, Buildings and the complete Smart Cities. Galaxy deploys G-Bots, the company’s innovative approach to Managed Service Delivery revolutionizing the way problems and inefficiencies are identified, reported and resolved, resulting in reduced energy consumption and improved operational efficiency.

“Pacific Controls Galaxy Platform with G-Bots is a paradigm shift in the automatic detection of plant inefficiencies that waste significant Energy. I am excited by the challenge of making Galaxy the preeminent, world leading platform for Smart Service Delivery” says Casey.

Dilip Rahulan Executive Chairman of Pacific Controls stated “We are delighted to welcome Terry to Pacific Controls. He has the stature and experience in very successful, high growth technology businesses to help guide this company to achieve its ambition of Global Market Leader in this rapidly emerging market of Smart Managed Services”

For the past ten years, Terry has been President of Europe, Middle East and Africa for Tridium, the inventors of the widely used and respected Niagara Framework technology. Previously he was Co-Founder and CEO of Trend Controls the UK’s leading Building Automation Technology Company. Terry has been a founder member of ESTA, the Energy Systems Trade Association and served as Chairman for 4 years.

Home to fewer than 2,000 islanders, the self-governing coral atoll is trying to encourage some of the 20,000 overseas Niueans – many of them New Zealand-born – to return.

Niue operates in free association with New Zealand, its main source of aid and its biggest trading partner. New Zealand is obliged under the island's constitution to provide "necessary economic and administrative assistance".

Aside from defence matters and foreign relations, Niue runs its own affairs. All Niueans are New Zealand citizens and can take up residency there.

The long-running population decline was aggravated by Cyclone Heta, which devastated the island in 2004. Some observers fear that the community's viability is threatened by migration.

Economic activity revolves around fishing, agriculture and tourism. Surrounded by a coral reef and with a rugged coastline, the island attracts whale-watchers, divers and yachting enthusiasts.

Technology-savvy Niue has embraced the internet. It earns money from the sale of its suffix and in 2003 it became the first territory to offer a free wireless internet service to all residents.

Lying between Tonga and the Cook Islands, Niue was settled by Samoans in the first century AD. Britain's Captain James Cook sighted the island in 1774, dubbing it "Savage Island" after locals thwarted his landing attempts.

British missionaries arrived in the 19th century and the island was subsequently administered from New Zealand. Niueans voted to become self-governing in 1974.

The performance of a pizza shop’s Facebook ad.

The campaign cost them $240 — almost $1 for each new Facebook fan they got from the campaign.

“Is that feeling of exhilaration worth $240?” Michael said. “I don’t know — hopefully that translates into new business.”

It didn’t.

After a long night of asking every single customer where he found out about Pizza Delicious, not one said it was through Facebook.

But while Greg took the garbage out, he checked his phone. And there was a message:

“Just found out about you guys via a sponsored Facebook ad if you can believe it. Super excited about your new place — happy to toss in a few bones over the top.”

That guy kicked in $10 to support the new restaurant.

“And that was cool,” Michael said. “We got some return on our ad.”

That return — $10 on a $240 investment — isn’t much.

Maybe at some point, the new Pizza Delicious fans will show up and buy some pizza. But social advertising is so new that nobody knows for sure. It’s still unproven, untested and largely unstudied.

Some companies, like Ben and Jerry’s, say they have gotten a big return. Others say they haven’t. On Tuesday, GM said it was pulling its Facebook ads because the ads haven’t done enough to generate new business.

Read More Of Our Facebook Coverage:

The 34-year-old announced his intention to leave German Bundesliga club Schalke 04 at the end of this current season on April 19, adding his future was no longer in Europe.

His arrival at Al Sadd was confirmed yesterday by the Qatar Football Association, who released no further details about the sensational signing.

Raul was in the stands on Saturday to watch Al Gharrafa beat Al Sadd 5-4 on penalties in the Emir Cup.

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(DALLAS – April 18, 2012) The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, has claimed a top spot in EPA’s sixth College and University Green Power Challenge for 2011-2012. The EPA tracks and recognizes collegiate athletic conferences with the highest combined green power purchases in the nation. Purchases of green power help spur the development of the nation’s green power market and reduce harmful air pollution.

“By committing to alternative, renewable sources of energy, Southwestern University has moved to the front of the class,” said EPA Regional Administrator Al Armendariz. “Green power not only helps green the planet, but reduces greenhouse gases while growing the American economy.”

Southwestern University signed an agreement that will enable it to meet all its electric needs for the next 18 years with wind power. The agreement will help Southwestern toward its long-term goal of being carbon-neutral. The university is committed to carbon neutrality through the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment, which formally commits campuses to eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions and net contributions to climate change.

This year’s challenge participation included 73 competing institutions, representing 30 athletic conferences nationwide. The challenge’s total annual green power usage of more than 1.8 billion kWh has the equivalent environmental impact of avoiding the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the annual electricity use of more than 150,000 homes.

The EPA ranks collegiate athletic conferences by the total amount of green power used by their member schools. To be eligible, each school in the conference must qualify as an EPA Green Power Partner and each conference must collectively use at least 10 million kWh of green power. EPA’s Green Power Partnership encourages organizations to use green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with conventional electricity use. Green power is generated from renewable resources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, biogas, and low-impact hydropower.

The partnership works with over 1,300 diverse organizations including Fortune 500 companies, small and medium businesses, government institutions, as well as a growing number of colleges and universities.

More information on the winners of EPA’s College and University Green Power Challenge is available at www.epa.gov/greenpower/initiatives/cu_challenge.htm

More information on EPA’s Green Power Partnership is available at www.epa.gov/greenpower

More about activities in EPA Region 6 is available at http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/region6.html
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Nonexistent until last June, the encampment of about 1,600 people now is a haven of peace compared with the terror experienced in the country just 300 yards away. Housed in neat, white tents in southern Turkey, with cooking stations in between, people here do not have to worry about being silenced, tortured, arrested or killed.

In other words, they don’t live in fear of what they say happened all around them on a daily basis — and still happens — in their war-torn nation of Syria.

EU slaps new santions on Syria

They are, however, left with the memories of people killed. And they share them freely, in the form of grainy videos showing their loved ones’ funerals, pictures on cell phones of their missing sons and stories about the horrors they escaped but many of their countrymen still endure.

“They want the world to understand them. They want the world to bear witness,” Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said Monday from the camp. “They also see the camera as a way of holding onto the memory of this lost world, a world that is very achingly close.”

The fighting has prompted thousands to flee Syria, setting up new lives in a number of makeshift camps in neighboring nations. The United Nations estimates at least 9,000 people have been killed over the past 14 months in Syria.

President Bashar al-Assad’s government blames the violence on “armed terrorist gangs,” while the opposition and many in the international community say it is the result of the regime’s bloody crackdown on dissent. Not including arrests, opposition groups actually estimate the death toll is at more than 11,000 and growing.

A month after ‘cease-fire,’ where does Syria stand?

Two of those killed are sons of Abu Mohammed, who recalled from the camp in Turkey how they had been fatally shot by security forces while demonstrating in Syria about a year ago. Another son is missing, believed to be arrested and possibly killed without ever having never met his 7-month-old son.

Mohammed cannot justify why Syrian security forces killed his sons and the children of so many others. But he knows why they spoke up, and why many are still fighting.

“We had young men that cried out and shouted, ‘Freedom!’, and they were killed for that?” he asked rhetorically.

“We just want freedom. What’s wrong with asking for freedom?”

Through a hole in a fence, past olive groves and across rolling farmland, that sense of freedom lives — albeit tenuously.

While the Syrian government exerts control over most of the country, there are exceptions.

The police station of one town, for instance, was turned into makeshift barracks for fighters from the rebel Free Syrian Army. At a school, where al-Assad’s government still pays the teachers’ salaries and for textbooks, students in blue uniforms burst into chants slamming their president.

Outside town, opposition fighters take up positions along roads. They take a 19-year-old prisoner who, they say, was headed to enlist in al-Assad’s armed forces, sparing him only after he vows to join their fighting force instead.

Even with this sense of ownership and fragile freedom, there is little sense here that the end is near. That’s especially true back at the refugee camp in Turkey, where expectations are low that they will return home safely anytime soon.

The cease-fire that was to take effect last month hasn’t ended the violence. One Syrian activist, identified as Zaidoun, says the government is “playing games” even with the scores of unarmed U.N. monitors in the country. Zaidoun said the government decreases attacks wherever the monitors are, then fills the void after they leave by pounding communities with mortars and gunfire.

Zaidoun says he has all but given up hope that people from outside Syria will intervene and stop his people’s suffering. But he still has faith that the dreams of he and other opposition will be realized.

“It’s OK. We know now that world is happy watching us being killed, and we will do it on our own,” he said.

“Even if it takes 10 years, we are on the streets and we will not change, we will not retreat, and we will not give up.”

]]> http://www.pembrokemayball.com/whats-wrong-with-asking-for-freedom/feed 0 http://www.pembrokemayball.com/sick-from-fracking-doctors-patients-seek-answers http://www.pembrokemayball.com/sick-from-fracking-doctors-patients-seek-answers#comments Wed, 16 May 2012 23:02:22 +0000 Zach Richards http://www.pembrokemayball.com/sick-from-fracking-doctors-patients-seek-answers Story By: by Rob Stein

Explore key components of the natural gas production process — and the questions scientists are asking.

View Interactive

In fact, just the day before being interviewed by NPR, Allen suddenly felt like she had been engulfed by one of these big invisible bubbles.

“And all of a sudden your tongue gets this metal taste on it. And it feels like it’s enlarging, and it just feels like you’re not getting enough air in, because your throat gets real ‘burn-y.’ And the next thing I know, I … passed out,” Allen said.

Half a dozen of Allen’s co-workers stopped coming in. One old-timer quit. No one can figure out what’s going on. For doctors and nurses used to taking care of sick people, it’s unnerving to suddenly be the patients.

“It’s the unknown I think that’s the scariest thing,” she said.

Richard Rinehart, who runs the rural clinic, can’t help but wonder whether the natural gas drilling going on all around the area may have something to do with what’s been happening.

“I lay in bed at night thinking all kinds of theories. Is something coming through the air from some process that they’re using? I know they use a lot of chemicals and so forth. Certainly that could be a culprit. We’re wondering, Is something coming through the ground?” Rinehart said, noting that he’d just noticed a new drill on a hill overlooking the back of the clinic.

Now, no one knows whether the gas drilling has anything to do with the problems at the clinic. It could easily turn out to be something completely unrelated. There’s a smelting plant down the road and old coal mines everywhere.

“Anything could be possible, and we just are trying to get to the root of it,” he said.

Mysterious Symptoms, Lots Of Questions

People living near gas well drilling around the country are reporting similar problems, plus headaches, rashes, wheezing, aches and pains and other symptoms.

Shale Play: Natural Gas Drilling in Pennsylvania

Doctors like Julie DeRosa, who works at Cornerstone, aren’t sure how to help people with these mysterious symptoms.

“I don’t want to ignore symptoms that may be clues to a serious condition. I also don’t want to order a lot of unnecessary tests. I don’t want to feed any kind of hysteria,” DeRosa said.

To try to figure out what’s going on, the clinic called the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which is investigating. It also started testing the air for chemicals, monitoring wind direction around the clinic and keeping diaries of everyone’s symptoms. In addition, the clinic contacted Raina Rippel, project director for the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project.

The local nonprofit was set up recently to help people in this kind of situation. Her team tested tap water from inside a men’s room and from a stream out back.

Rippel says she knows people in the area have a lot of questions: “Is my water fit to drink? Is the air fit to breathe? Am I going to suffer long-term health impacts from this?”

Connecting Experts In Search Of Answers

To try to answer these questions, her project is connecting doctors and patients with toxicologists, occupational health doctors, environmental scientists and other experts.

“People go from physician to physician, because ‘nobody seemed to be able to treat this awful rash that I have,’ or ‘nobody seemed to be able to deal with my gastrointestinal pain that I have.’ And so they go from place to place, trying to find someone who can do that,” said David Brown, a toxicologist who helped set up the project.

The project is also starting to educate doctors about what kinds of tests they can try and what kinds of advice to give. In addition, a nurse practitioner visits and counsels people who are sick.

Dr. Sean Porbin, a private doctor who advises the project, gives the project’s nurse practitioner advice when she needs it. But Porbin is skeptical that many people are getting sick from the drilling, which is commonly called “fracking.” There are about 5,000 new wells in Pennsylvania.

“If it’s true, you’d expect people dropping all over the place based on the amount of fracking that’s going on here. You would look around and see people dropping like flies. It’s not the case. I don’t see anybody affected. And it’s not for a lack of looking,” he said.

Porbin, who like a lot of people in the area has leased some of his land for drilling, wants to make sure no one’s missing more mundane explanations — like Lyme disease, sinus infections and migraines.

“We have an old saying in medicine: When you hear hoof beats, you don’t think zebras — you think horses,” he said.

Lots Of Anecdotes, Little Evidence

The natural gas industry says there’s no evidence the drilling is causing health problems.

Public health experts say the only way anyone is going to really know whether the drilling is making people sick is to do some big studies.

“There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence out there. And so a well-conducted study looking at a number of communities could help us better understand if there’s an impact, what its magnitude [is], how we should avoid having that impact if there is one,” said Christopher J. Portier, director of the National Center for Environmental Health and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

In the meantime, patients and doctors don’t have a lot of options. In western Pennsylvania, a lot of them are referred to Charles Werntz at West Virginia University. Werntz, an occupational medicine specialist, is used to dealing with chemical exposures. Lately, he’s seeing more people who live near the drilling.

But for now, he says he can’t really do much more than offer basic advice: Drink bottled water, air out the house, leave your shoes outside. If it’s still too bad, move — if possible.

“It is frustrating. As a physician, I like it when somebody can come to me with a problem and I can help them solve the problem. Whether it’s through a specific treatment or, you know, whatever. And this is frustrating, because in this case, the treatment is to get away from the exposure. And that’s hard to do,” Werntz said.

Back at Cornerstone, Rinehart just wants to get back to taking care of patients.

“We are in the business of trying to improve and maintain the public’s health here. And now we are in the throes of it. And we’re trying not to point fingers,” Rinehart said.

The next day, people got sick again, and the clinic had to be evacuated once more. So they’ve moved the clinic to temporary offices until someone figures out what’s going on.

Wednesday on Morning Edition, NPR’s Jon Hamilton will report on researchers who think they have a good shot at answering whether drilling is making people sick.

The audio version of this story was produced by Rebecca Davis.