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Steep river canyons lined with cottonwood trees are the signature landscape in Utah's Zion National Park. But a new report issued jointly by the park and the Grand Canyon Trust finds that without intervention, the giant trees will likely vanish in the next few decades.
That's because the trees in the lush forests that border the park's Virgin River are all over 70 years old. "There're no youngsters," says Jim McMahon, a former Grand Canyon Trust staffer, who oversaw the study. "This is a retirement community; it's not a healthy, reproducing community."
The reason, according to McMahon, is a century of human manipulation. In the 1930s, the federal government constructed two miles of stone levees to protect roads and park facilities from floods. But the levees have also kept the river from its historic floodplain, where it once deposited sediments vital to cottonwood seed germination.
The report recommends that the Park Service remove the levees - at an estimated cost of $5 million. Park officials say they won't make a decision about restoration for at least another year. First, they'll talk with downstream water users about the effect of dike removal on erosion and increased sedimentation in the river.
"There's a lot of other people potentially impacted by our decision," says Zion resource manager Jeff Bradybaugh. But any water-quality impacts can be mitigated, he says, and in the long run, the proposed project will benefit water users because a free-flowing river will put more water in the floodplain and replenish the water table.
When Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Mike Finley started to feel the budget pinch this summer, he made sure everyone knew about it.
Finley closed a popular campground and two museums in Yellowstone, and threatened to shorten the park season by as much as two months. "We can no longer do more with less," he said flatly.
It didn't take long for local businesses and Wyoming's congressional delegation to accuse the superintendent of poor planning and grandstanding. "This dramatic move is designed only to evoke public discontent," wrote Sens. Al Simpson and Craig Thomas and Rep. Barbara Cubin, all Republicans, in a letter to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
Mike Morey, a researcher for the Wyoming Chamber of Commerce, said the campground closing alone cost the region about $1 million in lost business.
In July, Cubin prompted the House Resources Committee to review the park's books. While the results of the review are not yet public, it was enough to prompt both Cubin and Thomas to schedule visits of their own to Yellowstone later this summer.
Finley insists that he tried to minimize impacts on visitors by cutting long-term projects and siphoning money into campgrounds and visitors' centers. He says he resorted to closures only after cutting all road maintenance, slashing science, reducing seasonal staff, and leaving some permanent positions vacant.
Simpson and Thomas have introduced legislation that would increase Yellowstone's funding by $4 million, but Finley says it's not enough. Don Striker, Yellowstone's budget officer, says they would need roughly $8 million to $13 million more each year to run the park properly.
"People in Washington think, "Yellowstone's got $19 million, how could they be having problems?" " says Striker. He hopes that the review will offer Congress a look at the complexities and shortfalls of parks funding. "We're not out here whining just to make a political statement."
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The LWCF does a lot more than buy inholdings. Roughly half of it goes to providing conservation easements on private land, conserving privately owned timberlands, developing urban parks and ball fields, and funding endangered species projects on non-federal lands.
Since its inception in 1964, the LWCF has protected more than 7 million acres. The fund draws no taxpayer dollars; most of it comes from royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling. "There's poetry in the idea that we can use revenue generated from the depletion of one resource to enhance another," says John Gale, conservation director of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Since 1978, the fund has been authorized to receive up to $900 million annually, though in recent years Congress has appropriated less than a third of that.
But even as Congress cut LWCF's funding, members on both sides of the aisle were trying to use it for projects in their own districts. According to a 2014 investigation by Greenwire, 16 Republicans, 48 Democrats and three independents had pushed for land acquisition, conservation easements, and grants for local parks and trails over the previous five years.
LWCF's primary foe is Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, R, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, who has refused to even allow hearings on the bipartisan reauthorization bill that's been sitting in his committee since April. He's vowed to continue blocking LWCF until it's been reformed, citing his opposition to an increase in federal lands for any reason. (Just over two years ago, though, Bishop had proposed that Utah counties negotiate- to get more congressionally designated wilderness, as a bargaining chip for increased energy development.) "We are not going to blindly reauthorize a fund with inherent flaws," says Bishop spokeswoman Julia Slingsby. "This law needs to be updated to reflect the 21st century."
The fund that Bishop wants to update has provided $48 million to his state for local projects like soccer parks and swimming pools. It's also paid for acquiring more than 7,000 acres of private inholdings within Zion National Park, plus nearly 5,500 acres in Dinosaur National Monument. Bishop's reforms would put an end to such purchases. He has yet to offer a specific plan, but has suggested that the program's money could instead cover shortfalls in PILT, "payments in lieu of taxes" to counties with large amounts of federal land, or pay for the education of future energy-industry workers. He and other critics also say the fund should be used to cover the $12 billion maintenance backlog at national parks.
The LWCF has accumulated a $20 billion IOU thanks to the gap in appropriations, giving Bishop another excuse to stop funding it. But it's disingenuous to claim that this money is available to be spent, says Lynn Scarlett, managing director of public policy for The Nature Conservancy- and deputy Interior secretary under George W. Bush. "There is no magic $20 billion waiting around, or even one dollar," she says. "It's a paperwork credit for funds long ago used for other purposes."
Now that the program has been allowed to sunset, the royalty money meant for it is going to the general treasury. Under the continuing budget resolution that expires Dec. 11, the House and Senate could pass an extension of the LWCF and maintain that funding link. If they don't, though, re-establishing it will take an act of Congress.
Fund supporters are now scrambling to find a must-pass piece of legislation they can attach reauthorization to. The most promising is a compromise by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., that would make the program permanent and balance state and federal spending, giving each 40 percent of the annual appropriation, and allowing the remaining 20 percent to be spent flexibly. It would also create a separate fund to address the national park maintenance backlog. Other Western representatives have sponsored similar legislation, including Montana Sens. Steve Daines, R., and Jon Tester, D, as well as Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz.
Meanwhile, environmental and sportsmen's groups are lobbying mightily for the fund's resurrection. "It's hard for us to see something like LWCF that has broad support become a political chip," Gale says. "Congress should be able to function and move things that are good for the American people and absolutely a clear winner."]]>
Until that moment, the only surprising sight had been the occasional homeless person. "It was like finding Bigfoot," Cooper says. "The difference being that Bigfoot doesn't exist, so you couldn't really hope for it."
Griffith Park is, technically, part of the Santa Monica Mountains, which begin in slide-prone bluffs along the Southern California coast, rise to 3,000 feet and then taper off until they disappear at the Los Angeles River, 45 miles inland. The mountains, state parks, open space preserves and a recreation area managed by the National Park Service form a patchwork ecosystem that functions, albeit in a strangled way, as it has for thousands of years, and not least because the cougar has persisted here as a native predator. Only eight to 10 lions remain in the mountain range, all in the western reaches. But they still play a key role managing deer and coyote. Cooper, who monitors the park on behalf of local neighborhood groups, was gratified to have documented the first evidence of a mountain lion so far east, on this "very constricted peninsula of habitat" in the city.
Cooper called National Park Service biologist Jeff Sikich, who leads a research team studying the Santa Monica lions. Sikich managed to capture the lion, take blood samples and fit it with a GPS collar. A genetics lab at the University of California at Los Angeles determined that it had indeed been born in the Santa Monicas. The biologists named it P-22 -- the 22nd puma Park Service researchers had collared since their study began in 2002.
Puma concolor, alternately called the mountain lion, puma or cougar, is not an urban predator; it has not adapted, like the coyote or the raven, to the perilous bounty of cohabitation with humans. That P-22 made it to the Hollywood Hills is close to a miracle. A 3-year-old, 110-pound male, the lion was probably looking for his own home territory to avoid a turf battle with another male lion, the most common cause of death among his kind here. Cooper surmises that he followed a deer into the park, first crossing one freeway screaming with traffic and negotiating his way through golf courses, swimming pools and clusters of six-bedroom homes with ocean views.
Once he arrived east, he stayed. "We've learned that the whole park is its territory," Cooper says. But it's a tiny, lonely one. P-22 may find enough meals in the park's other wildlife. What he won't do is find a mate. "Where the lion can go from here," Cooper says, "that's really an open question."
It's not just a question that applies to P-22. The Santa Monica Mountains' big cats die in all kinds of ways: on freeways, ingesting rat poison, shot by poachers. But there is no greater threat to their survival than the simple fact that they are imprisoned where they're born. Any route out can be deadly for an individual lion. No way out will ultimately be deadly for them all.
When I meet Jeff Sikich one August morning on a Malibu road in the heart of the mountains, I think they've sent the wrong guy. The 37-year-old looks too young to be the world-renowned expert I've read about. Only when he takes off his park-ranger cadet cap do I notice a few convincing flecks of gray in his close-cut hair. He is tall, thin, taciturn and focused. When I ask him whether it's a bother having journalists tag along during his work, he answers promptly: "Yes."
Sikich travels frequently to Peru to study the pumas of the Andes; he recently taught South African biologists his darting techniques. But most of his work is more mundane: trudging up hills, radio in hand, waving a duct-taped antenna in the air and listening for beeps from a box. Sometimes he walks dirt trails or bushwhacks through the sage and poison oak to get at his target. Other times he drives up steep roads in suburban neighborhoods, startling their elderly residents. ("Is he a police officer?" one freshly coiffed octogenarian in smart green sandals asks me. "No," I assure her. "He's a biologist.")
The beeps come in different frequencies to distinguish individual lions. Listening is exacting work: Even on Sandstone Peak -- at 3,111 feet, the mountains' highest point -- lawn mowers, weed whackers and boats at sea all interfere with the pings Sikich is looking for, which emanate from a collared mother and her two four-month-old kittens. When Sikich hears them, he pencils in the time and GPS coordinates on a ledger.
It's early still; fog from the ocean settles in the gaps between the green-and-dun mountains. "Mom's been here the past two nights," Sikich says, pointing inland to a small granite escarpment. "She probably made a deer kill, buried it, then went back and grabbed the kittens who were over on the other side of that ridge."
Mom is P-19, the lone survivor of four born in May 2010; her kittens arrived last April. Biologists thought it a hopeful sign that P-19 would whelp so young, right on schedule; it meant she had food. But the kittens' blood tests were less encouraging; they showed P-19 had mated with P-12, an itinerant male from a larger habitat to the north. P-12 had fathered two litters of kittens before. Among them was P-19.
The father-daughter tryst was the second instance of first-order inbreeding documented among the Santa Monica Mountains' puma population. The lions are now at risk for what biologists call "inbreeding depression" -- the same fate that befell a puma subspecies, the Florida panther, 20 years ago.
"They were going extinct," says Robert Wayne, the evolutionary biologist who oversees the DNA-testing lab at UCLA. "They had undescended testes, holes in their hearts, defective sperm." The Florida population only survived because they were, as Wayne puts it, "genetically rescued" in 1995 with the release of eight female panthers imported from Texas. Only the offspring of the imports have thrived.
The isolated cougars of the Santa Monicas don't need such a dramatic solution; other genetic strains roam not far away. Just 15 miles north of where P-19 is raising her kittens, space yawns open in the Santa Susana Mountains, which link to hundreds of square miles of contiguous habitat in the Los Padres National Forest. But to move that direction, animals have to cross all eight lanes of the 101 Freeway, which connects the cities of Los Angeles and Ventura.
Sikich takes me to a place on the 101 where there's natural habitat on both sides, the aptly named Liberty Canyon. From the north, the canyon funnels wildlife onto a lightly used road under the freeway; P-12 crossed here. But an animal making its way down the slope south of the freeway, a narrow channel of green through the housing tracts, would have to brave a vacant three-story office building to find that route. "We've had animals turn around here," Sikich says. "The ones that risk the freeway usually end up dead."
Biologists, wildlife advocates and the California Department of Transportation have long lobbied for an underpass here whose entrance would make sense to wildlife. It would cost $10 million, but it would offer a safe option for animals compelled to migrate north. It might have lured P-22 toward more promising lands than Griffith Park. And it might have opened up a route for the unnamed young lion that, on May 22, tested his boundaries and found himself stranded in a city.
That Tuesday morning, janitor Rogelio Rodriguez showed up for his pre-dawn shift at a downtown Santa Monica office building and heard a strange scratching sound. When he went to investigate, he saw a fawn-colored feline, six feet long and half again as tall, pawing on a wall just a few feet away. The animal turned around and saw Rodriguez, then ran past him into a courtyard. Rodriguez called the police.
Later blood tests revealed the lion came from the Santa Monicas. A young male, not quite 2 years old, he had likely wandered down during the night, crossing three miles of backyards or following the beach. He was now more trapped than when he started.
Wildlife agents first tried darting the lion, but the drug didn't take. Instead, the animal ran. Glass walls eight-feet high surround that courtyard, "but the thinking was that if he could get in, he could get out into the street," says assistant chief of California Fish and Wildlife Dan Sforza; pumas can spring to the top of 15-foot cliffs. Local police officers tried to hold the animal back with pepper spray, but when "he came toward the glass, the police shot him."
Bystanders were horrified. Blogs and comments overflowed with protests. But Seth Riley, the principal investigator on the Park Service study, says that the saddest part of the story came later, with the lion's DNA tests. "He had some unique genetic markers not seen in our other Santa Monica lions," he laments. "And he never got to pass them on."
Last year, the California Department of Transportation was turned down for a federal grant to fund the Liberty Canyon underpass. Riley insists the cost is justified. "These mountain lions are the ultimate challenge for conservation," he says. "If the system is able to sustain large carnivores, it says something good about the way we're able to conserve it." If it's not, the fragment of wilderness known as the Santa Monica Mountains will devolve into another large urban park.]]>
Park staffers began with a two-year public "scoping" process involving thousands of people. Meetings were hosted in a handful of major Western cities, and five "work groups' formed around themes like private access and outfitter services. The groups met regularly to struggle through sticky issues, such as the unequal allocation of river permits among private boaters and outfitters, and the continued use of motorboats and helicopters in the backcountry (HCN, 12/21/98: Grand Canyon Gridlock).
"These meetings were not for making agreements or reaching consensus," says Willie Odem, president of the Grand Canyon Private Boaters Association, "but for information gathering by the park."
"There was nothing particularly unique or unprecedented about the process," says Linda Jalbert, outdoor recreation planner at Grand Canyon National Park, "nor do I think we have unique issues."
The process didn't always hum along. A draft proposal missed its deadline; Park Superintendent Robert Arnberger was heard to say that he wished the whole business would just go away. Intense differences of opinion, particularly between river outfitters and private boaters, resisted easy solutions. But it was a process; it was under way.
Then, in February 2000, Superintendent Arnberger abruptly announced that the wilderness planning effort was over - halted. A "stunning turnaround" is what Mark Grisham, president of the Grand Canyon River Outfitters' Association, called Arnberger's pullout, and Grisham represents a contingent that appears to benefit most from maintaining the status quo at Grand Canyon.
Arnberger's decision even surprised some Park Service staffers. "I was shocked," says Jim Walters, deputy wilderness program director for the National Park Service Intermountain Region. "He just pulled the rug out."
In the deflated silence that followed his announcement, Superintendent Arnberger sent a letter addressed to "Grand Canyon Constituents," in which he detailed the official rationale for his decision.
First, he said, the management discussion was too contentious. Second, the process would require too much in the way of park resources. Third, he didn't feel he had sufficient direction from Congress with respect to wilderness designation.
Randall Rasmussen, program manager with the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, a citizens' watchdog group, calls Arnberger's argument "a straw man."
"Since when is controversy a reason to stop discussion?" he asks. "If contention is such a boogeyman, why did the NPS recently announce a proposal to exclude snowmobiles from 42 park units? Controversy should be a reason to include the public, not to exclude us!'
Rasmussen also bristles at Arnberger's citing lack of resources, since $400,000 was the projected spending on the planning process. They had already spent a good portion of that, he said, "which now appears to be wasted money."
Congressional direction is a moot point, Rasmussen says. NPS Director Robert Stanton issued Director's Order #41, specifically requiring all agency superintendents to complete wilderness management plans for all backcountry areas by 2002 - regardless of congressional designation.
In August 1999, the Park Service directive explicitly ordered phasing out nonconforming wilderness uses, such as motors on the Colorado River and snowmobiles in other parks, he says.
Agency staffer Walters adds that "our direct charge is to provide thorough assessment of backcountry and to manage it as wilderness until told otherwise. It is a clear and fundamental mandate."
To private boaters, it was hard not to conclude that the Park Service got cold feet. On one side of the debate sit commercial river outfitters, with 70 percent of the river-permit pie, motor and helicopter-supported trips and hefty political allies. On the other side sits an increasingly vocal group of private boaters who are fed up with a waiting-list system that can take two decades to work through, and angry at receiving only 30 percent of river permits. But while private boaters can protest, they lack political clout.
"We think," concludes Rasmussen, "that the Park Service saw some heavy rapids ahead in the management discussion and decided to simply jump out of the boat."
Odem says he met with Arnberger just hours after the superintendent's announcement. Arnberger told him, he says, that "he didn't want to be dragged in front of Congress again and ripped apart."
The previous fall, Utah Republican Rep. James Hansen had grilled Arnberger about possible wilderness designations in Grand Canyon.
"After that confrontation with Congress, the process stalled for six months or more. Then (came) the announcement to quit," Odem says.
Within days of Arnberger's announcement, Odem's private boaters' group decided unanimously to sue.
"What other option did we have?" asks Odem. "People had reached an extreme level of anger and frustration ... We understood that some of the consequences of the legal process might not be ideal, but that's what we were left with. We felt like we'd been kicked in the stomach."
On July 6, the Grand Canyon Private Boaters Association and its legal supporters held a news conference to announce their lawsuit against the Department of Interior and Arnberger. Plaintiffs in the case include the boaters' association, the National Parks Conservation Association, American Whitewater, and four private individuals.
"I don't think Arnberger expected us to get this kind of support," says Odem. "Instead of being confronted by our 650-member outfit, they are being challenged by groups with a combined membership of more than half a million."
Rasmussen says the lawsuit aims to get the Park Service back into the public-planning process, to challenge motors in wilderness backcountry, and to force an environmental review of contracts with river outfitters.
Kim Crumbo, one of the four citizen plaintiffs in the case, has a unique perspective on the situation. Crumbo left the Grand Canyon park staff, where he had spent 20 years as wilderness coordinator and river ranger, in September 1999. He'd been deeply involved with the backcountry planning process.
"I was looking at being fired for my views," says Crumbo, "so I retired instead. Besides, I felt I could do more good from the outside.
"I am an aggrieved party," Crumbo says, describing his part in the lawsuit. "First of all, I have signed up for a permit to float the Grand Canyon that I might have to wait 20 years for. It is an intolerable and patently unfair system. Second, as a citizen, I am suing the park to live up to its mandate to protect wilderness."
Crumbo isn't alone. Two other staff members directly involved with the planning process have either taken early retirement or requested a transfer. Superintendent Arnberger is also leaving Grand Canyon. After his announcement, Arnberger was promoted to regional director status, and will move to Alaska this fall.
Arnberger's February letter concludes with the words, "The end is not in sight, our work is not done, and progress will be made with the many opportunities yet available."
Since his surprise statement in February, however, the process has been essentially frozen. "No one is talking now," reports Grisham. "It's really frustrating to have made some discernible progress, and then have the whole thing come to a halt."
"This business could have been hammered out," agrees Crumbo. "There are ways to deal with these issues and come to compromises everyone could live with. My guess is that the Park Service saw this as a means to delay the confrontation."
Park Service employees refuse to comment on the issues or the lawsuit. Linda Jalbert reiterated Arnberger's statement that "the park was not successful in its strategy to proceed with planning in a manner that would avoid costly and unproductive debate." Public Affairs Officer Maureen Oltrogge reported that the Park Service is "working with their attorneys and studying the issues."
Meantime, the legal case will likely take years to grind through the courts. A new administration will move into the White House. Private boaters will inch up the waiting list, motors will drone down the sublime depths of the canyon, helicopters will whop overhead.
"If this goes to trial," predicts Odem, "whatever the verdict is will almost certainly be appealed."
Alan Kesselheim writes in Bozeman, Montana.
Copyright © 2000 HCN and Alan S. Kesselheim]]>
It all started in 1971, when Jim and his wife, Sandy, both elementary school teachers, took a two-week vacation in Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks. They were captivated by the experience, enough to return each summer for the next five years, while also deciding that they wanted to learn more about the region.
In 1977, they took their first class – geology -- at the Teton Science School at the foot of the Tetons. Then, for the next two years, they increased the time they spent in the West to four weeks each year, so they could take yet more classes and expand their explorations to Glacier and Rocky Mountain national parks.
They took classes in everything from meteorology to the lives of mountain men, from astronomy to storytelling. They studied bears and birds, coyotes and wolves, deer and pronghorn, insects and amphibians. They learned about the history of the parks and the ecosystems that support them. And then, once they were back home in their classrooms, Jim and Sandy shared what they knew with their young students.
In the 1980s, the Ungers spent three weeks getting to know other national parks in the West, including Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde and Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado, and Utah's Bryce and Zion national parks. They went to Crater Lake and Mount Rainier, and to Kenai and Denali National Park in Alaska, soaking up stories and lore that they could then pass on to the children in their classes.
When I met them in the early '90s, they were attending a conference in western Wyoming at the college where I taught. They wanted to know what made my corner of the High Plains desert a microcosm of the West's history, so they hiked along the Oregon Trail's ruts, floated the Green River where John Wesley Powell began his historic journey, and were introduced to contentious modern-day land-use issues like natural gas drilling. The next year, they returned to spend a few days with a ranching family near the Wind River Mountains.
The Ungers made friends they'd correspond with and visit on return, and they became avid readers of both fiction and nonfiction about the West. All winter, as they planned their next trip West, Jim and Sandy immersed themselves in reading about it. By spring, they were ready to make their reservations.
Their trips got longer after they retired, stretching to two months in the West. Sandy's last trip, however, was in 2004: Her diabetes had finally made her too ill to travel. After her death, Jim made the hard journey back to Yellowstone to revisit all their favorite places. As he resumed their pattern of Western immersion, Jim told me he began to find purpose in his life again.
Since his first solo trip in 2008, Jim has spent more and more time in the West. His longest trip? Four months exploring the Canadian Rockies, Glacier, Yellowstone, the Tetons and the Black Hills. Sometimes, his sister or son comes along on his travels, which is how they've come to know why these places keep calling Jim back.
Recently, Jim's own health problems have prevented him from hiking the way he did with Sandy. But he has – and cherishes – his memories. "I'll stop at a trail head and spend hours just watching and listening ... to the wind in the grass, the trees, birds, whatever wildlife shows up. And I'll reminisce about when I came before and hiked the trail." Asked if he keeps a journal, Jim said, "No, but I remember every twist and turn of the trail, how it looked, what we saw." He explains that the beauty of nature calms him, gives him a feeling of tranquility, even euphoria, and transports him back to his youth. "Spending time in the West is like a miracle drug," he says.
Jim's words remind me of what Wallace Stegner said in his Wilderness Letter:
"We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."
Perhaps that's why the national parks and campgrounds of the West overflow all summer, every year. People from all over the world are not only curious to see our public lands, they also are searching for some kind of refuge in what is left of our country's wild places, each person seeking a personal geography of hope.
Marcia Hensley is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. She lives in the Denver area.]]>
But unlike Yellowstone, which is managed by the National Park Service, the preserve has a radically different management structure. It is not managed by any federal agency; instead, it is run by a federal corporation known as the Valles Caldera Trust and its board of politically appointed trusties. Congress passed the Valles Caldera Preservation Act to establish the preserve and trust, and also gave it the unusual mandate that it must be operated as a working ranch and become financially self-sustaining.
Anyone who read the Preservation Act couldn't fail to see its conflicting goals: preservation of the land, the former Baca Ranch, along with exploitation of the land in order to make a profit and sustain the trust. Many New Mexico residents like myself wondered how both goals could be achieved, but we were jubilant when at last the formerly private land became a public resource.
Nine years later, we're a lot less jubilant. Public access is severely limited and also expensive, with $40 van tours, $35 to go fishing, $10 to hike on designated trails, and off-putting rules like no hiking midweek and fees tacked on to other activities. You have to pay to play in the preserve or be politically connected to get in. What's more, public board meetings seem more like a sham, with directors recounting what has already been decided somewhere else, far away from public scrutiny. Executive directors also come and go with disturbing frequency -- four in the last nine years.
Most of the nine board members are businesspeople with no public-land management experience. Almost without exception, all have fulltime endeavors to attend to besides the preserve. At best, a part-time board runs this national treasure.
Tom Ribe of the Valles Caldera Action organization, a watchdog group, is one of the disappointed conservationists who formerly supported the preserve. "We worked hard in 2000 to get the Valles Caldera in public hands," he said, "but it was a deeply troubled idea from the start, and we gave up on it entirely sometime in 2007." Now, he says, "the trust model has no constituency and offers no advantage and many drawbacks over traditional land management."
Jeremy Vesbach, director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, said one of the worst things about the trust's management is the way it kowtows to the rich. "The efforts that have been made to charge $10,000 or more for a person to access our own public lands for elk hunting have a lot of people outraged. Sportsmen would like to see a natural resource agency manage Valles Caldera. It would make more sense economically for all the people who would like to responsibly access and enjoy it."
This March, the trust announced that it had found a solution for its financial problems: Commercial development of the preserve. Opponents reacted quickly, saying that developing the land was exactly what the purchase of the Valles Caldera was supposed to prevent.
The trust has hired the Entrix Corp. to come up with several scenarios for making money. According to Terry McDermott, the trust's communication manager, the final version has not been determined. He says plans will be based on the options from Entrix as well as from other sources, and they will be shared with the public.
Critics say the whole emphasis on commercial exploitation is misplaced. Since the trust only generates about 20 percent of the money it needs to run the preserve, it needs 80 percent to come from some new enterprises -- a huge amount. Meanwhile, it has been receiving $3.5 million a year from the federal government -- public money, to be exact -- to meet its annual budget of $4.4 million. I don't think anyone is getting their money's worth.
The wheels in Washington turn slowly, but there is hope for change. Both New Mexico Democratic Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall say they want the National Park Service to study brin ging the preserve under federal management. That indicates there's still hope we can do something right for this wonderful land.
Mike Castinado is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is an outdoorsman and native New Mexican who lives in Albuquerque.]]>
When and if the National Park Service is allowed by the Congress to reorganize itself, it will still have 366 Park Service units and close to 300 million visitors a year. But the management of those parks and visitors and how decisions are made will be very different.
Gone will be the heavily staffed Washington office, with 1,100 employees overseeing 10 regional offices. And gone will be the regional offices, each with 200 or so employees, overseeing in turn an average of 40 parks.
In their places will be a slimmed-down D.C. office, and seven even slimmer field offices, each with only 20 or so employees. Those field offices will each oversee 50 or so parks. Finally, to provide the legal, architectural and planning services the parks need, there will also be 16 system support offices, each attached to a cluster of parks grouped by ecosystem, and each staffed by 80 to 100 people.
In the West, for example, the Rocky Mountain Regional Office in Denver will be merged with the Southwest Regional Office in Santa Fe. The 400 or so employees now in those two offices will become about 20 employees in the new Intermountain Field Office. That office's few employees will set policy for parks stretching from Glacier in Montana, on the Canadian border, to Great Bend in Texas, on the Mexican border.
The 79 parks, monuments, historic sites and six historic trails in the Intermountain Field Office will, in turn, be organized into three ecosystem clusters: the Rocky Mountain cluster (Yellowstone, Glacier, et al), the Colorado Plateau cluster (Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, et al), and the Southwest cluster (Grand Canyon, Organ Pipe, et al). Each cluster will have a system support office, headed by a superintendent whose civil service grade will outrank that of the park superintendents.
In theory, power will devolve to the park superintendents in each cluster, who will decide jointly how to distribute resources. (That decision is now made by the regional offices.) In addition, the superintendents will be freer to govern their individual parks, working with local communities and governments on a consensus basis.
But many of the questions about the reorganization center on who will actually exercise the power. Some wonder if the superintendents who head the system support offices will become de facto heads of the parks in his or her ecosystem cluster. Others believe the park superintendents will be able to jointly govern the cluster. And some think internal governance will be irrelevant, because the new system will become like the now changing Bureau of Land Management, run for and by special economic interests.
Whether or not the reorganization is approved by the Congress, it is already having an effect, as Park Service employees anticipate the new order. In Denver, the Regional Office has dropped from 170 employees to 140 since March. The same trend is visible in Washington, D.C., where 120 employees have left the central office for the "field." Overall, there are 500 vacancies still to be filled at national park and recreation areas, and under Operation Opportunity, employees in the central and regional offices have first shot at those jobs.
That, in itself, was not remarkable; Westerners kill wolves all the time. But this incident was different. This particular wolf, a 2-year-old male, was slain under a confusing set of circumstances: on the grounds of a private inholding within the boundaries of Grand Teton National Park.
As a result, the National Park Service and the Wyoming Department of Game and Fish found themselves in a muddle: Whose wolf was it, anyway? Both agencies dispatched personnel to the site, with the Park Service acting as lead investigator. The wolf had been threatening domestic animals, the shooter told them. He or she — the Park Service never publicly identified the landowner — injured the wolf with two shots from a .223 Remington, followed the wounded animal into a stand of timber, knelt in the snow 50 yards out, and put a fatal bullet in its left shoulder. Park Service biologists thanked the landowner for cooperating, and a state game warden loaded the carcass into his truck for later examination.The two agencies now stood on uneasy ground: Both had feared just this scenario — a wolf killed on an inholding — since the species was delisted in Wyoming in 2012. Though the Park Service had for decades assumed it had jurisdiction over the inholdings, Wyoming Game and Fish had been urging it to revisit the question for over a year; now, the federal government began a legal review in earnest. Ten months later, on Nov. 11, 2014, the resolution came in the form of a letter from Tammy Whittington, a Park Service official, to Brian Nesvik, chief game warden at Game and Fish. After extensive review, Whittington wrote, the state of Wyoming "will take the lead in responding to wildlife management issues on privately-owned lands within the park."
Five months after the Park Service surrendered its wildlife authority over the inholdings, the agency's officials seem sanguine about the decision. "We've always had a good working relationship with the state," says park spokeswoman Jackie Skaggs. "The average visitor to Grand Teton National Park will not see any difference or realize anything's changed."
Many conservationists, however, consider the reversal a troubling, even precedent-setting, shift. "How can you protect anything inside the park anymore?" demands Franz Camenzind, former director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance. "I find it ironic and disturbing that, as we're preparing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Park Service (in 2016), we're witnessing the shredding of its very fabric."
So what does this decision really mean — and what might it portend for Grand Teton and other national parks?
If you want to make sense of the Park Service's decision, you have to rewind 65 years, to the bizarre circumstances surrounding Grand Teton's birth.
Though the park was created in 1929, its boundaries initially embraced only the jagged Teton Range, leaving the neighboring valley of Jackson Hole an unprotected quilt of private land. That wouldn't last: In the 1930s, New York millionaire John D. Rockefeller snapped up 30,000 acres, intending to donate it to the federal government, and in 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt declared Jackson Hole a national monument. Though local opposition was vehement — one enraged senator called the designation a "foul, sneaking Pearl Harbor blow" — President Harry Truman upped the ante in 1950, merging the monument into Grand Teton National Park.
Even then, Grand Teton remained incomplete. At the time of the park's creation, private landowners still held 13,000 acres, forming Swiss cheese-like holes in the feds' domain. Over time, the Park Service purchased almost all of that property. Today, the park is laced with 100 private inholdings representing 950 acres — less than half of 1 percent of Grand Teton's area.
Still, enough private land remains that wildlife conflicts are inevitable. "We've had bison gore livestock, situations involving bears and sanitation," says Scott Talbott, director of Wyoming Game and Fish. When such incidents have cropped up, he says, "We've worked closely with the Park Service, and on most occasions both agencies have responded. But there's always been that question: Whose jurisdiction is it?"
That dilemma took on new urgency in 2012, the year Wyoming's wolves were removed from the endangered species list. The delisting pushed the inholdings into legal limbo. Within Grand Teton, wolves, and virtually all other wildlife, were protected by federal regulations that prohibited hunting or trapping inside park borders. On private land in northwest Wyoming, however, the creatures were now subject to state statutes that allowed landowners to kill wolves that attacked livestock. In other words, Canis lupus was clearly secure within the park, and clearly vulnerable on private lands. But what about private lands within a park?
The uncertainty didn't sit well with Wyoming Game and Fish. Could the owner of an inholding really be prosecuted for following state laws on private property? In a March 2013 letter, the state agency urged the Park Service to clarify the matter. But the feds moved too slowly. Nine months later, on that frigid morning in January 2014, as Skaggs puts it, "What we were afraid would happen, happened."
The long-dreaded wolf killing pushed the inholdings review into overdrive. The Park Service sent the case to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Wyoming, Christopher "Kip" Crofts. During the following months, Crofts and his staff pored over state statutes and federal regs, examined similar cases, and solicited advice from other offices. Their analysis focused mostly on the Code of Federal Regulations, which says that prohibitions against killing wildlife apply "regardless of land ownership, on all lands and waters within a park area that are under the legislative jurisdiction of the United States."
For decades, those words had buttressed the view that the Park Service had authority. "There's substantial past practice and legal precedent for Park Service jurisdiction," says Deny Galvin, the agency's former deputy director.
Crofts' office, however, decided that the phrase "regardless of land ownership" was modified by the words that followed, "under the legislative jurisdiction of the United States" — and the inholdings weren't under U.S. jurisdiction because they were not "dedicated to park purposes," language in a 1977 Wyoming state statute. The inholdings' long history of private ownership effectively trumped their location.
"It would be counterintuitive to consider private land that has nothing to do with the park 'dedicated to park purposes,'" Crofts says. "You don't need to be a lawyer to understand that." Federal wildlife regulations, Wyoming's U.S. Attorney Office decided, didn't apply to Grand Teton's private inholdings.
How much does this matter, in the end? After all, we're talking about just 950 acres in total — smaller than Golden Gate Park in the heart of San Francisco.
For starters, the next time a bison gores a cow or a black bear raids a garbage can, it will be Wyoming Game and Fish, not the National Park Service, that rides to the rescue. (That still applies to wolves, even though they're again federally protected after a court threw out the delisting in September 2014.) That shift probably won't transform management. "I don't see a huge change in how we work," says the Park Service's Skaggs.
But another issue has conservationists concerned: the impacts of hunting. After Game and Fish received Whittington's letter last year, the agency promptly opened bison hunting on Moose Head Ranch, the park's second-largest inholding at 120 acres; the state is proposing to continue the Moose Head bison hunt this year. On another inholding, the 450-acre Pinto Ranch, the state has proposed treating the land like a regular hunting area in 2015, meaning it would be open to the pursuit of game species from waterfowl to mule deer to cougars. Those proposals will be finalized in late April.
"We're not against hunting in general, but we would have liked to see the state respect the sanctuary of the park," says Sharon Mader, Grand Teton program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. "People come to parks to view wildlife in its native habitat, unmolested." Mader also points out that hunters on inholdings can now shoot non-game critters, including coyotes, foxes, jackrabbits and porcupines, on sight.
For his part, Franz Camenzind fears that expanded hunting within park boundaries could disrupt the ecology of predators like black bears, wolves, and, if they're eventually delisted, even grizzlies. "Some of these private lands are in prime habitat and movement corridors," he says.
To be sure, the vast majority of Grand Teton's inholdings are residential lots, some as small as a quarter-acre, that are unlikely ever to host hunting. And hunters will only be able to access the Pinto and Moose Head ranches at the pleasure of their owners. "(The inholdings' owners) value wildlife as much as the Park Service does," avers Skaggs. "I doubt they would want just anybody gaining access to their land to hunt."
Yet the decision's implications may extend beyond Grand Teton's borders. As of 2012, the nation's parks contained 2.7 million acres of inholdings, around 3 percent of their total acreage. Glacier, Zion and Sequoia are but three of the parks that embrace private lands. "Most Western parks have private property within their boundaries," says Galvin. "It just seems to me an unmanageable situation if you have people able to shoot and kill species as soon as they step onto private land." (In response, Crofts says that Grand Teton's circumstances are too specific to set precedent, and that the opinion of a U.S. attorney, as opposed to a court decision, is unlikely to have sweeping ramifications.)
Ultimately, the question of what this all means for Grand Teton, and the park system, can only be met with that always unsatisfying answer: We'll see. In his 2014 book Peaks, Politics and Passion, the historian Robert Righter observed that Grand Teton, owing to its contentious origins, receives scrutiny and incites acrimony like nowhere else. "In many national parks administrative errors, or well-intended policies that somehow backfire, would go unnoticed, but not in Grand Teton National Park," Righter wrote.
That's not to claim that the jurisdictional change is an error or a failed policy — the decision is too new to make that judgment. Rather, the jury is out, and the West awaits its verdict.
Ben Goldfarb is a correspondent for High Country News.]]>
Across the Western National Park System, vandalism of natural features, like rock faces and trees, has risen steadily in recent years, with more than 600 incidents reported since 2013. The hardest-hit areas are near large urban centers — such as Lake Mead National Recreation Area, a mere 39 miles from the Las Vegas Strip.
Joshua Tree, located about two and a half hours east of Los Angeles, had to close portions of its historic Barker Dam in February 2013, and, months later, it closed Rattlesnake Canyon as well. Superintendent David Smith says the vandalism ranges from run-of-the-mill high-school-type inscriptions ("Nancy loves Carl") to gang tags and unwanted works of "art," like the bright blue giraffe hikers found on a boulder in February.
This year, there have been more than 150 incidents in the Pacific West and Intermountain West regions. Such vandalism is difficult to undo, though workers can scrape off paint with spatulas, or use chemical treatments, provided they won't damage archaeological features.
People "have a desire to leave a permanent mark," says Smith, "but the difference between prehistoric times and now, is we have other mechanisms to leave a permanent record without defacing or destroying something that belongs to every American."]]>


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Jay-Z is unquestionably electrifying onstage, though the upcoming live album that resulted from his performance Sunday will be anything but.
Jigga will appear on MTV's "Unplugged" next month, and an album culled from the set is expected to drop in mid-December, according to a Roc-A-Fella spokesperson.
Backed by a string quartet and the Roots — minus vocalists Rahzel and Black Thought — Jay-Z delighted the live studio audience with cuts from his past as well as his latest album, The Blueprint. Queen of hip-hop soul Mary J. Blige joined the MC on "Can't Knock the Hustle," the track from Jay's 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt, on which she also appears. The Neptunes' Pharrell Williams accompanied him on "I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)," the pair's track on last year's The Dynasty: Roc La Familia.

subset: commoncrawl


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HidingInAHijab Hiding In A Hijab YKTTW Discussion
|Hiding In A Hijab
Hide by disguising yourself as a Muslim womanNeeds Examples Better Name Description Needs Help Already have?
Ah, the hijab, and its close cousins the niqab and the burqa; these articles of clothing are most associated with Middle-Eastern Muslim maidens (for their modesty). They also have the distinctive properties of being 1. Extremely common in certain locations and 2. Face-concealing. This means that if you as a fictional character are on the lam in Qurac, running through the ubiquitous out-door marketplaces in an attempt to dodge your pursuers by leaping over apple-carts, you have a perfect means of evading capture: Simply don one of those big, black outfits the women are wearing, and vanish right into the crowd. (Actually being a woman is optional.) Just how you're supposed to come by one of these is not important. How you find one in your size is even less so. The important thing is that you can hide your face without drawing the kind of attention a mask or hood would bring down on you, and make yourself harder to find than Where's Waldo?. And really, besides tipping off the audience that the scene takes place in the Middle East, isn't this the only reason these clothes exist?
ExamplesAnime and Manga
- Lupin III: In one episode, Lupin and his gang steal burqas to hide from Inspector Zenigata. Zenigata tracks them to a well where women are doing the laundry. Finding the gang's discarded clothes, he forces the women there to remove their veils, and promptly subverts the trope when its revealed the ladies are actual ladies, who promptly make their displeasure known with wooden laundry mallets. Later in the episode, it's played straight when the gang actually does disguise themselves in burqas. Afraid of getting beaten again, Zenigata lets them go without an inspection.
- This was done by Luke Cage and Danny Rand in a Power Man and Iron Fist issue; part of the gag was that the cover advertised "dancing girls" without mentioning just who those "girls" were.
- Tintin and Captain Haddock sneak past Kuweit guards while wrapped up and balancing urns on their heads in Black Gold. The captain trips, nearly swears, and manages to keep the urn balanced to the guards' unhidden admiration. Later at a well they meet another robed woman who questions them in Arabic. When neither answers, she rips off the (bearded) captain's veil. Who starts yelling at her as Snowy pops out of the urn and starts barking at her. Fortunately they escape before the guards can find them.
- Done once in Zero Dark Thirty, used to capture someone. (Details needed)
- In White Sun of the Desert, Black Abdullah uses this trick to get the drop on Petrukha (a Red Army soldier and Comrade Sukhov's sidekick) and kill him.
- Epically done in Jackie Chan's The Accidental Spy. While being pursued by enemy agents, he notices large swathes of cloth hanging from rafters, which he acrobatically wraps around him. See for yourself.
- Reese does this in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle after he's joined the army and is lost in Afghanistan.
- Done in an early episode of Community where Shirley's two children hide in a burqa so that Abed's cousin to in the bouncy-castle without Abed's disapproving father noticing that she's gone.
- The presenters from Top Gear try this in Syria in order to not be recognized. It didn't work.
James: (After finding out it didn't work) I've appeared on television in drag for nothing!
- Doonesbury: While in Afghanistan Hedley disguises himself this way, it triggers quite a few jokes.
- Funky Winkerbean: During Wally's escape from his Afghan tribal captors he was taken in by an orphan girl who dressed him up in a burqa to hide him from said tribe.
- Parodied on Family Guy, where two cops end up chasing Brian through an inexplicable marketplace and find what seems to be Brian in a burqa, only to discover it's actually just an ugly woman.
- On The Wild Thornberrys, although Eliza isn't actually running from anyone, she does use a veil in order to switch places with a friend in one episode. The disguise is impenetrable until said friend confesses to the ruse.
- Mustaf Jama, was said to have been caught attempting to flee the UK in a Muslim veil after being involved in the murder of a policewoman in a robbery.
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It is the mission of the National Park Service to preserve the remnants of the historic route of 1804-1806 Corps of Discovery Expedition located along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail and to provide a comprehensive interpretation of its history, including the American Indian perspective, to allow for better visitor understanding and appreciation of its significance.
To support partners in their efforts to make good decisions, have quality programming, be proactive in their planning and to provide for visitor access to Trail resources, the Trail has developed the Partner Support Program or PSP. For more information on the Partner Support Program and how it could help your organization meet its needs along the Trail, please visit the Partner Support Program page.


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Software Audits Consume Time and Resources
Under Scrutiny53% of survey participants have worked for an organization that has been audited by a software vendor or industry trade group—34% of them in the last six months.
Short-Handed68% of organizations without IT asset management tools have been audited within the last two years, compared to just 46% of companies with these tools.
Lead TimeNearly one-half of organizations are given a month or longer to prepare for a software audit.
Dragged Out45% of audits last three months or longer, from the initial audit request to resolution.
Tense Situation20% of respondents describe the relationship with the software vendor as "contentious" during the audit. In firms with more than 10,000 employees, it's 40%.
Payment DueOf those organizations that owed money to the vendor at the audit's conclusion, 42% owed at least $50,000.
Complicated Relationship55% say the biggest challenge in staying compliant is that the license agreements and entitlements are difficult to understand and interpret.
Muddled LandscapeAbout half say that the complex IT environment creates immense difficulties in staying compliant.
Beware of the dreaded software audit: Preparing for one seems to take forever, and the process of conducting the audit takes even longer, according to a recent survey from Express Metrix. What's more, a significant number of organizations have to pay tens of thousands of dollars—and sometimes a lot more---once an audit concludes. A big part of the problem is that software agreements have grown too intricate to figure out, respondents say. Investing in IT asset management tools is one way to avoid this perennial pain point, as these tools help technology organizations stay on top of software usage, among other benefits. It's also important for IT professionals to understand how common software audits really are, in addition to the extent of their potential impact on the targeted enterprises, according to Express Metrix CEO Kris Barker. "This [information] allows organizations to reflect on their own situations, anticipate their risks and adjust their license management strategies accordingly," he says. Approximately 180 IT professionals took part in the research.
How App Complexity Hurts Employee Per...A significant number of employees complain that enterprise apps are...
Watch Now


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Wind Works Power Corp. Signs Letter of Intent with Sprott Power Corp.
OTTAWA, ONTARIO--—October 29, 2012 – Wind Works Power Corp. (OTCQB:WWPW.BBO - News)(Frankfurt:R5E1.F - News)(WKN: A0RPM2) is pleased to announce it has entered into a Letter of Intent with Sprott Power Corp. to sell interests in and co-develop several projects owned by Wind Works (through its wholly-owned subsidiary Zero Emission People, LLC) representing up to 90 MW of contracted capacity with the Ontario Power Authority under the FIT program in Ontario, Canada.
Sprott Power previously assumed the position of a secured lender in the projects, and continues to actively participate with Wind Works in project development and in providing additional development funding to the projects.
The transaction will be subject to standard conditions including receipt of any consents required from the Ontario Power Authority, and other third parties.
Wind Works has 90 megawatts of FIT projects in Ontario, Canada; 27 megawatts of near-term permitted projects in Germany; and 475 megawatts of projects under development in the United States.
Our mission is to provide the opportunity for people to participate in the development of renewable wind energy projects. We believe in making sound, environmentally conscious investments that are good for our shareholders and our planet. To eliminate one person`s carbon footprint of 20 tons each year (for Canada), it only takes a modern windmill 2 days by producing approx. 40,000 kilowatt hours of zero emission energy.
Read more at http://www.stockhouse.com/bullboards/messagedetail.aspx?s=WWPW&t=LIST&m=31709642&l=0&pd=0&r=0&msg=3#r4KKwkPzFk4ZwgsR.99


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1993 Subaru Impreza • 144,000 miles
I am putting on a resistor chip, to see if it really improves my mileage, but I cant seem to find anyone who knows either where the IAT is or which of the 4 wires on the MAf are for the IAT
November 28, 2011.
November 28, 2011.
It appears it doesn't have one. You were just wasting your money anyway.
Looked at it again on the 1.8 which is the impreza-it doesn't have one-like Wrench said-
No, it does not. I just looked at the PCM wiring and it does not have an IAT input.
A minute ago it was mileage that you wanted to improve. Now it's power. They are completely opposite goals and if you get one, you lose the other. You have a computer controlled car. Other than keeping it well tuned, keeping the tires inflated properly and changing your driving habits, your only other option is a different vehicle but first decide whether it's power or fuel mileage that you are after.
You want a little power try this -use a 10K's ohms resistor on the coolant temperature sensor harness-There's a lot of ways to improve power but do you have the funding for it?
Sorry to confuse you, the reason I said that was because this "chip" was supposed to do both at the same time. I have already email the company for a return and refund, any car with AWD gets only moderate mileage. So im fine with getting a little worse mileage, but would like to get a little more power for take off.
My car has 157k on it and the coolant light came on today flashing i looked at the resivoir and it was empty filled it up and then later on that day it was empty again i looked at the ...
1 answer • 1996 Saturn SC2 • 157,000 miles
Dear SIR. Now I have some question to ask you. 1 How can i change (step)water coolant? 2 How much 1 lite oil per kilometre? 3 How can i maintain moonroof? Thanks so much
1 answer • 2006 Honda Accord • 40,000 miles
1992 Ford Tempo mileage: 65,000. My daughter has a 1992 Ford Tempo that she has been driving for about 4 years. She is very conscientious in regularly changing oil, and routinely having...
1 answer • 1992 Ford Tempo • 65,000 miles
This is about "Red" antifreeze, it's harmful attributes to engine gaskets and corrosion to all parts of the cooling and heating systems. I noticed that comments have been made on ...
1 answer • 2000 Chevrolet S-10 • 71,000 miles


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EU Slams Israel Over Settlements, Says Treaties Demand 1967 Borders
Israel Slams Criticism as 'One-Sided'
A new statement from European Union foreign ministers has condemned Israel's latest settlement expansion plans, expressing "deep dismay" at the policy and insisting that all EU treaties with Israel rest are explicitly applicable only to the 1967 borders.
The reference to the 1967 borders could be significant, as some are saying it could lay the groundwork for EU sanctions banning products coming out of Israeli settlements, something which so far officials publicly insist isn't being considered.
EU criticism of settlements has gotten progressively more serious in recent months, with the last announcement seemingly the "last straw" and suggesting a major shift in EU policy against the far-right Israeli government's policy of building whenever it serves to spite the Palestinians.
Israeli officials are downplaying the seriousness of the comments, and slamming the European Union as "one-sided" in their criticism of the settlements, insisting history has "proven" that the Palestinians are exclusively to blame for the lack of peace deals.
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz
- Saudis to Behead Over 50, Including Top Shi'ite Cleric, as 'Terrorists' - November 26th, 2015
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- Cameron Challenged on Claim of 70,000 Moderate Syrian Fighters - November 26th, 2015
- Russia Says 'Wiped Out' Terror Groups Near Downed Plane - November 26th, 2015
- Powers Open to 'Grand Coalition' Against ISIS - November 26th, 2015
5 Responses to "EU Slams Israel Over Settlements, Says Treaties Demand 1967 Borders"
You have taken too long get rid of ashton then you may see things as they are as the Palestinians do.
Words mean nothing with these people. Act, or just shut up. Now you just sound like fools.
The EU is a fossil, so nothing new or good can come out of there.
EU is just a waste of the USA tax payers money, they are good for nothing corrupt and blind to be kind.
As if the EU, stumbling from pillar to post, was in any position to criticise anyone


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1998 Dodge Neon • 130,000 miles
A few days ago I was driving and when I started turning while on the brake I noticed that it was difficult to turn the steeringwheel. Yesterday I was driving and when I took a corner it sounded like my left front tire was flat and I could hear one of the tires sliding across gravel. It felt like the left front was not turning with the right front. Also when the car is in park and I turn the wheel you can hear something popping once I turn the wheel so far. I was told it was the tierod but I wasn't sure so I figured I would try to find some help on this website.
April 29, 2012.
April 29, 2012.
Without seeing it, it makes sense but you need a shop to visually check it to confirm.
Apr 29, 2012.
Apr 29, 2012.
It ended up bein my tierod end. It broke away from the steering knuckle. Its fixed but now I can hear a grinding in the right front. I dont hear it when im on the throttle though. Im guessing the bearings in the cv-joint are bad.
May 12, 2012.
May 12, 2012.
I think I have a wheel bearing that is going bad, front driver's side. What can I do to test this at home without taking everything apart. I have heard that if while driving if you ...
1 answer • 2002 Mazda Protege • 108,000 miles
2002 Honda Accord mileage: 48,000. Six months ago, my Service Center replaced the front struts on my Accord. They did not say that a wheel alignment was necessary at that time. I now ...
1 answer • 2002 Honda Accord • 48,000 miles
How do I replace rear axle wheel bearings on a 1988 Chevy Suburban 4x4 1500?
1 answer • 1988 Chevrolet Suburban • 150,000 miles
This has to do with my 4 wheel drive in 1997 Jeep Cherokee Sport. When in 4 wheel drive it is all over the road and when putback into 2 wheel it clunks and the jeep jumps.
1 answer • 1997 Jeep Cherokee


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4Runner Toyota Leveling Kits
A leveling kit is designed to raise the front of your Toyota 4Runner. There are various options for the type and amount of front lift, depending on your specific requirements. Since nearly all vehicles come from the factory with a slight rake, a leveling kit is what you'll need to not only raise the front but also allow the installation of larger tires. If you've added a heavier bumper or a winch to the front, this is another reason to install a leveling kit. You'll find a wide assortment of leveling kits here provided by manufacturers that are known to be leaders in the industry.
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RETRACTED ARTICLE: Expression of microRNA-497 and its prognostic significance in human breast cancer
Diagnostic Pathology 2013, 8:172 doi:10.1186/1746-1596-8-172
The Publisher and Editor regretfully retract this article because the peer-review process was inappropriately influenced and compromised. As a result, the scientific integrity of the article cannot be guaranteed. A systematic and detailed investigation suggests that a third party was involved in supplying fabricated details of potential peer reviewers for a large number of manuscripts submitted to different journals. In accordance with recommendations from COPE we have retracted all affected published articles, including this one. It was not possible to determine beyond doubt that the authors of this particular article were aware of any third party attempts to manipulate peer review of their manuscript. The retraction note is available from the following link; http://www.diagnosticpathology.org/content/10/1/9
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I just hope Lou doesn't get stupid and overpays Clarkson at the last minute or even worse throws a dumb contract term at Ryane Clowe to fill his spot.
Clowe was a useful player in SJ this year but had terrible shooting luck. He then had 8 pts in 12 games in NY. Part of the reason NY has no interest in re-signing him is the Sharks get a 2nd rounder if they do, I think he could be a solid, cheaper version of Clarkson.
Given the number of UFA forwards available and the fact that there's a bit of cap crunch (For example, SJ can basically sign no one) I think there's going to be some decent value signing options for NJ at the forward position. Maybe not Clowe exactly, but there will be options.


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August 18, 2009
Neal McCready
Ole Miss entertained Eric Mitchell for an unofficial visit in April. The Rebels wowed the three-star athlete from Cape Coral (Mariner), Fla., and moved into the lead for his collegiate services, and Mitchell said Ole Miss would be "tough to beat."Those comments, presumably, were comforting for Ole Miss, but for the past four months or so, the Rebels have held on while other programs have made a run at the 5-foot-11, 170-pound speedster. On Sunday, Ole Miss got its man when Mitchell gave the Rebels his verbal commitment. Mitchell chose Ole Miss over Indiana, Iowa State, Michigan, Florida International and others. Mitchell is Ole Miss' sixth verbal commitment for the 2010 signing class, joining Lauderdale Lakes, Fla., cornerback Cliff Coleman; Cleveland, Tenn., offensive lineman Jared Duke; Atlanta, Ga., linebacker Clarence Jackson; East Mississippi Community College quarterback Randall Mackey and Monticello, Ark., safety Brishen Matthews. Yazoo City, Miss., four-star offensive tackle Demarco Cox committed to Ole Miss' basketball program earlier this month and has not ruled out playing both sports at some point during his college career. Mitchell picked up an offer from Ole Miss in early April. Soon thereafter, he made the 14-hour trip to Oxford with a pair of his high school coaches, including Mariner head coach Chad O'Brien. "When I left, I said I'm an Ole Miss fan," O'Brien said. "I'll root for them now. I was really impressed. They have a top-notch thing going." Mitchell, who plays running back, wide receiver and cornerback at the high school level, will likely begin his college career at cornerback. "They're not sure if they're going to put me on offense or defense," Mitchell said in April. "I watched their corners, and I'm pretty sure I could handle it.
It doesn't matter. Wherever they want to put me, I'll play, as long as I get on that field." O'Brien said he believes the Rebels are recruiting Mitchell as a cornerback, adding that Ole Miss recruiting coordinator/cornerbacks coach Chris Vaughn "really liked him." ...More... To continue reading this article you must be a member. Sign Up Now!
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This paper presents an adaptive fuzzy mixed H2/H∞ attitude control of nonlinear spacecraft systems with unknown or uncertain inertia matrix and external disturbances. Using an adaptive fuzzy approximation method, an uncertain nonlinear model is estimated. Then, by a mixed H2 and H∞ attitude control design, the effect of external disturbance and fuzzy approximation error on spacecraft attitude can be restrained and the tracking error as well as consumed energy of the controller is minimized. By virtue of the skew symmetric property of the spacecraft system and adequate choice of state variable transformation, this adaptive fuzzy control problem can be reduced to solving two algebraic equations instead of a pair of coupled time-varying differential equations. Finally, experimental simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design methods.
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A 27-year-old man faces more burglary charges in connection with thefts in August in Skippack and according to police, other locations in Montgomery County. Police charged Royersford resident, Andrew Top with a list of charges. Police say, on August 21st a homeowner in Perkiomen Township spotted a car at around 11:30 in the morning coming out of the his driveway when he returned home. Police say, the homeowner followed the car, got the plate number and called police. The State Police Criminal Investigation Unit stopped a white Acura at a convenience store in Upper Providence Township. Troopers served Top with a search warrant on his car and home, finding stolen items from the home in Upper Perkiomen Township and another home in Skippack on Reginald Lane. Police say, Top is responsible for the theft of thousands of dollars in property from homes. Top was sent to prison in 2005 for a term of 18-to-25 months. In 2009 he was sentenced again for more burglaries. He was released this past June.
A Telford Police Officer was forced to call for back-up during a domestic dispute between a man and his girlfriend in Telford. Police were called to the Telford Garden Apartments Sunday at around 10PM, where a woman told an officer, her boyfriend, Dewayne Johnson, pushed her out of his care and then starting choking her. The officer tried to arrest Johnson, but police say, he fought with the officer, before another Telford officer could take part in the arrest and handcuff Johnson. Police say, Johnson threatened to kill both officers. He faces an October 22nd hearing on a list of charges, including terroristic threatening, simple assault, driving under the influence and possession of drug paraphernalia. Johnson is in the Montgomery County Prison after failing to post
10-thousand dollars bail.
For now, a woman who was driving a school bus that killed 78 year old, Shirley Wilhelm, last Monday morning at around 7, will not be charged. The Montgomery County District Attorney's Office believes that the driver, whose name is being withheld, did not know she hit the elderly woman in Lower Pottsgrove Township, near the intersection of Mervine and north Charlotte streets. The Montgomery County District office continues to investigate the case by way of cell phone records to determine if the driver was using a cell phone when the elderly woman was struck and killed. The District Attorney's Office will also check a toxicology report and request a mechanical analysis of the school bus.
Four people are displaced after a fire rips through their a building on Bridge street, in the area of Jacobs street, Tuesday morning in Upper Providence township. The blaze erupted just before 9am. Firefighters were able to bring the flames under control in under an hour. The Red Cross of Southeastern Pennsylvania is assisting the displaced people with lodging. The cause of the fire remains under is unknown. Several fire companies responded to the fire. One person was taken to the hospital for treatment. Two other occupants of the building did not want treatment.
Address: 1210 Snyder RoadLansdale, PA 19446
Phone: (215) 855-8211
Phone: (215) 723-2116


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I have obtained years of experience being a personal assistant/shopper. One of my main hobbies is shopping and I view beauty as an art.


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1998 Honda Civic • 150,000 miles
I hear a pretty loud squeaking coming from the right rear when going over bumps and especially when it is cold.
Could someone tell me what it is likely to be?
. Poor Student
Could someone tell me what it is likely to be?
. Poor Student
December 19, 2012.
December 19, 2012.
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Ive tried this but doesnt work.
Here is the js file called install.js function install() { document.location.href="file:///c:/install/install/cmd"; } here is how I am calling it from a .hta file.    ... ...
Ive based this off the windows post install wizard someone posted a few months back. I cant seem to find the post. It does everything I want except execute the install.cmd as it actually was made for unattended install.


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I'm working on my laptop on a source-controlled project, but now I want to move my work to my desktop. The thing is, I can't commit because the changes are still work-in-progress.
- A solution may be to Export, but as far as I know that doesn't take into account file deletion (which I did).
- Another solution would be to make a patch and apply on the desktop, but the last time I tested, it didn't take into account binary files (which I have created and modified).
I don't have admin privileges, so I can't create a new branch.
Any other solution / workaround? Thanks!


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Treating OA of the Knee Video
Learn how lifestyle changes and non-invasive treatments can ease osteoarthritis knee pain. Watch the video now.
Copyright © 2005 - 2015 Healthline Networks, Inc. All rights reserved for Healthline. Healthline is for informational purposes and should not be considered medical advice, diagnosis or treatment recommendations. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy


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The Chamber Mission
To bring together the advancement of commercial, agricultural, industrial, civic and cultural interests for Spur, Texas and its trade area; to advance the interest, needs and concerns of the membership and community. … Read More >>
Welcome Hunters
If you are looking to bag that buck or for trying to hunt some smaller game like turkey, quail or dove Spur, Texas is this place to be. We can help set you up with a lease or a day trip from many of our local ranchers and in Town. We have all you … Read More >>
Spot Light
Spotlight: The Rowel
The Chamber sat down with Debra Capps, the owner of The Rowel Variety Store: What does The Rowel bring to our area? Debra opened The Rowel in Spur almost 3 years ago … Read More>>
Next Chamber Meeting
September Meeting
September 30th at 6:00 pm in the Willie room. Chamber meeting are always held on the last Monday of the month at 6:00pm in the Willie Room at Dickens Electric unless … Read More>>
Previous Minutes
June 2013 Minutes
Spur Area Chamber of Commerce Meeting called to order at 6:19pm Members present: Joan Day, Dominique McArthur, Michelle Ostrander, Debra Capps, Barbara Bogart, and … Read More>>
From The Chamber Blog
Spirit of The West Art Contest
The Spur Area Chamber of Commerce is looking for striking artwork that embodies our slogan "The Spirit of the West". Entries can be of places, nature or people. Entries can … Read More>>
Highway 70 Garage Sale Map
The Spur Chamber is creating a map for the Spur Area of the Highway 70 Garage sale. (May 4th) Get your sale or business listed now! $10 to place an Ad for a store or a sale … Read More>>
Just a few quick updates to the site. The 2012 Business Member and Community Member pages have been updated for the 2012 year. The Chamber Officers page was updated to … Read More>>
Property In Spur Texas
Looking to rent, lease or purchase either land or a house in the Spur area? The best place to find what you are looking for is to visit our local paper The Texas Spur. Visit … Read More>>


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I ordered my Paperwhite from Amazon.ca!!!
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Join Date: Mar 2010
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No issues whatsoever with colors blotches, specks or scratches. My screen is white. Not white white but fluorescent white. Until you've seen how a frontlit eReader works it's hard to describe. It's nothing like a LCD or book light.
I have only one complaint. I wish the text was darker but all Kindles suffer from contrast issues. I own a K4S that is worse, a K3 and K4 that is great and the PW I own falls in between the two but once you turn on the light it's not really a issue. It's so easy to add custom fonts (I have 10 installed) that you can fixed that problem easily by adding a darker font.
The Paperwhite is hands down the best eReader I've own. I currently have 5.
I should mention the higher resolution is just breathtaking on the PW compare to the K3 or K4.
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New Two and a Half Men OpeningMatt Richenthal at . Comments
they ruined a perfectly good opening. Ashton soundas like he had a vasectomy!
could it look any worse ?
If you were him, would you want to be there knowing you could never fill the last guy's shoes and everyone would be constantly comparing you to him? Of course he's in it for the money... but then, why does anyone actually work?
true indeed Aston looked like he was in it for the $
Is it just me, or does Ashton look like he really doesn't want to be there? Every clip I see is him looking bored or snotty. The top ten list on Letterman last week was awful.
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- Two and a Half Men
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Comments (9)
melanie (35) DH (36)
proud parents of 2 sweet cats
Theresa + Tommy=Molly 12.13.11 + big brother T
Rainbow Puff & Baby Puff
There's an old wives tale somewhere about if one boob is bigger than the other it's an indication of what your baby's gender will be :)
It might be on BBC, or I might have googled gender prediction old wive's tales...some of them are a hoot to read :)
1st edition in '01 with 2nd in '08, 3rd in '10, and our final released in 2011!
For where your treasure lies, there will your heart be also...
One of mine is slightly larger but in general they are just huge, sweaty, uncomfortable and in the way. I hate them. They ache and hurt and itch. I went from a nice C cup to almost DD now. I am hoping and praying they go back to normal :(
J + C = M our new years eve girl:)Survived HG! TTC #2! CHART
Me too, jcors :(
If it makes you feel any better, I did get up to a DD last time, and went back down to only half a size larger than I started. (which was fine with me because I was finally a full C) Praying I don't get left being in a D this time after delivery. My back does not like this!!
Mommy to Aidan (2004) and Owen 2012
It's normal. Actually statistically speaking most women have one breast bigger than the other, and it is usually the left. My right one has always been bigger than my left although everyone says I'm the only one who notices it. Both have grown so far with the pregnancy and I think the left one may be catching up to the right lol but there is still a difference in size. Don't worry about it, it won't affect breastfeeding or anything else and you are not the only one with this problem. Don't worry about a thing!!!


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Mutt Life Inc. in Milton, Ontario offers the best, trendiest, hippest and healthiest food and gear for your dogs and cats.
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For more information, please visit Mutt Life, follow them on Facebook or Twitter, call the store at 905- 878-9904 or email firstname.lastname@example.com.


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April 2010 Indie Next List
"Where does a grizzly bear get his name? Does a hippo's yawn really mean he's sleepy? How smart is a chimpanzee? What's the difference between an alligator and a crocodile? All the answers to these questions are combined with beautiful photographs of animals to create a truly fun survey of some favorite animal friends."
— Megan Graves, Hooray for Books!, Alexandria, VA
In this knockout book of animal photographs, perfect for the youngest animal lover, you'll discover all sorts of things. Did you know that orangutans are "ticklish"? Yes, they are just like you and me. But be careful if you ever see a hippo yawning. It doesn't mean he's sleepy it means he wants to fight.
The gorgeous up-close pictures and fascinating facts are complemented by behind-the-scenes peeks at how animal photographs are taken. (For instance, photographer Steve Grubman once had to lull a cow to sleep with soft music ) Animal lovers, young scientists, and budding photographers will all adore this beautiful nonfiction book.


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Hides Hotel Cairns - Cairns
- Free buffet breakfast and free parking
Main amenities
- 102 guestrooms
- Outdoor pool
- WiFi in the lobby
- Area shuttle
- Terrace
- 24-hour front desk
- Air conditioning
- Laundry service
- Meeting room
- Luggage storage
- Tour/ticket assistance
What's around
- In Cairns CBD
- Centenary Lakes Botanic Gardens (2.6 mi / 4.2 km)
- The Cultural Place (0.1 mi / 0.1 km)
- Cairns Regional Gallery (0.1 mi / 0.2 km)
- Cairns Night Markets (0.2 mi / 0.3 km)
- Esplanade Lagoon (0.3 mi / 0.4 km)
Staff was friendly. Helped in planning of our trips during our 3 days stay at Cairns.
Nice building and friendly staff however our room was extremely old and you can feel it…
Enter dates to check prices
Hotel Info: from Rs3,441
- Standard Room
- Twin Room (Heritage Twin)
- Superior Room, 1 Double or 2 Single Beds
- Family Room
- Double Room (Heritage Double)
- Standard Room, Ensuite (Heritage Ensuite Room)
Recommended hotels
At a glance
Key facts
Hotel size
- This hotel has 102 rooms
- This hotel is arranged over 3 floors
- 24-hour check-in
- Check-out time is 10 AM
Required at check in
- Credit card or cash deposit required
- Government-issued photo ID required
Travelling with others
- Children (14 years old and younger) stay free when occupying the parent or guardian's room, using existing bedding
- Pets not allowed
- WiFi in public areas *
- WiFi in rooms *
- Free self parking (limited)
- Area shuttle *
Nearby Three Star Cairns hotels
In the hotel
- Free buffet breakfast daily
- Outdoor pool
- Bicycle rentals nearby
- Parasailing nearby
- Scuba diving nearby
- Snorkeling nearby
- One meeting room
- 24-hour front desk
- Tours/ticket assistance
- Dry cleaning/laundry service
- Laundry facilities
- Luggage storage
- Number of buildings/towers - 1
- Year Built 1968
- Elevator/lift
- Designated smoking areas
- Terrace
- Accessible path of travel
- Accessible bathroom
- In-room accessibility
In the room
- Air conditioning
- Ceiling fan
- Iron/ironing board (on request)
- Free toiletries
- Hair dryer (on request)
- Digital TV channels
- WiFi (surcharge)
- Phone
- Refrigerator
- In-room safe
- Access via exterior corridors
Top Cairns hotels
Recently reviewed hotels in Cairns
- Cairns Plaza HotelFrom
"Had a nice time, excellent location, room of right size."May 23, 2015
- Reef Palms MotelFrom
"This family run motel is excellent value for money. Management is highly courteous and more than willing to help on each of your need. Location is close to airport (5-10 minutes…"Mar 7, 2015
- Grosvenor in CairnsFrom
"Good location and comfortable apartment style hotel with good facilities."Feb 26, 2015
- The Reef RetreatFrom
"BBC area and room were OK"Jan 11, 2015
Nearby hotels
Hides Hotel Cairns - Cairns's small print
Noise-free guestrooms cannot be guaranteed.
Parking height restrictions apply.
Optional extras
Safes in guestrooms can be used for AUD 3 per day
Cribs/Infant beds are available for AUD 10 per day
WiFi is available in guestrooms for AUD 5.00 per hour (rates may vary)
WiFi is available in public areas for AUD 5.00 per hour (rates may vary)
Area shuttle service is offered for an extra charge
We have included all charges provided to us by this hotel. However, charges can vary, for example, based on length of stay or the room you book.


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Demi Lovato Goes Brunette for First X Factor Live Show!
Demi Lovato is going back to her roots!
After spending the summer as a blonde, the natural brunette returned to her natural shade on Oct. 30 -- just one day before The X Factor's first live episode. The 20-year-old got her makeover at the Nine Zero One Salon in West Hollywood. "She's going for more of an edgy look," a source tells Us Weekly.
VIDEO: Demi Lovato's hair color evolution
Lovato has experimented with her hair several times in 2012, often sporting pink and blue streaks. The four members of Lovato's young adults team on The X Factor --Jennel Garcia, CeCe Frey, Willie Jones and Paige Thomas -- also got makeovers prior to the Oct. 31 episode.
PHOTOS: Demi Lovato's X Factor style
"So proud of my group," Lovato tweeted post-show. "You guys were amazing."
PHOTOS: Demi Lovato, then and now
Lovato and fellow judges Britney Spears, L.A. Reid and Simon Cowell will narrow the X Factor finalists from 16 to 12 when the show returns Thursday, Nov. 1 at 8 p.m. EST on FOX.
Tell Us: Do you prefer Demi Lovato as a brunette?
This article originally appeared on Usmagazine.com: Demi Lovato Goes Brunette for First X Factor Live Show!
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See what the cast of "American Beauty" is up to today.Watch Video »
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Jennifer Lopez shares an adorable photo of her look-alike daughter, plus more celebritots on social media on today's Celebs Gone Social.Watch Video »
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Sofia Vergara poses in a revealing neon bikini while her "Modern Family" castmates hit the beach in Australia on Celebs Gone Social.Watch Video »


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"Through the run of the series, there was much talk among its characters of being on the island for a purpose. As it draws to a close, "Lost" has sustained the eerie feeling (eerie for TV, anyway) that it was on the air for a purpose a special purpose beyond selling products and filling time, or even entertainment. " -ap
Ummm, gimme a break.


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We can provide a complete karaoke setup for your event, providing all necessary equipment, music and backing tracks and host the event for you.
Our equipment is of the very latest specification with computerised software and alongside our professional staff ensures you'll have a special karaoke night plus a great atmosphere.
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Typically any karaoke event bigger than a small house party is better suited to hiring a mobile karaoke DJ.