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admin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:44:22 +0000

Gunfire and Grenades: Three Shot and Two Explosions Along The Texas-Mexico Border

Katie Luke — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:20:00 +0000

The Houston Chronicle reports today on two stories dealing with violence along the Texas/Mexico border.

The first story deals with the recent deaths of three teenage boys shot over the weekend in Ciudad Juarez:

Three teenage boys were shot to death in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, at least two of them U.S. citizens and high school students in Texas, authorities said Monday.

The boys were killed at 4:22 p.m. Saturday while looking at cars in a dealership in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas, Chihuahua prosecutors’ spokesman Arturo Sandoval said. One was found inside a white Jeep Cherokee and the other two in the courtyard.

Read the full article here.

The second story covers two explosions by grenades in Metamoros, Mex.:

At least two grenades were thrown Monday evening along a busy boulevard in Matamoros that lies close to two international bridges.

Sources confirmed that two explosions went off at approximately 7:30 p.m. along Alvaro Obregon Boulevard near the intersection with Calle Sexta.

Read the full article here.

ERCOT Ends Emergency Blackouts

Katie Luke — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 19:56:34 +0000

by Becca Aaronson, The Texas Tribune

32 minutes ago

Power out at your house? You’ve got good company — 400,000 other Texans, as of noon today. But as of this afternoon, the lights (and heat) should be coming back on.

The demand for power — namely heat — exceeded generation capacity around midnight last night, causing more than 50 generators to shut down statewide. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the flow of electric power, ordered utilities to begin rotating power outages to prevent the escalation of uncontrolled power loss. As of about 1:30, ERCOT ended those emergency blackouts.

“Because of winter weather conditions that have created an unprecedented demand on the state’s energy grid, many Texans across our state are experiencing power outages today,” Gov. Rick Perry said in a statement. “I urge businesses and residents to conserve electricity to minimize the impact of this event.”

Utilities are controlling outages to prevent loss of power in critical areas with concentrations of hospitals or nursing homes. They say outages should last no more than 15 to 45 minutes per neighborhood — though regional reports are varying.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/hCrwcK.

Obama’s Speech And The Issues

Katie Luke — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:02:02 +0000

In case you missed President Obama’s State of the Union address, NPR.org reporters analyzed what the president said (and didn’t) about the issues they cover. Here are some of the highlights from their coverage. You can read the full article here.

Jobs: Facing slow job growth rate and a 9.4 percent unemployment, Obama focused on the need for job creation through clean energy, a cut in the corporate tax rate and the need to cut government spending.
Health Care: While Obama said that he was willing to work on legislation that would improve the new health care bill, he also said “What I’m not willing to do is go back to the days when insurance companies could deny someone coverage because of a pre-existing condition.”
Earmarks: “And because the American people deserve to know that special interests aren’t larding up legislation with pet projects, both parties in Congress should know this: If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it,” President Obama said.
Iraq and Afghanistan: While most of Obama’s speech focused on domestic issues, Obama was brief about Iraq and Afghanistan and reiterated the goal of American troop withdrawal.
Clean Energy: Obama set a new goal for America, stating that he hopes to have 80 percent of America’s electricity from clean energy by 2035
Transportation: Obama also stated a new goal for high speed railways, saying that he wants 80 percent of the population to have access to high speed rail within 25 years
Education: While calling for more science and math education to compete with China and India, Obama also challenged states for ideas on how to improve education. “That’s why instead of just pouring money into a system that’s not working, we launched a competition called Race to the Top,” the president said. “To all 50 states, we said, ‘If you show us the most innovative plans to improve teacher quality and student achievement, we’ll show you the money.’”
Immigration: Obama challenged congress to “take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration”
Competitiveness: “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” said Obama while still stressing the need for innovation in industry and job creation.
Electric Cars: Another goal: a million electric cars on the road by 2015

Texas Jobless Rate Up for Second Month

Katie Luke — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 22:38:17 +0000

KERA reported today that according to The Texas Workforce Commission, the unemployment rate in Texas increased for the second month in a row. December’s rate was 8.3 percent, up from 8.2 percent in November. The strongest growth in jobs, adding 8,700 jobs in December, was in the construction industry.

Read the original article here.

After Death Ruled Homicide, State Shuts Facility

Katie Luke — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:23:10 +0000

by Emily Ramshaw and Terri Langford, Houston Chronicle
January 7, 2011

Seven months after The Texas Tribune and the Houston Chronicle revealed staff at a Manvel residential treatment center had forced young girls with disabilities to fight each other, the state has shuttered Daystar Residential Inc. The move follows the Harris County medical examiner’s determination that a 16-year-old foster child’s death at the facility — one that occurred in November following a physical restraint — was a homicide.

“Today, we have revoked Daystar’s license to operate, effective immediately,” Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Anne Heiligenstein said in a statement. “This facility is just not safe for children.”

The Tribune and the Chronicle teamed up this summer on an investigation into conditions at Daystar, finding that workers there in 2008 had provoked seven developmentally disabled girls into fights, laughing, cheering and promising the winners after-school snacks. The collaborative report also revealed more than 250 incidents of confirmed abuse and mistreatment in residential treatment centers over the last two years.

Following publication, DFPS halted new admissions to Daystar and brought in a monitor to oversee conditions at the facility. But that monitor stayed for just 90 days, leaving in September after issuing a report that staff frequently used emergency physical restraints to control youth. In November, four days after Daystar was put on probation by the state, the Tribune and the Chronicle reported that a troubled 16-year-old living at the facility died of asphyxiation after a staffer applied a physical restraint in a closet.

Daystar’s attorneys have refused repeatedly to answer Tribune or Chronicle reporters’ questions about the facility.

In an e-mail Friday evening, DFPS said all foster children have been removed from Daystar and that it has “found more suitable placements for them.” All other children at the facility have also left.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/gwzMLN.

Giffords outlook “optimistic”

admin — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 21:40:45 +0000

CNN is reporting that Giffords is out of surgery and her doctors are “optimistic” about her recovery.

A suspect is in custody. Six of the 12 victims have reportedly died from their injuries.

NPR and other news organizations reported earlier Saturday that Giffords had died. NPR member station KJZZ in Phoenix reported the congresswoman and six others had been killed by the gunman (NPR).

Latest:
NPR The Two-Way
@kjzzphoenix
HuffPo

Giffords, 6 others killed by gunman

admin — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 19:30:07 +0000

Update: This post originally stated that Giffords was one of the six who died. She is reported to be recovering from surgery.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and six others died after a gunman opened fire at a public event on Saturday, the Pima County, Ariz., sheriff’s office confirms.
(NPR)

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Shot In Arizona

admin — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 18:36:56 +0000

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Shot In Arizona
by NPR STAFF

U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot outside a grocery store in Tucson while holding a public event, Arizona Public Media reported Saturday.

The Democrat, who was re-elected to her third term in November, was hosting a “Congress on Your Corner” event at the Safeway in northwest Tucson when a gunman ran up and started shooting, according to Peter Michaels, news director of Arizona Public Media.

At least five other people, including members of her staff, were hurt. Giffords was transported to University Medical Center in Tucson. Her condition was not immediately known.

Giffords was talking to a couple when the suspect ran up firing indiscriminately and then ran off, Michaels said. According to other witnesses, he was tackled by a bystander and taken into custody.

Giffords was first elected to represent Arizona’s 8th District in 2006. The “Congress on Your Corner” events allow constituents to present their concerns directly to her (NPR).

Aided by Oil, Carbon Capture Projects Advance in Texas

Katie Luke — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 05:50:07 +0000

by Kate Galbraith, The Texas Tribune
January 7, 2011

The Obama administration views carbon dioxide as a pollutant that warms the earth, and it imposed new regulations at the beginning of the year to begin to control CO2 emissions. But to Texas oilmen, carbon dioxide is a useful — and scarce — commodity that is vital to extracting hard-to-reach oil reserves.

In Texas, the nation’s largest oil producer, the demand for CO2 is soaring — because carbon dioxide can help squeeze oil out of formations deep in the earth — and new carbon dioxide-producing facilities are in the works.

Last month, Texas air-quality regulators approved crucial permits for two coal-fired power plants that will capture their carbon dioxide emissions and sell them for use in nearby oil fields. A major new pipeline operated by Plano-based Denbury Resources began ferrying carbon dioxide from Mississippi to oilfields near Houston last month.

“The demand for carbon dioxide is very, very large,” said Steve Melzer, the Midland-based president of the Texas Carbon Capture and Storage Association. He added that some oil-extraction projects are on hold because they cannot buy enough carbon dioxide.

The idea of capturing carbon dioxide and pumping it underground is gaining traction in the power sector. It sounds like an exercise in environmental idealism: Take the heat-trapping gas — belched prolifically from coal plants, which generate 45 percent of the nation’s electricity — and bury it, benefiting the atmosphere and combating global climate change. Of course, it is something of an environmental conundrum that stowing the greenhouse gas underground can also help to produce more fossil fuels.

Carbon dioxide is a “fantastic solvent,” said Susan Hovorka, a scientist with the Gulf Coast Carbon Center at the University of Texas’ Jackson School of Geosciences. In a nearly liquid form, it can mix with the underground oil, making the oil more fluid and easier to extract. Water gets pumped in before the carbon dioxide; when carbon dioxide is unavailable, water suffices, but it is not as effective.

Some of the carbon dioxide comes back out with the oil, but that gets separated and reused in the wells. When the project has finished producing oil, the vast majority of the carbon dioxide stays underground and will not leak out of the tiny pores it is wedged into, said Hovorka, whose team has monitored two oil fields in the state and verified that the gas does not escape.

Capturing carbon dioxide can increase a coal plant’s capital cost by 30 percent — a key reason why no major power plant with that capability has been built in the United States. One pilot-scale project, slated to expand, has been operating in West Virginia since 2009, and another plant that may capture and store carbon dioxide is under construction in Indiana. In addition to the two proposed Texas plants, projects are in the planning phases in California, Illinois, Kentucky and Mississippi, said Julio Friedmann, director of the carbon management program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Texas, however, has a major advantage over most other states: it can put the carbon dioxide to use. The West Virginia plant pumps carbon dioxide underground just to keep it out of the air, but Texas plants can sell it to oil companies.

Texas has been using carbon dioxide to help extract oil since the early 1970s. Much of the state’s supply gets piped in from New Mexico and Colorado, where dome formations yield CO2 in abundant quantities. In recent years — due to high, albeit fluctuating, oil prices that motivate oil producers to expand operations — demand for carbon dioxide has far outstripped supply in the Permian Basin. Prices there for carbon dioxide for new projects have more than doubled in the past five years and are now close to half the wellhead price of natural gas, measured by volume, according to Melzer.

It seems odd that Texas, which because of its heavy industry discharges more carbon dioxide into the air than any other state, would need to import it. But this could begin to change, in a modest way, with the construction of the two coal plants that received air permits last month. One is a $3.5 billion to $4 billion plant called the Tenaska Trailblazer Energy Center near Sweetwater; the other is a $2.2 billion plant near Odessa built by Summit Power.

Neither power plant is being built yet, but they plan to capture 85 percent or more of their carbon dioxide emissions and sell them to oil companies. Laura Miller, Summit’s director of projects in Texas, said the Odessa plant will get one-third of its revenue from selling power, one-third from selling fertilizer — a byproduct of a coal-gasification process to be used by the plant — and one-third from selling carbon dioxide.

Some environmentalists — in effect acknowledging that the country cannot quickly wean itself off coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel — have tepidly endorsed the concept of capturing carbon dioxide from coal plants and storing it underground. Jim Marston, the Texas head of the Environmental Defense Fund, which received a written commitment from Tenaska to using carbon-capture technologies, noted that the state’s planned plants would help show that the technology works.

Whether Texas’ plants actually get built remains to be seen. Around the country, some similar projects have folded or stalled due to cost. The failure last year of federal legislation that would in effect have put a price on greenhouse gas emissions hurt the economics of the plants, which will sell power at market prices in Texas.

But federal and state help have pushed the Texas projects along. Both Texas and the federal Environmental Protection Agency have recently issued new rules governing carbon capture projects designed to provide clarity for the industry — and have also provided financial help. In Summit’s case, the plant received $450 million in federal incentives, and it is eligible for state incentives, including a tax credit, approved in the last legislative session, worth up to $100 million.

A few Texans are already looking far ahead, to when carbon dioxide, because of its heat-trapping properties, gets buried for its own sake — not just in oil fields. The Gulf Coast Carbon Center recently received $10 million in funding from the federal stimulus package and Texas’ General Land Office to study the possibility of storing carbon dioxide emissions under the Gulf of Mexico — “not that anyone is going to want to do it tomorrow,” Hovorka said.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/fzRYTB.