Free Republic

BISMARCK -- Legislators continued their look at new bills to combat sex trafficking in North Dakota on Tuesday, taking up proposals to require school for "johns" and increased penalties for pimps that force abortions. Anti-trafficking groups are hoping for the adoption of a uniform trafficking law, increased penalties for sellers and buyers of commercial sex and significant resources for victims. Hearings on the package of bills began last week by the Senate Judiciary committee. Senate Bill 2332, from Sen. Mac Schneider, D-Grand Forks, goes after the demand for commercial sex, which many say creates the market for pimps. The bill...

Stimulus: Obama says jobs from the Keystone project aren't permanent and it's just one pipeline that will move foreign oil to foreign markets. But fixing the bridge he once used as a prop didn't create permanent jobs either. 'Let's set our sights above a single pipeline," the leader of the party of infrastructure told Congress in the State of the Union. But this Congress has 80 more Republicans than when he took office, and on Thursday the Senate rejected his admonition by a 62-36 vote. Eight Democrats crossed the aisle after a series of amendment votes, a process that had...

Union leaders called strikes on Sunday at nine U.S. refineries in a bid to pressure oil companies to agree to a new national contract covering workers at 63 plants. The walkouts, the first held in support of a nationwide pact since 1980, target plants that together account for more than 10 percent of U.S. refining capacity. The discord comes as plunging crude prices force oil companies to slash spending. Royal Dutch Shell, the lead industry negotiator, indicated talks had broken down. ... Shell activated a strike contingency plan at its sprawling joint venture refinery in Deer Park, Texas, to keep...

Horizontal Drilling and Hydraulic Fracturing, represent technology developed in the 1980’s, are responsible for extracting Shale Gas and Shale Oil [Unconventional Liquid Hydrocarbons] from previously non-productive shale formations about one mile below the surface. As this technology was applied throughout the USA environmental upsets occurred (e.g. well water contamination in Weis County TX and Methane leaks in Dimrock PA. Recent peer review studies [Cornel, Stanford, Duke, Texas University, Penn State University and Ohio State University] have shown that these incidents could have been avoided by maintaining proper well integrity. State regulatory agencies now require adherence to industry standards, to ensure...

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Monday that both Nevada and Tennessee have joined the Lone Star state's challenge of President Obama's executive amnesty, bringing the total number of states fighting Obama's unilateral immigration policies to 26. “Texas is proud to lead a coalition that now includes a majority of the United States standing up against the President’s rogue actions,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement. “The momentum against the President's lawlessness continues to build with Tennessee and Nevada joining the effort to protect our states from the economic and public safety implications of illegal amnesty. As President...

Students who attend Catholic schools in North Dakota will carry the lead banner next week in the annual March for Life on the National Mall in Washington. More than 160 students from schools within the Bismarck Diocese will join their peers from Shanley High School in Fargo to lead a crowd expected to exceed 500,000 in the anti-abortion march, said Nick Emmel, a religious studies teacher at St. Mary's Central High School. While in Washington, students also will attend conferences, tour the monuments and visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he said. This is the second year students from...

ALCO stores nationwide, including those in South Hutchinson and 21 other small Kansas communities, are closing. The stores, which typically serve small towns with few other options for everything from clothing to housewares and groceries, began conducting going-out-of-business sales on Friday morning, a day after a U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas authorized ALCO’s owners – Tiger Capital Group LLC, SB Capital Group LLC and Great American Group LLC – to begin doing so. In all, 198 stores in 23 states will close, as will the 113-year-old discount retailer’s 352,000-square-foot distribution center in Abilene. During the liquidation sale, the company plans...

Energy Policy: In spite of dramatically lower methane emissions from fracking, according to the EPA's own data, the agency wants to impose draconian regulations on the oil and gas industry similar to those on coal. The new rules that the White House announced on Wednesday aim to cut oil emissions of methane, a target of environmental groups, by 45% below 2012 levels, despite the fact that the emissions already show a sharp decline even as shale oil and gas production has skyrocketed. This war-on-shale action mirrors the administration's war on coal, with EPA rules impossible to meet economically and sometimes...

A closely watched legal fight over two of the nation's most stringent abortion bans resumed Tuesday, with attorneys for North Dakota and Arkansas asking a federal appeals court to reinstate two laws overturned by two separate lower federal courts. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis heard back-to-back oral arguments Tuesday but made no immediate ruling after giving each side 15 minutes to present its case. Several questions by the three-judge panel suggested that the two states face a difficult task to uphold laws that seemingly challenge the U.S. Supreme Court standard established more than four decades...

BISMARCK – The North Dakota Supreme Court has declined to rehear arguments against their ruling that upheld a state law passed in 2011 that limits drug-induced abortions. The state’s only abortion clinic petitioned the high court for a rehearing in November to clarify what it called ambiguities in the effects of House Bill 1297. The bill makes it illegal for doctors to provide medication abortions unless they have a contract with another doctor who has admitting privileges at an area hospital.

en Chorn had a good vacation in Minnesota last month, making it to a Vikings game, a hockey game in Duluth and getting engaged. But while he was gone, the price of oil hit him personally. “While on vacation, I got a call from someone who’s covering for me and said, ‘Hey your rig’s being laid down,’” said Chorn, who does geology work on rigs for Sunburst Consulting. He’s had a slow six weeks since then. The oil price drop will impact fringe regions in the Bakken the most, experts said, because the oil there costs more to extract. “I...

The McKenzie County sheriff's department used its K9 team to track down three men who fled an accident scene in McKenzie county last week. The dogs led deputies and officers from the U-S Border Patrol through three miles of badlands where they found two of the men. They caught the third man two days later near Williston, after reports of a drug transaction. The Border Patrol was involved because all three of the suspects are illegal immigrants. The sheriff's office reports that one of the men has been deported 33 times.He will be charged with felony immigration violations. The suspects...

One-third of the crude oil hauled from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale region by railcars could be forced off the tracks and into expensive truck fleets in the next four years, according to a railcar-industry trade group. The Railway Supply Institute says there aren’t enough shops to retrofit cars carrying flammable liquids in time to meet proposed federal deadlines, and that tens of thousands of cars will be idled as a result. The U.S. Department of Transportation wants tank cars carrying crude oil to be retrofitted with more puncture-resistant features in two years, and those carrying ethanol to be upgraded in...

Did the Welsh discover America? 26/8/2002 A team of historians and researchers announced today that Radio Carbon dating evidence, and the discovery of ancient British style artefacts and inscriptions in the American Midwest, provide the strongest indications yet" that British explorers, under the Prince Madoc ap Meurig, arrived in the country during the 6th Century and set up colonies there. Research team members have known the location of burial sites of Madoc's close relatives in Wales for some time, it emerged today; but they have decided to break their self-imposed silence in order that their research be fully known and...

Recent declines in North Sea Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices – and the recent decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to maintain oil output – has caused speculation about whether the boom in U.S. shale exploration and production could continue. The U.S. shale revolution has created in a boom in U.S. oil production over the past five years, growing from 5.4 million barrels of oil per day (MMbopd) in 2009 to 8.6 MMbopd today. Shale gas production has also soared from 59.3 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2009 to more than...

Oil producers in North Dakota don't seem ready to give up their rail cars just yet. Enterprise Product Partners has shelved plans for a pipeline out of the prolific Bakken Shale after the company was unable to secure enough crude shipment deals along the route to make the project viable. The proposed 340,000 barrel-per-day line would have run 1,200 miles from the oil fields of North Dakota to the nation's largest oil transportation hub in Cushing, Okla. Houston-based Enterprise Product Partners originally announced that it would solicit shipping commitments from Sept. 4 to Oct. 17 - a process called an...

Seven more states signed on to a lawsuit challenging President Obama's executive action halting the deportation of as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants, bringing the total to 24 states, Texas Atty. Gen. Greg Abbott announced Wednesday. The new states to join the coalition were Arizona, Florida, Arkansas, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio and Oklahoma. The original 17 states, including Alabama, Kansas and Texas, filed suit in U.S. District Court last week, arguing that Obama overstepped his powers in enacting such changes on his own. "The president's proposed executive decree violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law, circumvents the will of...

So apparently there’s a uterus puppet going around the country making videos about abortion clinics and lack thereof. Yes, there’s a puppet named Eunice, and she’s a sad uterus. Hans Johnson from JillStanek.com found this great little gem and we just had to share. He wrote: In the “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” category comes a video called “The Abortion Desert.” Taking a cue from the idea of “food deserts” - a lack of urban grocery stores – the abortion lobby group Lady Parts Justice nervously brings attention to the dwindling number of abortion clinics. For a serious subject,...

Enterprise Products Partners (EPD) is shelving a proposed pipeline that would have transported crude from North Dakota to Oklahoma, the company announced on Friday. The news came in the midst of a brutal slide in global oil prices that have raised concerns about whether U.S. companies will continue to build on the expansion of oil production. Middle East oil producers have yet to announce a cut in production to offset the drop in crude, in what some analysts say is a slow-bleed strategy designed to make pumping crude as uneconomic as possible for the world's fastest growing non-OPEC oil producer....

Six moderate Democratic senators are asking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to give states more time to comply with its climate rule for power plants. The moderate Democrats said that states should be responsible for developing their own “glide paths” toward the 2030 goal. The senators signing the letter were Sens. Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Joe Donnelly (Ind.).