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SPRINGFIELD, IL — It is unclear who was responsible for providing water to attendees of an August 21 event featuring Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama, where an estimated 150 people were treated for heat-related illness, including 17 who required hospitalization, according to an August 26 article in the Journal Star. Justin DeJong, spokesman for Obama for America in Illinois, said the Obama campaign worked with Downtown Springfield, Inc. (DSI) to provide water for the crowd. DSI volunteers sold water for $2 per cup at three locations near the plaza. Springfield Mayor Tim Davlin said in the article that the city...

COMBAT OUTPOST RIO LOBO — The most important natural resource for Iraqi citizens and Coalition forces in Iraq is water. Combat engineers with Combat Logistics Battalion 6, 1st Marine Logistics Group, recently teamed up with the leaders of Regimental Combat Team 5’s 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion and Iraq’s Ministry of Water to facilitate the building of a new combat outpost here. “Building this COP outside Rio Lobo frees up the structures for the Ministry of Water, facilitating the reopening of the water plant,” said 2nd Lt. James R. Armstrong, 1st Marine Division. When the Marines occupy the new outpost,...

LOS ANGELES — Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the Department of Water and Power are expected to announce on May 15 a revised water use and management plan for this city that includes using recycled wastewater to recharge drinking water aquifers, according to a May 15 Los Angeles Times article. The new plan allocates about $1 billion for the proposed reclamation system, also known as “toilet-to-tap” or “sewer-to-spigot.” The city would recycle about 4.9 billion gallons of treated wastewater to drinking standards by 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported on May 15. Villaraigosa, who less than a decade ago opposed such...

FReep This Poll! Do you want fluoride added to your drinking water supply? Yes No Not sure Go to the North County Times/The Californian link provided. Scroll down a bit and look for the poll on the right hand side. Vote your choice.

Does CO2 really drive global warming? I don’t believe that it does.To the contrary, if you apply the IFF test—if-and-only-if or necessary-and-sufficient—the outcome would appear to be exactly the reverse. Rather than the rising levels of carbon dioxide driving up the temperature, the logical conclusion is that it is the rising temperature that is driving up the CO2 level. Of course, this raises a raft of questions, but they are all answerable. What is particularly critical is distinguishing between the observed phenomenon, or the “what”, from the governing mechanism, or the “why”. Confusion between these two would appear to be...

We have well water and the pressure is low. Hubby is away on an extended business trip and I don't know anything about wells. What should I do?

The Mars rover Opportunity's examination of Martian rocks last week provided the first convincing evidence that our neighbour world was once "awash" in water, as one NASA scientist described it. But where did the water come from? And why does Mars have no liquid water now, while Earth apparently has been covered with the stuff for 4 billion years? Scientists are just beginning to piece the story together, and it goes right back to the beginning. Mars, like Earth, was formed from dusty and rocky debris left over after the sun was born 4.57 billion years ago. Initially, there were...

Seventh-Grader's Science Project Turns Up Some Disturbing Results NEW YORK - Jasmine Roberts never expected her award-winning middle school science project to get so much attention. But the project produced some disturbing results: 70 percent of the time, ice from fast food restaurants was dirtier than toilet water. The 12-year-old collected ice samples from five restaurants in South Florida -- from both self-serve machines inside the restaurant and from drive-thru windows. She then collected toilet water samples from the same restaurants and tested all of them for bacteria at the University of South Florida. In several cases, the ice tested...

New York City's water supply could be the target of contamination if a water system map made its way into the wrong hands, an environmentalist said. The threat has arisen since someone broke into a vehicle belonging to a Department of Environmental Protection maintenance supervisor and stole an agency laptop containing a map of the water system. If the map was detailed enough,"there could be the opportunity to pose a threat," the executive director for the Center for Environmental Information, Cindy Stachowski, said. Even without a map, Ms. Stachowski added, someone pouring biological, chemical, or radiological contaminants into a fresh...

The National Guard was handing out sandbags in flooded areas of Essex and Passaic counties Thursday as a seventh day of relentless rain pounded New Jersey, flooding roads, trapping people in stalled cars and forcing some families from their homes near rivers or streams. Jail prisoners were pressed into duty filling sandbags in one North Jersey community. The northern section of the state got more than 5 inches of rain over the past two days, with an additional 2 inches expected in some places. The rain was expected to continue into Saturday. In Fairfield, where the National Guard distributed 3,000...

There has been something askew in the reporting from New Orleans. It has bothered me for a week now. Finally, when I took a look at the 2000 census data on New Orleans, a lot became clearer. According to the Census, the population of New Orleans in 2000 was 485,000 of whom 326,000 were black, 136,000 white, and the remaining ten thousand or so each, Asian or Hispanic. If 75-80 percent of the population evacuated the city safely before the storm hit, as everybody is reporting, that means that far more than half the black population escaped safely before the...

Many argue that communism will never be possible because of "human nature". The essence of this false argument is the belief that a communist society would consist of an all-powerful central government that would tell everybody what to do--and would therefore undermine the creative initiative of individuals and the search for happiness. • This argument is based on two false assumptions: (1) It assumes that a communist society will look like the former Soviet Union, or the current China, North Korea, etc (ie: corrupt police states with a feudal-style ruling class) (2) It assumes that people will only work in...

Here is the list so far for sponcers to this hate America fest: ANSWER Code Pink UFPJ NION Al Awda World Workers Party Ruckas Revolutionary Communist party Moveon.org ACORN Campus Antiwar Network International Socialist Org Greens Party Muslim Student Association CPUSA

Just as desperate kids in nearby shantytowns lined up for water at standpipes as Earth Summit delegates converged upon Johannesburg in 2002, H20 is still a scarce commodity in the region. According to the London Sun, 80,000 bottles of mineral water quenched the thirst of 60,000 delegates to the Johannesburg Earth Summit on Sustainability. While the delegates from 182 countries have long since gone home, the children of Alexandra, a shantytown just down the road from the wealthy Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, still go thirsty. Chronicled in the Corporate Watch video, White Gold, Alexandra is "a settlement of largely self-built...

In ice, each molecule grabs the feet and hands of its four nearest neighbors. The placement of these neighbors forms a tetrahedron, or three-sided pyramid. When ice melts, the big question is what happens to this shape. The traditional picture, the one that Saykally is defending, is that water continues to look – for the most part – like ice with four hydrogen bonds around each molecule. The difference in the liquid form is that, at a given time, approximately 10 percent of the hydrogen bonds are broken. Nilsson’s group, in contrast, claims that water takes on a new structure,...

Will hydrogen from water soon run your car? By Tim Bradner Alaska Journal of Commerce Publication Date: 09/13/04 The concept is elegant and simple. Pull up to your neighborhood creek or tundra pond, and fill 'er up. Forget gasoline and diesel - hydrogen, extracted from good old H2O, is it. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. If we can figure out a way to economically extract hydrogen from water, we'll have an inexhaustible, pollution-free source of fuel. Our world is awash in water, quite literally. "When you burn hydrogen your emission is water vapor. You start with...

Wetter World Counters Greenhouse Gases -Scientists Tue May 11,11:07 PM ET Add Science - Reuters to My Yahoo! SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists have found the Earth may be more resilient to global warming than first thought, and they say a warmer world means a wetter planet, encouraging more plants to grow and soak up greenhouse gases. "The global water cycle has changed in response to greenhouse emissions," almost 100 Australian greenhouse scientists said in an annual statement on their research received on Wednesday. "As the world warms it is, on average, getting wetter," said the scientists, who met...