Monday, August 23rd, 2010
, - Michigan Technological University
Stephan: This is the kind of story I just love to uncover and share with you. Ingenuity finding a use for something that is otherwise just toxic waste. So much of this could be done if we just got our priorities straight.
An entrepreneur from Traverse Bay, Mich., and Michigan Technological University researchers are collaborating on a project to use Upper Michigan’s stamp sand, an unsightly leftover from the mining era, for roofing shingles. Plans are to build a mill to process the stamp sand and supply it to the roofing industry. The mill will be near Gay, Mich., and will employ up to 40 people.
A Michigan Tech materials scientist, Ralph Hodek, and geological mining graduate Domenic Popko also have plans for a longer-term prospect: building a mill to manufacture the shingles themselves, employing up to 300 people.
A roofing shingle is 30 percent asphalt and 70 percent rock. To get the rock, typically manufacturers have to develop a quarry and drill, dynamite and crush the rock. They also have to add copper, which retards the growth of algae, moss and lichen.
The stamp sand is especially attractive for the roofing industry because it’s already been mined and crushed, and it contains copper naturally. The initial operation would use a stretch of stamp sand between Gay and Traverse that is owned by the Keweenaw County Road Commission.
There are about 500 million tons of stamp sand in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan. The biggest deposit, […]
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Monday, August 23rd, 2010
OSWALD ALONSO, - The Associated Press
Stephan: It is very interesting to me that so many trends are reaching their crisis point at the same time. This arises, I think from the nonlocal presentiment people feel about the future, their interconnectedness, and the individual decisions they are making which, collectively, create these trends in the first place.
This one is the culmination of decades of the insane war on marijuana. Just as Prohibition created the national Mafia families, so this has created the Drug Cartels. With 28,000 people murdered since 2006 in Mexico, the country is not experiencing just criminality. This is a civil war.
CUERNAVACA, Mexico – The decapitated bodies of four men were hung from a bridge Sunday in this central Mexican city besieged by fighting between two drug lords.
A gang led by kingpin Hector Beltran Leyva took responsibility for the killings in a message left with the bodies, the attorney general’s office of Mexico state said in a statement.
The beheaded and mutilated bodies were hung by their feet early Sunday from the bridge in Cuernavaca, a popular weekend getaway for Mexico City residents.
Cuernavaca has become a battleground for control of the Beltran Leyva cartel since its leader, Arturo Beltran Leyva, was killed there in a December shootout with marines.
Mexican authorities say the cartel split between a faction led by Hector Beltran Leyva, brother of Arturo, and another led by Edgar Valdes Villarreal, a U.S.-born kingpin known as ‘the Barbie.’
The message left with the bodies threatened: ‘This is what will happen to all those who support the traitor Edgar Valdez Villareal’
Authorities said the four men had been kidnapped days earlier. The family of one of the men reported the abduction to police.
In western Mexico, police found the body of a U.S. citizen inside a car along the highway between the Pacific resorts of […]
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Monday, August 23rd, 2010
GRAHAM BOWLEY, - The New York Times
Stephan: Further evidence of the trend of the destruction of the American Middle Class. In this long article this is what stood out for me: 'And the flight from stocks may also be driven by households that are no longer able to tap into home equity for cash and may simply need the money to pay for ordinary expenses.
'On Friday, Fidelity Investments reported that a record number of people took so-called hardship withdrawals from their retirement accounts in the second quarter. These are early withdrawals intended to pay for needs like medical expenses.'
Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.
If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.
Small investors are ‘losing their appetite for risk,
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Sunday, August 22nd, 2010
ELLEN KELLEHER, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: Contrast this with the next article below it.
Investors in emerging markets who are enticed towards China, now the world’s second-largest economy, but who do not know where to start, should think about the companies and sectors that will profit most from the rising incomes of the Chinese, say fund managers .
As Douglas Turnbull, co-manager of Neptune’s two China funds, sees it: ‘The future of the Chinese economy is about harnessing the spending potential the emerging middle class in China can unleash
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Sunday, August 22nd, 2010
BOB HERBERT, Op-ed Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan: I don't normally do op-ed pieces, except for an occasional column by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, but this one reports a trend that I think is both critical and deeply under-regarded. This trend of the failure of the Black lower class is a long one, with many explanations. None but the Black community itself can solve the key one, but the three that don't get mentioned are the rise of the corporate virtual state, and its uninterest in job creation, the abject failure of public education, and the rise of the private human warehousing industry. It is in no one's interest to have any of these trends continue.
A tragic crisis of enormous magnitude is facing black boys and men in America.
Parental neglect, racial discrimination and an orgy of self-destructive behavior have left an extraordinary portion of the black male population in an ever-deepening pit of social and economic degradation.
The Schott Foundation for Public Education tells us in a new report that the on-time high school graduation rate for black males in 2008 was an abysmal 47 percent, and even worse in several major urban areas - for example, 28 percent in New York City.
The astronomical jobless rates for black men in inner-city neighborhoods are both mind-boggling and heartbreaking. There are many areas where virtually no one has a legitimate job.
More than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. And I’ve been hearing more and more lately from community leaders in poor areas that moms are absent for one reason or another and the children are being raised by a grandparent or some other relative - or they end up in foster care.
That the black community has not been mobilized en masse to turn this crisis around is a screaming shame. Black men, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, have nearly a one-third chance […]
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