CREDIT: AP/WILSON RING

The 42,000 people living in Burlington, Vermont can now feel confident that when they turn on their TVs or power up their computers they are using renewable energy. With the purchase of the 7.4 megawatt Winooski One hydroelectric project earlier this month, the Burlington Electric Department now owns or contracts renewable sources – including wind, hydro, and biomass – equivalent to the city’s needs.

‘We’re now in a position where we’re supplying Burlington residents with sources that are renewable,” said Ken Nolan, manager of power resources for Burlington Electric Department, earlier this month. ‘The prices are not tied to fossil fuels – they’re stable prices – and they provide us with the flexibility, from an environmental standpoint, to really react to any regulation or changes to environmental standards that come in the future.”

According to Nolan, the utility will get about one-third of its power from the Joseph C. McNeil Generating Station, one-third from wind energy contracts, and one-third from the hydroelectric stations Winooski One and Hydro-Québec. The McNeil power station is a […]

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Photo by 401(K) 2013 (CC BY-SA 2.0)

An estimated 2 million Americans age 60 and older are in debt from unpaid student loans, whether from money borrowed long ago or from more recent borrowing to fund degrees for family members. And some are having their Social Security payments garnished as a result.

This discrete population of debtors has almost tripled from about 700,000 in 2005.

The New York Times reports Friday:

The debt among older people is up substantially, to $43 billion from $8 billion in 2005, according to the report, which is based on data from Equifax, the credit reporting agency. As of July 31, money was being deducted from Social Security payments to almost 140,000 individuals to pay down their outstanding student loans, according to Treasury Department data. That is up from just under 38,000 people in 2004. Over the decade, the amounts withheld more than tripled, to nearly $101 million for the first seven months of this year from over $32 million in 2004.

While older debtors account for […]

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Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. (photo: unknown)

The Tom Steyer-funded outside group focused on climate change has found attacks on the Koch brothers to be effective in key races and with a swath of voters for whom economics are a main driver, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO.

The findings, laid out in a memo from Steyer adviser Chris Lehane to NextGen state teams, are synthesized from research in specific states by pollsters Anzalone Research, Benenson Strategy Group and Hart Research, and the data analytics firm Civis.

Democrats have repeatedly used the Koch brothers as a cudgel in ads in key races nationally this year, a strategy they argue is backed up by immense data.

The memo lays out how climate issues are playing out with certain voters, identifying a group NextGen calls ‘Super Shifters.”

‘The Super Shifters are primarily voters with children who earn an annual income of less than $100,000 and are profoundly unhappy with the gridlock in Washington,” Lehane writes in the memo. ‘These are voters […]

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Photo: AFP

Never bet on another man’s game,” my father loved to say. It’s a lesson Barack Obama never learned, especially in his military strikes against Islamic State.

Islamic State, or ISIL, has only one way to keep the support of Iraq’s Sunni tribesmen and former Baathist supporters of Saddam Hussein. The blood-thirsty ‘fools of God” need to be seen defending their people against a Western invasion, which is precisely what Obama gives them.

He plays the role they purposely provoked with their brutal beheadings, summary executions, and sickening use of mass rape to keep their fighters happy. He becomes the foreign, Christian crusader defiling a Muslim land, and he does it in company with Iranian as well as Iraqi Shiites, whom Islamic State despises as heretics, and with the blessing of Sunni Arab leaders it correctly sees as outrageously corrupt.

In other words, the more jihadis Obama kills, the more Sunnis that Obama recruits to their ranks. Not a winning strategy.

Please do not read into this any defense of Islamic State. Though a response to […]

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(Image: Soil testing via Shutterstock)

Does an apple a day really keep the doctor away? Not anymore, according to soil health experts-unless the apple comes from a tree grown in healthy, organic soil.

According to Australian soil scientist Christine Jones, as reported by Courtney White in his book, Grass, Soil, Hope, apples have lost 80 percent of their vitamin C.

And that orange you just ate to help ward off a cold? It’s entirely possible that it contains no vitamin C at all.

A study looking at vegetables from 1930 to 1980, found that iron levels had decreased by 22 percent, and calcium content by 19 percent. In the United Kingdom, from 1940 to 1990, copper content in vegetables fell by 76 percent, and calcium by 46 percent. The mineral content in meat was also significantly reduced.

Food forms the building blocks of our bodies and health. Soil forms the basis for healthy food. Unhealthy soil grows poor quality food. And poor quality food means poor health.

Even our mental health is linked to healthy […]

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