Pet waste pickup law met with skepticism from equestrians | Suffolk ...

COUTESY PHOTO | Members of the East End Livestock and Horseman?s Association on a recent trail ride.

Southold?s new pooper-scooper law may conform with federal stormwater discharge regulations, but it?s not sitting nicely with equestrians in town.

The expanded pooper-scooper law, adopted this April, requires residents to clean up the waste of cats, horses, swine, donkeys and goats in addition to dogs.

The East End Livestock and Horseman?s Association is bristling at the regulation, and not just because of the logistical possibility of having to follow after their horses on trails with wheelbarrows and shovels.

The group?s president, Samantha Perry, told the Town Board last Tuesday that she?s concerned about the slippery slope produced when animals that have always been considered livestock are suddenly legally classified as domestic pets.

She said if laws begin to define horses as pets instead of livestock, it could limit the amount of USDA funding for horse diseases, could change the tax classifications for people who have working horses on their farms, could change animal cruelty laws and could limit federal and state funding for working animals.

?Southold is a small town, but this sets the tone for bigger areas,? she said.

Town Supervisor Scott Russell said he?s not sure how classifying horses as pets could be detrimental to their owners. He added that the pooper-scooper law only governs horse owners? activities on publicly owned lands, not in agricultural districts, where the legal definitions of horses as livestock are set by state Agriculture and Markets law.

Ms. Perry said in an interview later that she?s concerned about safety issues associated with cleaning up after horses on trails, including extra dismounts, the possibility that horses will run away while their riders are cleaning up after them, not to mention the sheer weight of their waste and the utensils needed to pick it up.

She said more than 80 percent of horse manure is water, causing the manure to break down significantly just one day after it lands on the trail. She added that horses also evacuate while walking, making it difficult for riders to know when there?s a steaming horse pile in their wake.

Mr. Russell has agreed to meet with horse owners to iron out potential changes to the language in the law.

?We didn?t pass this legislation because we perceived a problem,? he said. ?It wasn?t because we thought we had a bunch of irresponsible horse owners running around.?

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Source: http://suffolktimes.timesreview.com/2012/08/33977/pet-waste-pickup-law-met-with-skepticism-from-equestrians/

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Washington: Legal pot could bring in $2B over 5 years | Yakima ...

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Wash.: Legal pot could bring in $2B over 5 years

By GENE JOHNSON?

Associated Press

SEATTLE (AP) -- The state's latest financial analysis says legalizing and taxing marijuana could bring Washington as much as nearly $2 billion over the next five years - or as little as nothing.

The Office of Financial Management released its fiscal impact statement for Initiative 502 on Friday, and the results track closely with its earlier analysis, released in March.

I-502, which will be on the November ballot, would legalize pot under state law and allow its sale at state-licensed stores, with tax proceeds dedicated to education, health care and substance abuse prevention. Oregon and Colorado voters will also decide on marijuana legalization measures this fall.

Marijuana would remain illegal under federal law, however, and it isn't clear how the federal government would respond if any of the states voted to legalize it. The Justice Department could prosecute employees of state-licensed pot shops, sue in federal court to block the laws from taking effect, or simply seize the tax revenue from the states as proceeds of transactions that are illegal under federal law.

Because the federal response remains unclear, Washington's analysts said they could not determine the ultimate effect of I-502 on the state's finances. However, they said, assuming a fully functioning marijuana market develops - and that it entirely replaces the existing illicit market - state revenue from pot sales could be more than $1.9 billion over the next five years. The state typically spends $30 billion per two-year budget cycle.

I-502 would create a system of state-licensed growers, processors and stores, and impose a 25 percent tax at each stage. People 21 and older could buy up to an ounce of dried marijuana, one pound of marijuana-infused product in solid form, such as brownies, or 72 ounces of marijuana-infused liquids.

The analysis anticipates 100 state-licensed growers supplying 328 marijuana stores that would sell more than 187,000 pounds to at least 363,000 customers. Those numbers are based on federal drug-use surveys.

Consumers would pay $12 per gram - the price currently charged by many medical marijuana dispensaries - plus the 25 percent marijuana tax, 10 percent state sales tax, and any local sales tax, the analysts assumed.

The document noted that Washington would likely lose some federal money to fight drugs, such as a marijuana eradication grant from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

However, the analysis did not take into account any possible savings from no longer arresting, prosecuting and jailing people for having small amounts of marijuana, and Alison Holcomb, campaign manager for I-502, said she found that disappointing.

About 10,000 people in Washington are charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession each year.

---

Johnson can be reached at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

SEATTLE (AP) -- The state's latest financial analysis says legalizing and taxing marijuana could bring Washington as much as nearly $2 billion over the next five years - or as little as nothing.

The Office of Financial Management released its fiscal impact statement for Initiative 502 on Friday, and the results track closely with its earlier analysis, released in March.

I-502, which will be on the November ballot, would legalize pot under state law and allow its sale at state-licensed stores, with tax proceeds dedicated to education, health care and substance abuse prevention. Oregon and Colorado voters will also decide on marijuana legalization measures this fall.

Marijuana would remain illegal under federal law, however, and it isn't clear how the federal government would respond if any of the states voted to legalize it. The Justice Department could prosecute employees of state-licensed pot shops, sue in federal court to block the laws from taking effect, or simply seize the tax revenue from the states as proceeds of transactions that are illegal under federal law.

Because the federal response remains unclear, Washington's analysts said they could not determine the ultimate effect of I-502 on the state's finances. However, they said, assuming a fully functioning marijuana market develops - and that it entirely replaces the existing illicit market - state revenue from pot sales could be more than $1.9 billion over the next five years. The state typically spends $30 billion per two-year budget cycle.

I-502 would create a system of state-licensed growers, processors and stores, and impose a 25 percent tax at each stage. People 21 and older could buy up to an ounce of dried marijuana, one pound of marijuana-infused product in solid form, such as brownies, or 72 ounces of marijuana-infused liquids.

The analysis anticipates 100 state-licensed growers supplying 328 marijuana stores that would sell more than 187,000 pounds to at least 363,000 customers. Those numbers are based on federal drug-use surveys.

Consumers would pay $12 per gram - the price currently charged by many medical marijuana dispensaries - plus the 25 percent marijuana tax, 10 percent state sales tax, and any local sales tax, the analysts assumed.

The document noted that Washington would likely lose some federal money to fight drugs, such as a marijuana eradication grant from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

However, the analysis did not take into account any possible savings from no longer arresting, prosecuting and jailing people for having small amounts of marijuana, and Alison Holcomb, campaign manager for I-502, said she found that disappointing.

About 10,000 people in Washington are charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession each year.

---

Johnson can be reached at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

?

?

Source: http://www.yakima-herald.com/stories/2012/08/11/washington-legal-pot-could-bring-in-2b-over-5-years

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Wild bees sting Texas man more than 300 times

PFLUGERVILLE, Texas (AP) ? A 40-year-old warehouse worker has been stung more than 300 times after accidentally disturbing a massive colony of Africanized bees in Central Texas.

Pflugerville police say the man was in stable condition when he was taken to a hospital after the attack Wednesday. Police say three other people were stung, but not seriously, by the aggressive honeybees.

The worker did not know that the bees had built their hive inside a cabinet that he was trying to move. Beekeeper Keith Huddle, who helped to remove the bees, tells the Austin-American Statesman that the colony contained some 125,000 of the insects and 120 pounds of honeycomb.

Entomologist Wizzie Brown says Africanized bees have become prevalent in Texas in recent decades.

Pflugerville is about 15 miles north of Austin.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wild-bees-sting-texas-man-more-300-times-125706712.html

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First BOSS data: 3D Map of 500,000 galaxies, 100,000 quasars, 11.5 billion light years away

ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2012) ? The Third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) has issued Data Release 9 (DR9), the first public release of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). In this release BOSS, the largest of SDSS-III's four surveys, provides spectra for 535,995 newly observed galaxies, 102,100 quasars, and 116,474 stars, plus new information about objects in previous Sloan surveys (SDSS-I and II).

"This is just the first of three data releases from BOSS," says David Schlegel of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), an astrophysicist in the Lab's Physics Division and BOSS's principal investigator. "By the time BOSS is complete, we will have surveyed more of the sky, out to a distance twice as deep, for a volume more than five times greater than SDSS has surveyed before -- a larger volume of the universe than all previous spectroscopic surveys combined."

Spectroscopy yields a wealth of information about astronomical objects including their motion (called redshift and written "z"), their composition, and sometimes also the density of the gas and other material that lies between them and observers on Earth. The BOSS spectra are now freely available to a public that includes amateur astronomers, astronomy professionals who are not members of the SDSS-III collaboration, and high-school science teachers and their students.

The new release lists spectra for galaxies with redshifts up to z = 0.8 (roughly 7 billion light years away) and quasars with redshifts between z = 2.1 and 3.5 (from 10 to 11.5 billion light years away). When BOSS is complete it will have measured 1.5 million galaxies and at least 150,000 quasars, as well as many thousands of stars and other "ancillary" objects for scientific projects other than BOSS's main goal.

The key to the history of the universe

BOSS is designed to measure baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO), the large-scale clustering of matter in the universe. BAO began as rippling fluctuations ("sound waves") in the hot, dense soup of matter and radiation that made up the early universe. As the universe expanded it cooled. Finally atoms formed and radiation went its own way; the density ripples left their marks as temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), where they can be detected today.

The CMB came into being 380,000 years after the big bang, over 13.6 billion years ago, and continues to stretch across the entire sky as the universe expands. Peaks in CMB temperature variation occur about half a billion light years apart, at the same angle, viewed from Earth, as peaks in the large-scale galactic structure that evolved billions of years later. The regions of higher density in the CMB were in fact the sources of galaxy formation; they correspond to regions where galaxies cluster, along with intergalactic gas and concentrations of much more massive underlying dark matter. The natural "standard ruler" marking peaks in clustering can be applied not only across the sky but in all three dimensions, backward in time to the CMB.

Distant quasars provide another way of measuring BAO and the distribution of matter in the universe. Quasars are the brightest objects in the distant universe, whose spectra bristle with individually shifted absorption lines, a "Lyman-alpha forest" unique to each that reveals the clumping of intergalactic gas and underlying dark matter between the quasar and Earth.

Marks on the cosmic ruler

Schlegel has called BAO "an inconveniently sized ruler," requiring "a huge volume of the universe just to fit the ruler inside," but it's a precision tool for tracking the universe's expansion history, and for probing the nature of gravity and the mysterious dark energy that's causing expansion to accelerate.

To fill the huge volume, BOSS had to find more and fainter objects in the sky at greater distances than SDSS had attempted before. The camera system and spectrographs of the 2.5-meter Sloan Foundation Telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico had to be completely rebuilt.

SDSS uses "plug plates" at the telescope's focal plane, aluminum disks with holes drilled to match the precise position of previously imaged target objects. SDSS-I and II plug plates had only 640 holes apiece, each covering three arcseconds; BOSS is using 2,000 plug plates with 1,000 holes apiece, each covering a tight two arcseconds to reduce light that's not from the target.

Optical fibers are plugged into the holes every day by hand, to guide the light from each target to a spectrograph. While weather conditions vary night to night, observations on the best nights use up to nine plug plates. For BOSS, the spectrographs were rebuilt with new optics and new CCD detectors designed and fabricated at Berkeley Lab.

"Light from distant galaxies arrives at Earth redshifted into the infrared," says Natalie Roe, director of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division and BOSS's instrument scientist, who led construction of the spectrographs. "We optimized the BOSS spectrographs for mapping exactly these galaxies."

Working with Schlegel and Adam Bolton at the University of Utah, Berkeley Lab's Stephen Bailey is in charge of daily "extraction pipeline" operations that convert raw data from the telescope into useful spectra and quantities derived from them, ready for scientific analysis. Data storage and the extraction pipeline run on the Riemann Linux cluster of Berkeley Lab's High-Performance Computing Services Group; the data is copied from Riemann to the University of Utah, New York University, Johns Hopkins University, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab.

The Lab also hosts the SDSS-III website, http://sdss3.org, from which the data can be downloaded.

"Data releases are a proud tradition for SDSS, and the first BOSS data greatly increase the SDSS store of information," Bailey says. "Members of the SDSS-III collaboration get first crack at it -- with barely enough time to write up their results -- but three times as many papers based on the data are published by scientists outside the collaboration."

Says Schlegel, "SDSS-III is already the most used of all surveys from any telescope in the world, including the Keck telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope. With DR9, BOSS contributes a huge information increase for all kinds of scientific investigations, from quasars to how stars evolve to really odd objects like galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses. Meanwhile the BOSS BAO survey is over two-thirds finished, and ahead of schedule -- we're well on our way to the best measure of BAO that will be made for a long time. All the data BOSS collects will be available to anyone who can use it."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. SDSS-III Collaboration: Ahn C. P. et al. The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2012 [link]

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/2r3ZWOUoyz8/120808093851.htm

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As China prepares for Gu's trial, rule of law also in the dock

BEIJING (Reuters) - China holds its most sensational trial this week since convicting the Gang of Four over 30 years ago, putting Gu Kailai, the wife of deposed leader Bo Xilai, in the dock for murder.

It took two months for the widow of Chairman Mao Zedong and three other ultra-leftist leaders to be found guilty of excesses in the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution after a show trial.

Gu, a career lawyer who has championed China's swift, unblinking justice system, is likely to be dealt with even sooner.

Legal experts and activists expect her to receive the kind of rapid guilty verdict handed down in almost all Chinese criminal trials - the kind Gu once compared favorably to the United States where she felt the guilty risked going free on legal technicalities.

"As long as it is known that you, John Doe, killed someone, you will be arrested, tried and shot to death," Gu wrote of Chinese criminal justice in a 1998 book.

Chinese law, she explained, did "not mince words".

Now Gu finds herself on the other side of Chinese law in a case that experts say is hardly likely to show any signs of judicial reform.

The trial will open on Thursday in the gritty and poor eastern Chinese city of Hefei, a court official said. In keeping with the Communist Party's secretive nature, the date has still not publicly been announced.

Gu faces the death penalty if found guilty of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood last November, but may be let off with a stiff jail sentence.

That would follow the pattern set by the trial of the Gang of Four, in which Mao's widow Jiang Qing and one of her henchmen were given death sentences that were later commuted to life imprisonment. The other two were also jailed for long periods.

In Gu's case, the scandalous nature of a crime involving foreigners and her husband's fall from a senior Communist Party position means the verdict, and the sentence, is almost certainly pre-decided.

"It simply cuts too close to core issues of internal (Communist) Party politics and the handover of power," said Carl Minzner, a Chinese law expert at New York's Fordham University School of Law, casting Gu's trial as part of a political campaign against her husband, once seen as a candidate to join China's next top leadership team to be unveiled late this year.

"These are the very last areas we should expect any willingness (from Beijing) to play by legal norms."

British Foreign Secretary William Hague has demanded Beijing live up to its judicial rhetoric in the Gu case, calling in April for "a full investigation that observes due process, is free from political interference, exposes the truth behind this tragic case, and ensures that justice is done".

'AN OBVIOUS FARCE'

Experts say London is bound to be disappointed. They point out that the signs so far are that the trial against Gu and her alleged accomplice, family aide Zhang Xiaojun, will be a formality with only the severity of the sentence in any doubt.

Gu will not have access to her family lawyer, Shen Zhigeng, who has said other lawyers have been assigned to her case.

China's official Xinhua news agency has already said the evidence against Gu will be "irrefutable and substantial" when the case goes to court.

"It makes the case a transparent sham," said Jerome Cohen, an expert on Chinese law at New York University. "If you forbid people to have the best lawyer they can and you assign lawyers who you control ... it renders the whole thing an obvious farce."

Both Bo, who was party chief in the teeming southwestern city of Chongqing, and Gu have been in detention since Beijing first announced the murder allegation against Gu and the unspecified "disciplinary violations" against Bo in April.

At the time, Bo was stripped of all party positions. Neither he nor his wife have been able to publicly comment on the allegations.

Bo has not been named as a suspect in the murder case, but he is separately under investigation by party authorities and could also face trial at a later time.

Hefei, far from Chongqing, has deliberately been chosen for Gu's trial -- a decision in keeping with a tradition of holding politically charged trials in a different judicial region.

Despite the track record of China's criminal justice system - its courts answer first to the party, almost never side with defendants and have never ruled in favor of dissidents - it has sometimes raised hopes for genuine reform.

Beijing appeared to offer some encouragement to reformers in the 1990s with a promise to "rule the country according to law". Late in the decade, it added the principle to the constitution, though it still recognized the party as supreme arbiter.

In 2003, it abolished "custody and repatriation" powers, a form of arbitrary detention once used by local governments to sweep homeless and other undesirables from the streets.

Emboldened, some legal activists began to test the government's rhetoric on the rule of law, launching cases against the authorities on behalf of ordinary aggrieved citizens - but they quickly found nothing much had actually changed.

RULE OF LAW RETHINK

Blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who made headlines in April with his escape from house arrest and his flight to the United States, recalls his own 2006 trial for whipping up a crowd that disrupted traffic and damaged property - charges he says were trumped up to stop him advocating for the disabled, farmers and women forced to undergo abortions under China's one-child policy.

Chen too was deprived of his lawyer and was forcibly represented by two state-appointed counsel.

"In the courtroom, to all the unfounded accusations by the prosecution, the two lawyers would only respond, 'We have no objection'," Chen said by phone from New York where he is furthering his legal studies.

Minzner, of Fordham University, said any genuine party interest in the rule of law evaporated from around 2003 as the government realized it posed a threat to one-party rule.

"A combination of political and practical concerns came together to lead central authorities to rethink it - how far do we really want to go down this track?" he said.

For Chen Guangcheng, genuine rule of law would challenge the party's grip on power, though he also believes long-term political stability cannot be assured without it.

"If there was truly the rule of law in the first place, power should be returned to the people. There would be no way for them to hold on to power," Chen said.

As ever in China, there is a pithy phrase to sum up Chinese justice.

"You will have heard the saying 'the police cooks the food, the prosecutor serves it and the court eats it'," said Eva Pils, a law expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard and Lucy Hornby; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-prepares-gus-trial-rule-law-dock-210222183.html

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Benefits of Structured Settlements and Getting Quotes | Silver and ...

There are many cases where people have had an accident or been injured. More often than not the two sides agree to settle and suggest receiving or paying in installments instead of a lump sump payment. When this happens the payments are referred to as a structured settlement.

The payments from structured settlement can almost be set up in in fashion that one would like. You can receive you payments in lump sum every two-three years, monthly payments over 20 years and even annual payments. But just what are the benefits of structured settlement payments?

Benefits of a Structured Settlement

One of the main benefits of having a structured settlement is as mentioned above, which is the way you can receive you payments. Structured settlements allow great tractability to fit anyone?s lifestyle or need. The payments can be set up so that you get monthly, quarterly, annual, or any other type of payment stream that works best for you.

Another benefit of the settlements is that the payments are tax-exempt. With the proper set-up the person receiving the settlement payments can significantly reduce tax responsibilities and in some cases they may find that they don?t have to pay taxes. However, this is something you should consult a tax advisor or lawyer on.

Protection from oneself is also a much-needed benefit of structured settlements. In many cases people who receive structured settlement may not be good with finances. Instead of having access to all the money at once and wasting it the payments assure that you will have a income stream coming if for years to come.

Getting a Structured Settlement Quote From Companies

There are a lot of cases where people may need more money then they are receiving from their settlement payments. In this case you can look to sell some of your future payments for a lump sum of cash. Getting a structured settlement quote is as easy as going online or calling an 800 number. Places like Imperial Structured Settlement deal with getting people a lump sum of cash. All you have to do is visit a site like: www.imperialstructuredsettlements.com. There you can fill out the form and submit it. Sometimes it is best to get several quotes so that you can compare. Some other structured settlement buyers along with Imperial are JG Wentworth, Woodbridge Investments, Peachtree Financial, and Olivebranch Funding.

When you are happy with the quote you receive from a potential buyer make sure you still reevaluate your situation to make sure selling is the best option for you. Remember settlement payments are there to help you in the long run. Ask many questions and do some research on your own if you decide that after getting the quote you really need to sell.

Source: http://www.silverandspice.com/benefits-of-structured-settlements-and-getting-quotes/

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Iran's foreign minister in Turkey to seek help in Syria

ANKARA (Reuters) - Iran's foreign minister flew to Turkey on Tuesday seeking to mend a relationship sorely strained by the Syrian uprising and to secure Turkish help for dozens of kidnapped Iranians.

"Turkey has its links with the opposition in Syria. So we think Turkey can play a major role in freeing our pilgrims," Ali Akbar Salehi told reporters as he arrived in Ankara.

A busload of 48 Iranians was seized in Syria on Saturday. Tehran says they were pilgrims visiting a Shi'ite Muslim shrine, denying suggestions that they were military personnel helping President Bashar al-Assad put down a rebellion.

A Syrian rebel spokesman said on Monday that three of the Iranians had been killed in a government air strike and said the rest would be executed if the attacks did not stop. There has been no word on their fate since then.

The once close ties between the Middle East's two non-Arab powers have been ravaged by events in Syria. Turkey has demanded Assad quit but Iran supports his suppression of the "terrorists" it says are backed by its regional and Western enemies.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called comments by Iran's top general Hassan Firouzabadi this week blaming Turkey for the bloodshed in Syria "regrettable" and denied his country has meddled in Syrian affairs.

"The statement by Iran's chief of general staff on a website belonging to the Revolutionary Guards that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are responsible for the bloody developments in Syria is worrying and regrettable," Erdogan told members of his party in comments broadcast live by NTV television.

Erdogan also sought to remind Tehran he had been one of its few defenders amid Western pressure to boycott Iran over its nuclear program, which the United States and others believe is aimed at making an atomic bomb, despite Iran's denials.

"When no one else was by its side, Turkey was the country that stood by Iran, despite everything. Turkey was also the country that defended (its right to) nuclear energy," he said.

"But on Syria, once again I ask the Iranians: Does defending a regime that kills its brothers, and I think it has reached 25,000 by now, suit our values, our beliefs?"

Before Salehi's plane landed in Ankara, the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a statement in which it called the comments from Firouzabadi "unacceptable and irresponsible."

As Salehi arrived in Turkey, another senior Iranian foreign policy official was in Damascus to reassure Assad of Tehran's support.

"AXIS OF RESISTANCE"

"Iran will not allow the axis of resistance, of which it considers Syria to be an essential part, to be broken in any way," Syrian state television quoted Saeed Jalili, the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, as telling Assad.

Reflecting Iran's view that its enemies in the Middle East and the West are backing the Syrian rebels, Jalili, the representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the 17-month uprising was a "conflict between the axis of resistance and its enemies in the region and the world".

The "axis of resistance" refers to Iran's alliance with Syria and Lebanon's Shi'ite group Hezbollah, which fought a month-long war with Israel in 2006, with Iranian and Syrian support. It also includes some Palestinian militant groups.

Assad reiterated his determination to defeat the rebels, affirming "the Syrian people and government's determination to cleanse the country of terrorists", the TV report said.

Assad is a member of the Alawite faith, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam that has dominated Syrian politics through more than 40 years of his family's rule in a country that has a Sunni Muslim majority.

Iran is the Middle East's Shi'ite Muslim power whose regional influence is viewed with suspicion by its mostly Sunni Arab neighbors in the Gulf.

While Syrian rebels accuse Iran of sending fighters from its Revolutionary Guard to help Assad's forces put down the uprising, Iranian officials have blamed the United States, Turkey and Qatar for the kidnapping of its citizens.

"We do not only blame the terrorists on this issue," Jalili told reporters in comments aired on Iranian television. "All those who help them ... are participants in their criminal actions, and we hold them responsible."

Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani, in a speech in parliament aired on Iranian television, said: "In the name of Islam, some of these governments have launched killings and even treat Iranian pilgrims in Syria with violence. These crimes are not something the Iranian nation will disregard.

"The American regime and some countries in the region are responsible for these crimes. And they will receive their response in turn."

(Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy in Beirut, Yeganeh Torbati in Dubai and Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and Janet Lawrence)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/turkey-iran-key-syria-peace-iran-says-153549273.html

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Study: Minor quakes near Texas injection wells

Dozens of small earthquakes occurred in central Texas over a two-year period, and 23 of them were close to injection wells where waste water from energy extraction was pumped deep underground for disposal, a new study reported on Monday.

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The study used temporary seismographs to detect earthquakes of magnitude 1.5 or higher in a geologic area called the Barnett Shale, a swath of land the size of England that includes Dallas and Fort Worth.

Earthquakes with magnitudes of 1 to 3 would be felt by few people, and only under particularly favorable conditions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Study author Cliff Frohlich of the University of Texas at Austin located 68 earthquakes in this area, more than eight times as many as the U.S. National Earthquake Center found over the same period from November 2009 to September 2011.

Of those, 23 were located within about two miles of high-volume injection wells that pumped more than 150,000 barrels per month of water underground, Frohlich wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

His study did not examine any possible link between earthquakes and hydraulic fracturing - commonly called fracking - where water, sand and chemicals are pumped underground at high pressure to break up rock formations that contain oil and natural gas.

"Drilling never causes earthquakes," Frohlich said in a telephone interview. "Fracking almost never causes earthquakes ... While there are probably millions of hydrofracking jobs, only a few have caused earthquakes and they've all been little tiny earthquakes."

Many high-volume injection wells in the Barnett Shale were not near earthquakes, and the study does not specify what made the difference.

Frohlich theorized that injection of water only triggers an earthquake if a nearby fault is "experiencing tectonic stress" - that is, the fluid underground might relieve the stress by getting the fault unstuck, causing a mild earthquake. To test this theory would require data about subsurface faults that is not available now.

This research sparked interest in Britain, where shale gas extraction came under fire last year after tremors were measured in Blackpool, where fracking was taking place. The government temporarily halted fracking at the site.

British science and engineering bodies reported on June 29, 2012 that shale gas fracking is unlikely to cause big earthquakes or contaminate drinking water.

Cuadrilla Resources, a UK shale gas company, said on July 12 that it will improve monitoring of earth tremors at its drilling sites.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48535673/ns/us_news-environment/

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