Correction: This column misidentified the closed Invesco fund. The Invesco Developing Markets Fund (GTDDX) is closed to new investors. Invesco Emerging Markets Equity Fund (IEMAX) is not.
These days, strategists are more likely to recommend individual emerging-market stocks, rather than emerging-market stock markets. There's only one problem: Some of the asset class's best stockpickers are closing their funds to new investors.
The developing markets are increasingly fractured and hard to navigate, which is why strategists from the likes of HSBC, Barclays, and Morgan Stanley are recommending that investors pursue "alpha" (that is, stock-picking), over "beta," or tracking an index. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index is down 1.7% this year, largely due to very localized troubles—like a less-than-spectacular Chinese recovery, heavy-handed regulation in Brazil, and uncertainty over economic reform in India. But there are plenty of individual countries and stocks that are rising, giving a good stockpicker the opportunity to buy the winners and avoid the losers.
Picking a good fund manager is never easy, however, and it's made more difficult by the fact that some of the best are closing to new investors. So far this year, three of the largest—and best-performing—funds have announced that they will close their doors to most investors who don't already own shares: The $32.8 billion Oppenheimer Developing Markets Fund (ticker: ODMAX) will close to new investors as of April 12, while the $8.2 billion Virtus Emerging Markets Opportunities Fund (HEMZX), and the $10.9 billion Aberdeen Emerging Markets Fund (GEGAX) have already begun limiting new money.
How well have these funds performed? The Oppenheimer fund has returned 6.2% annually during the past five years, ranking it among the top 4% of emerging-market funds, according to Morningstar; the Virtus fund has returned 6.7%, good for the top 2%; and the Aberdeen fund has returned 10.7%, putting at the top 1%. Each fund also ranks in the top-10 of alpha producers during that period, meaning it wasn't just a hot asset class that boosted their returns.
With performance comes new money. The Oppenheimer fund added $5 billion in 2012, according to Morningstar; it started the year with $20.3 billion. The Virtus fund added $3.4 billion of new money in 2012, more than doubling its assets. All that new money, though, can be tricky to deploy, especially in stocks that trade infrequently or are on the small side. Hence the new closings, adding to the list of other top performers like the $15.7 billion Lazard Emerging Markets Equity Fund (LZEMX) and the $3.4 billion Invesco Emerging Markets Fund (IEMAX) that are no longer available to new investors.
THIS MAKES IT TOUGH, but not impossible, to find solid (if less exciting) choices, says Morningstar analyst Karin Anderson. There's American Funds New World Fund (NEWFX), which divides its assets among multiple managers and even includes developed-world companies that get a sizable piece of their revenues from developing nations. The Thornburg Developing World Fund (THDAX), meanwhile, has been near the top of the alpha list based on its three-year returns, but was only launched at the end of 2009.
Another route: Cheap index exchange-traded funds like Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets (VWO) and iShares Core MSCI Emerging Markets (IEMG), which charge just 0.18 percentage point, compared with the average of 1.62% for an actively managed fund. For investors with a long time horizon, they could be the perfect choice. "We prefer active management when emerging markets are weak," says Jim Holtzman, an advisor at Legend Financial Advisors in Pittsburgh. "But over the long term, it probably won't matter much."
Correction: This column misidentified the closed Invesco fund.


text:
With new 'industrial relations' code, what does the future look like for India's trade unions?
The roll-out of the Industrial Relations Code, 2020 and the draft Industrial Relations (Central) Recognition of Negotiating Union or Negotiating Council and Adjudication of Disputes of Trade Unions Rules, 2021 as part of India's labour reforms initiative, is in the offing.
The specific recognition of "negotiating unions" under this is significant in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and fast-growing digitalisation, both of which have necessitated a rethink of the role of collective bargaining and trade unions.
Given recent regulatory developments on this topic in the United States and the United Kingdom, this development in India assumes importance.
The Code and negotiating unions
The erstwhile Trade Unions Act, 1926 (TU Act), by itself did not mandate trade union registration or recognition; it only provided a framework for registration and for registered trade unions to operate.
The lack of a recognition mandate in the TU Act culminated in the absence of a framework for recognising negotiating unions or councils under it. However, certain state laws (such as the Maharashtra Recognition of Trade Unions and Prevention of Unfair Labour Practices Act, 1971 and Kerala Recognition of Trade Unions Act, 2010) address this 'recognition' gap, albeit in an ad hoc manner.
The absence of a framework to statutorily recognise trade unions at the central level left a long-standing legal vacuum which has been filled by statutorily acknowledging "negotiating unions" and "negotiating councils", under the Code and the Rules.
The Code mandates every industrial establishment to have a negotiating union or a negotiating council. Where there is one registered union, the Code designates that as the negotiating union; where there are multiple registered unions, the union supported by more than 51% of workers forms the negotiating union.
A negotiating council is formed where no union has clear majority. In that case, there is proportional representation on the negotiating council of all trade unions with 20% membership or more. The Rules indicate subjects on which a negotiating union may negotiate with employers, including worker classification, wages, working hours, shift timings, promotion and transfer policies.
Although the Code awaits implementation and the Rules are still under consideration, differing views have been expressed on the proposal to recognise negotiating unions, negotiating councils, and attendant procedures. While experts have questioned the efficacy of the proposals on whether workers could follow the same, others emphasise the potential of these proposals to boost investor confidence while also enabling workers to exert greater power.
A brief history of trade unions in India
These developments indicate an important shift in industrial relations. Concepts like negotiating unions and negotiating councils, premised on a sole negotiating body in an establishment, are assuming centre-stage. In other words, newer forms of negotiation between workers and employers, premised on the individual rather than the collective, may be emerging, pointing towards the evolution of collective bargaining and trade unions.
It may be argued that this evolution has already been underway.
Trade unions are, essentially, predicated upon the 'employer-employee' relationship where a 'mutuality' exists between employers and employees. This traditional employment relationship (and the tripartite relationship among the government, employers and trade unions) has steadily eroded over the past decades, primarily due to newer forms of employment emerging which are characterised by contractual and casual work. Further, the pandemic has perpetuated informal work, aided and complemented by digital acceleration.
Tracing briefly the evolution of trade unions in India, the primary focus upon Indian independence was economic progress. Workers and trade unions were greatly valued for their role in ensuring the economy's production targets.
In fact, several labour policies formulated at that time protected workers, including provisions of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, which required employers to seek government permission for lay-offs and retrenchments – a request often rejected due to the strong ties between trade unions and the government. In contrast, under the Code, permission for lay-offs and retrenchment may be sought only by establishments with over 300 workers, thereby allowing hiring flexibility.
The evolving role of trade unions
Liberalisation in the 1990s, characterised by the abandonment of import-substitution industrialisation and a move towards a free market, triggered a somewhat permanent adoption of outsourcing and atypical employment (contractual/casual work), even in the formal employment sector. The growing fragmentation of a collective workforce resulted in union memberships undergoing stark decline in several industries.
Employers, in order to survive in this highly competitive, globalised world, reduced manpower through voluntary retirements while increasing subcontracting. As per International Labour Organisation ILO estimates, the global union density rate halved from an estimated 36% in 1990, to 18% in 2016.
Further, experts have attributed the changing role of trade unions, globally, to growth in alternate forms of social action and protection provided by employers, states, intermediary agencies, NGOs or emerging social movements and the introduction of CSR initiatives in corporations for the workers' benefit.
Moreover, human resources departments in many enterprises are observed as having adopted certain functions of trade unions.
The multiplicity of trade unions in a single establishment has also been observed as being counterproductive to collective bargaining, with recognised trade unions often failing to reach consensus (the Code, interestingly, also allows for the creating and maintaining of a sole negotiating union/negotiating council in establishments).
Trade unions and digitalisation
One of the most enduring reasons for the changed role of collective bargaining and trade unions may, however, be digitalisation and the growth of the gig economy, especially since the pandemic. The status of trade unions in a heavily digitalised future, dominated by the gig economy, is crucial. This future, characterised by heterogeneity, individualism and technology, is seemingly not agreeable with the traditional tenets of collective bargaining; however, the interaction between the gig economy and trade unions is inevitable.
The thunderous arrival and perpetuation of gig and platform work globally is historic, having fundamentally altered traditional work formats which are characterised by permanence, homogeneity and predictability. The male, manual industrial worker whose 9-to-5 job was central to his existence is, therefore, a declining species.
The augmentation of this work-format has not only changed how people work, spend, and live in general, but has also impacted traditional industrial relations. Concepts of collective bargaining, trade unions and tripartite consultation, integral to industrial relations, are therefore in flux.
Potential challenges for the trade unions of the future
The shifting 'employment-type' relationship in the gig economy and its heterogeneous structure have been observed as impacting trade unions, their role in providing a collective space and associated education and support for workers. Certain challenges trade unions are likely to face in a digitalised future are highlighted below:
(i) Geographical: Trade union activities depend on physical meetings and discussions; a format being challenged by technology. While app-based gig platform trade unions have seen some success in the past, the challenge lies in organising skilled gig workers (for example, consultants and freelancers) dispersed globally and working primarily from home.
(ii) Youth disinterest: An ILO report suggests that the unionisation gap between young entrants in the labour market and older, retiring workers, is larger than ever. This is unsurprising as the youth today prefer self-employment, transitioning through various jobs. Trade unions, so far, do not cater substantially to these workers. Additionally, trade unions are perceived as tired, archaic bureaucracies, largely irrelevant to the issues of the contemporary world.
(iii) Piecemeal work: Work today is disintegrated and dispersed, being divided into small tasks and paid for accordingly. This disintegration of work isolates individual workers (unlike earlier, when workers could collectivise), effectively altering the balance of power as well as employer-worker negotiations. Such workers lack access to trade union support, given the absence of a conducive framework.
(iv) Equity determined by algorithms: A gig worker's performance is determined by one-off gigs performed and not by line-management responsibility (prevalent in traditional organisations). This minimises the role of trade union representation. Further, a gig may be performed by different workers each time. This necessitates temporary work relationships, reducing the utility of trade unions.
Are trade unions headed towards a challenging future?
The observations above, demonstrating the interplay between trade unions and a digitalised future, are indeed indicative of a challenging future. The pandemic, however, has thrown up interesting questions for this future.
Reports suggest that, across varying national approaches, opportunities for the revitalisation of collective bargaining and trade unions are being created. At the same time, multilateral organisations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the ILO, recognising the pandemic's impact and resultant economic upheaval, have recommended that social dialogue needs to partake in the post-pandemic "building back better" agenda. Thus, a revitalised future for collective bargaining and trade unions may be underway.
Parallel developments are underway in America and the UK, which are likely to impact the future of collective bargaining and trade unions. It is too early to conclusively state the exact implications of this, globally and for India, given that the Code awaits implementation. However, these developments undoubtedly indicate a resurgence of collective bargaining and trade union activity.
The proposed 'American Jobs Plan', announced under President Biden's broader "Build Back Better" agenda, aims at long-term economic recovery with a renewed focus on creating jobs through promoting collective bargaining and ensuring that trade unions function as vibrant institutions. A key element of the Jobs Plan is the proposed Protecting the Right to Organise Act, 2021 (PRO Act), amending the foundational National Labour Relations Act (1935).
The PRO Act expands the right to organise and collectively bargain via multiple measures. While it is being described as a "sweeping bill", its reception has been mixed. Some commentators have described the PRO Act as encouraging forced unionisation, adversely impacting flexibility and potentially affecting relationships with independent contractors. On the other hand, the PRO Act has been called a "game changer", supportive of strengthened collective bargaining.
The decision of the UK Supreme Court in February, 2021, adjudicating whether drivers working on a prominent ride-hailing platform were independent contractors or workers, is shaping up to be extremely important. This decision saw the court unanimously hold that such drivers would be considered 'workers'. Post judgement, there has been a status reclassification of such drivers which consequently makes them eligible for benefits such as minimum wages and pension plans. Commentators have pointed to this being made possible by the hybrid status of the "worker" under UK employment law.
Significantly, post-reclassification, the platform has recognised one of UK's largest trade unions, the GMB, as representing more than 70,000 drivers on the platform. The recognition also extends to collaboration on important issues including earnings, representation, organising and pensions.
Thus, this adoption of a model blending gig work with trade union rights shows that newer possibilities are being imagined for the work of the past and of the future to co-exist and that newer ways of collaborative working, between trade unions and gig platforms, are underway.
Trade unions emerged as a response to the labour problem that emerged during the Industrial Revolution. Over time, collective bargaining and trade unions experienced several setbacks, with the advent of subsequent industrial revolutions. Currently, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterised by technological development, may have provided a fresh lease of life to collective bargaining and trade unions, despite indications of the contrary.
The world is currently witnessing a barrage of changes owing to the pandemic and the consequent digital acceleration; all while India undergoes significant labour law reforms. In this, introducing negotiating unions and negotiating councils via the Code addresses the absence of a regulatory framework to recognise trade unions at the central level.
At the same time, the developments in the US and the UK indicate the renewed resurgence of collective bargaining and trade union activity.
As the Code develops and emergent developments elsewhere mature, it would be interesting to see how the regulatory landscape for collective bargaining and trade unions in a post-pandemic world, shapes up.
This article was originally published in The Wire on 20 September 2021 Co-written by: Soumya Jha, Research Fellow; Ulka Bhattacharyya, Research Fellow. Click here for original article
Contributed by: Soumya Jha, Research Fellow; Ulka Bhattacharyya, Research Fellow

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Tell him to take a good look at the grass, the trees, the birds, the sun, the sky and everything else. Then ask him a few questions.
Say, "Mr. Devil, do you know what all these things are made of? Do you know what the basic substance is that produced them? I do. They're made of a supernatural substance called faith! Everything in this universe was produced by that substance. It's the spiritual force that brought into existence every divinely created thing. As Hebrews 11 say, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Through faith…the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear" (Verse 1, 3).
I can pretty much guarantee you, before you even get finished quoting those verses, the devil will have heard enough. He'll be out of there, and you'll have preached yourself happy. Instead of being discouraged and tempted to doubt, you'll be ready to double down on your believing. You'll be thinking, Whoo-boy! I'm surrounded by living proof of what the God king of faith can do!
"That sounds great, but there's a big difference between my faith and the force God released at Creation. I do the best I know how but I certainly can't operate in God's kind of faith." You might say.
Yes, you can! Jesus confirmed it in Mark 11:22 when He commanded us as His disciples to "have faith in God." According to Greek scholars, what He said there can be literally be translated, Have the God kind of faith.
"What?! How on earth am I supposed to do that?" you might ask.
It's actually very simple. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ" (Romans 10:17). So, you can get as much of God's faith as you want just by availing yourself of His WORD.
God's WORD has His faith in it! That's why it's called "the word of faith" (Romans 10:8). When you read it, hear it, meditate on it and speak it, it empowers you to believe. It creates in you God's very own faith because He filled it with that faith when He released it.
Just as your physical body is designed by God to feed on certain natural substances, your spirit, which is created in God's likeness and image, is designed by Him to feed on His WORD. His WORD is spirit food! It strengthens and nourishes your inner man with the very life of God.
Matthew 4:4 says, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." So, if God said it, you can feed on it. You can receive it and it will produce in you the force of diving faith. Then you can release that force to go to work in your life.
"is the releasing part hard?" you might ask.
No, I'm happy to say it's quite simple. You just follow the example Jesus set in Mark 11 when He released His faith in the situation with the fig tree. You've probably read about that. Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem when He got hungry; "And seeing a fig tree…he came, if haply he might find anything thereon; and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter forever. And his disciples heard it" (Verses 13:14).
For a while it didn't look like anything happened. That's apparent because later that evening, when Jesus and His disciples passed that way again, the disciples didn't say anything. You know they must have looked at the tree as they went by.
Having heard what Jesus said to it, they probably expected it to be gone, or at least appear to be sickly. But even after 12 hours had gone by, it showed no visible signs of change.
That's often the way it is when the force of faith goes into operation. It usually takes some time for the visible effects to show up because faith goes to work first in the unseen realm of the spirit. It works from the inside out. This inside-out way of operating can seem strange when you're first learning to walk by faith because in the natural you were raised to be an outside-in person.
From the time you were born, everything you needed was outside you and someone else had it.
At first, it was your mother and father who had it and you depended on them to get it. Then you grew up and it was your employer who had it, or the government or some other outside source.
When you received Jesus as your LORD, however, you became an inside-out person. You were born into the kingdom of God, and Jesus said that kingdom is within you. So now you increase and deal with the situations you face in life in an entirely different way. Rather than depending on outside sources, you draw on the spiritual resources of God's kingdom by speaking words of faith.
That's what Jesus did in Mark 11. He understands that words are the most powerful things that exist. He knows they govern everything because this is a word-created universe. So, He got rid of the unfruitful fig tree by speaking words of faith. He essentially said it, "You're done. It's over for you." And, as a result, roughly 24 hours later when He and His disciples passed by the tree the third time, it was dead – dried up from the roots – from the inside.
What did Jesus say in response? Something that most likely astonished the disciples even further. He told them if they'd do what He did, they'd get the same result.
No, He said the exact opposite.
Have faith in God. [Or, "Have the God kind of faith."] For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, what things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. And when ye stand praying, forgive…(verses 22-25).
Those verses contain the most detailed teaching on faith in the Bible, and one of the first things they say is that it will work for "whosoever." It will work for anyone because it's spiritual law. Like the laws of physics, it functions the exact way every time and it can be depended upon. What you believe in your heart and say with your mouth without doubting, will come to pass.
Make sure you're saying what God says in the Bible!
The Bible is His written WORD and His WORD contains His creative power. It is within it the ability to do anything He can do. It doesn't matter who you are, His WORD spoken by faith out of your mouth will do the same thing it does when it comes out of His mouth: It will come to pass.
You've already proven this in your own life. It's how you got saved! You heard the WORD about Jesus dying for your sins and reconciling you to God, you believed that WORD in your heart and confessed it with your mouth (Romans 10:10), and it made you a new creation. You were "born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever" (1Peter 1:23).
You can do the same thing with any other Bible fact or promise. All the promises in God's WORD are yes and amen in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20). Therefore, you can believe and speak any one of them and confidently expect them to produce for you just like they would for Jesus Himself.
You won't have that kind of confidence if you just make up something on your own. The secret to it is basing what you say on the Scriptures. When you do that, you can be certain you're on solid ground and that He's going to back you. You can be sure that the things you're praying and saying are in line with God's will because His WORD IS His will!
"But sometimes even when I pray according to The WORD, I don't feel like God hears me. Sometimes I don't feel like I have any faith." You might say.
Feelings don't have anything to do with this. You can't feel faith! It's a spiritual force. There are times when that force becomes perceptible (as it does when the anointing manifests in a tangible way), but you don't judge it by feelings or any other kind of natural evidence. You base your judgments on God's WORD. You simply believe what He said.
This is where Jesus' disciple, Thomas, missed it. He's often referred to as "doubting Thomas" because he refused to believe Jesus had risen from the dead after the other disciples told him about it. "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails," Thomas said, " and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe" (John 20:25).
That's the attitude a lot of Christians have today when it comes to the Bible. They can see in 1 Peter 2:24, for example, that by Jesus' stripes we were healed, but they won't believe they've received healing until they can feel or see some outward manifestation of it.
As a result, they keep pushing their healing away. They pray…and pray… and pray for it, but they keep waiting for tomorrow to see if God's WORD is going to work, and tomorrow never comes.
You can't walk in THE BLESSING of God by acting like a doubting Thomas! You do it by following the faith of Abraham. You do it by having the God kind of faith.
Romans 12:3 says God has already dealt to you the measure of that faith. The instant you got born again, He deposited it in your reborn spirit. He put on the inside of you the same kind of faith He used to create the heavens and the earth. So, go ahead and do something with it: Feed it. Increase it. Release it!
Open your Bible and read and meditate on the promises of God. Say about yourself and your life what He said and believe that what you say comes to pass. Then stay with it. Don't be on again and off again about it. Keep believing and confessing, and don't ever give up.
It will create a whole new world of BLESSING for you!


text:
Events in the year 2007 in Eritrea.

Incumbents

 President: Isaias Afewerki

Events

 30 July – United Nations Security Council Resolution 1767, which extended the U.N. mandate in the country and Ethiopia, was unanimously adopted.

Deaths

References

2000s in Eritrea
Years of the 21st century in Eritrea
Eritrea
Eritrea

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
News » Obituaries
Memorial Events for Chris Harris Set for January 14 and 15
Christian Harris, born in Providence, RI on December 23, 1967 to Beverly Boulton Cottam of Boynton Beach, FL and the late Robert L. Harris of South Kingstown, RI, passed away peacefully at home surrounded by family and close friends on Wednesday, January 9, 2019.
"What's up, ProviDANCE?" is a question familiar to anyone who has attended a 'Chris Harris Presents' event. Lovingly known as the "King of Clubs," Chris was an award-winning event producer, premier concert promoter, accomplished business owner and community organizer. He was co-owner of Club EGO in Providence, RI, and provided some of the best LGBTQ nightlife experiences that captivated audiences and forever changed the industry.
Chris was a pivotal leader in the LGBTQ community, an advocate of equality and proud to have created safe environments where people could come together to celebrate who they are. He was never shy of sharing his vision of dreaming big and "no" was never an answer. Chris was always willing to help where he could and never stopped fighting for what was right. He was always there for the community and leaves a substantial legacy that is being celebrated across the country.
He leaves behind his loving companion, Dominic Chang. He is survived by his mother Beverly, stepmother Donna Harris of South Kingstown, RI, his three siblings Alexander A. Harris of Scituate, RI, Robert L. Harris Jr. of Exeter, RI, Rebecca Harris Fiske of Richmond, RI, and cherished nieces and nephews Abigail, Alissa, Jacob, Daimon and Isabelle.
Visiting hours Monday, January 14th at 3:00 - 8:00pm at Russell J. Boyle & Son Funeral Homes, 331 Smith Street, Providence, RI, 02908. An EPIC 'Celebration of Life' event will take place on Tuesday, January 15th at 5:30pm at the Providence Biltmore Hotel, followed by a parade procession to the after party at Club EGO.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made online to the 'Chris Harris Tribute Fund at the National LGBT Cancer Network' at ChrisHarrisTribute.org or by check mailed to Hope Artiste Village, 1005 Main St. Suite 2137, Pawtucket, RI 02860. This fund will be used to establish a LGBTQ cancer prevention and education program in Rhode Island and beyond.
WONDER PARK on Blu-ray, DVD, & Digital!


text:
Read Next 'Why Are They Doing This to Me?' Trump Asks Friends at Mar-a-Lago, While Legal Team Officially Denies Impeachment Charges	Send Us a Tip	Subscribe
July 21, 2010 12:00PM ET
The Poisoning
It's the biggest environmental disaster in American history — and BP is making it worse
Jeff Goodell's Most Recent Stories
Trump, His Generals, and the Iran Crisis: An Interview with Author Peter Bergen
Even Greta Isn't Radical Enough
McNamee/Getty
On July 15th, just as this article was going to press, BP lowered a 75-ton cap over the damaged wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico and closed — at least temporarily — the gushing hellmouth of oil. How long that cap will hold is not clear. At the moment, BP and government scientists are trying to determine whether the structure of the well itself was damaged by the blowout, and, if it was, whether oil and gas could be leaking through other parts of the well, or even through the sea floor itself. Depending on the integrity of the well, the gusher could be permanently capped in a matter of weeks; or there could be oil flowing into the Gulf again tomorrow. "This is an extremely unstable situation," retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is overseeing the federal response to the clean-up, told me on the day the cap was lowered into place.
12 Politicians and Execs Blocking Progress on Global Warming
Capping the well, even temporarily, is welcome progress, but it is not the end of the story. Since the blowout in late April, up to four million barrels of oil and nearly two million gallons of toxic dispersants have been dumped into the Gulf. The clean-up operation will continue for months, but it's mostly PR — only a small fraction of the oil will actually be removed. More important, no one has a clue yet what the longer-term effects of this catastrophe will be: how many dead dolphins will wash up on the beaches, how many local residents will lose their livelihoods, how the complex ecosystem of the Gulf will be altered, or, indeed, what the political fallout will be for the Obama administration. Sorting all that out is a much larger story, and right now, it is just beginning.
— Jeff Goodell, July 21st, 2010
This article appeared in the August 5, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.
Day 68. That's all the sign says on the wall of the Starfish Restaurant in Grand Isle, Louisiana. Everyone knows what it means: 68 days since the blowout, 68 days of oil gushing out at the rate of 30,000, 40,000, 60,000 barrels a day. Who knows for sure? Nobody trusts BP's numbers. When it comes to the spill, Grand Isle is ground zero. Everyone here has seen the live pictures of the gushing wellhead, the hellish brown geyser a mile deep out in the Gulf. They have smelled the oil, touched it, walked in it, and they know more is out there, coming in with a shift of the wind and tides, killing the shrimp, coating the birds, scaring away tourists. The days tick by, the oil keeps coming. Day 68. On the Louisiana coast, the Deepwater Horizon blowout was the environmental equivalent of September 11th, an event so significant that it rearranges time itself.
As the World Burns
Around here, the biggest fear is what happens now that hurricane season has arrived. In the restaurant, diners glance up at the TV, tuned to the Weather Channel, where tropical storms swirl. They have been through them all – Katrina, Gustav, Ike. Each time, they rebuilt. But this time is different. "If a hurricane gets us now," says Jeannine Braud, a waitress at the Starfish, "it will be all over. We will not recover. There will be oil and chemicals and a toxic mess everywhere. It will be the end of this place. It will be an apocalypse."
The Vanishing Ice Sheets
It would be tempting to dismiss such sentiments as the unfounded fears of a local resident, one whose economic livelihood depends on the Gulf, if it weren't for all that we know about the nature of oil spills. Crude oil contains hundreds, perhaps thousands, of chemical compounds, many of which are lethal in high concentrations. As soon as oil began erupting out of BP's well and into the water, the compounds in the oil began to separate, some drifting up to the surface, others remaining near the bottom, where they will inevitably spread a toxic brew into the cellular structure of virtually every plant and animal in the Gulf, from microscopic plankton all the way up to sperm whales. Even worse, BP has responded to the disaster by pumping nearly 2 million gallons of toxic chemicals into the Gulf in an effort to break up the oil into smaller, camera-friendly slicks. The cleanup operation, in effect, has turned the Gulf into a vast science experiment, one whose consequences – untested and unforeseeable – are likely to haunt the planet for decades to come.
After lunch at the Starfish, I drive a mile or so down the road. Grand Isle is a thin spit of land on the edge of the bayou. It's a place known for sport fishing – the annual tarpon festival draws thousands of people each year. The houses along the road all back up to the beach, and they are built on 15-foot stilts so the water can rush under them. In the early days of the spill, the sand dunes here were jammed with reporters from the major networks, all of them strolling along, picking up oil-covered bottles and rocks in lame attempts to help viewers understand the enormity of the tragedy. President Obama visited Grand Isle in late May, and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has swung through here repeatedly. On the worst days, the oil flowed up on the beaches in ribbons, sticking to the sand like big black cobwebs. The smell was bad, too – a heavy, metallic, stomach-churning odor of volatilizing chemicals, of benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. It was the smell of cancer.
Today – Day 68 – the smell remains. A red fence has been erected along the beach, accompanied by a string of yellow crime-scene tape that reads no admittance. A few shrimp boats, their booms lowered to collect oil, bob out in the distance. The beach is paved with the heavy footprint of vehicle tracks. A few hundred yards away, there's a big white tent pitched on the sand. Workers are lifting plastic bags into a Dumpster – the last of the oil they have sopped up from the beach. Rumors around Grand Isle are that BP is using tents like these to cover up environmental horrors beyond anything that has been reported. One local resident tells me that he has it on good authority that BP is shredding sperm whales and bottlenose dolphins at sea, then bringing them to shore and disposing of their remains. Impossible to imagine, but who knows? "You should never put the murderer in charge of the crime scene," says Carl Safina, a noted ecologist who has spent a lot of time in the Gulf observing the cleanup. "Their impulse is always to hide the body."
I walk up to a security guard, who is stationed under a small tent on a sand dune. He is about 30, works for Talon Security, a BP subcontractor. He looks sour and angry. He won't reveal his name. But we start talking. He tells me he's from California and that he is only out here because he has a new wife and baby, and needs a few extra bucks. So he stands out on the beach all day – different beaches on different days – and makes sure tourists and sightseers and reporters don't get too close.
I ask him how long he's been here. "Since Day 12," he says. "It depresses the shit out of me. I never thought I'd see something like this happen in my lifetime."
"It doesn't look so bad today," I say.
"Have you touched the water?"
We walk down to the beach, put our hands in the surf. "Feel that?" he says.
I raise my hand. It's sticky, coated with a thin film of . . . something.
"Oil," he says. "It's everywhere."
The Deepwater Horizon Incident Command Post – the regional headquarters where BP, the Coast Guard and various state and federal agencies are running the cleanup operation – is a pretty spiffy place on the edge of the bayou in Houma, Louisiana. Until the blowout on April 20th, the building was used as a training center by BP – it's bright and airy, the walls decorated with stylized images of pelicans and marsh grass. Some 1,000 people show up here to work every day, eating three meals a day in the cafeteria and monitoring the spill on giant screens, tracking ships and airplanes and skimmers, as well as the tides and the oncoming weather. "It's a little like the control room for Apollo 13 in here every day," says Mike Ziccardi, a wildlife veterinarian from California who is heading the efforts to rescue and rehabilitate sea turtles and marine mammals.
Each day, the command center reviews a single fact sheet called "Operations and Ongoing Response." The numbers are a kind of simple, one-sheet accounting of the spill. The first day I visit – Day 65 – the sheet boasts of a cleanup response of unprecedented proportions: 94 airplanes, 6,210 ships, more than 35,000 people, 2.6 million feet of boom. More people are involved in the cleanup than live in most small towns, and the fleet of vessels trying to cap and clean up the spill is more than 20 times larger than the U.S. Navy. "We are fighting the oil at every front," says James Black, deputy chief of operations at the command center. "At sea, on the beaches, in the bays. This is an all-out war."
But the command center's daily tally conveniently omits the most telling number of all: the monstrous size of the spill. Since it began, the BP blowout has flooded the Gulf with the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every four days. A third of the fishing waters in the Gulf – more than 80,000 square miles – have already been closed. Estimates of the total amount of oil dumped into the Gulf so far range as high as 4 million barrels. Put into gallon jugs, the oil would line the entire 1,680 miles of the Gulf Coast – 19 times over. It is the largest oil spill ever in U.S. waters, and by the time it is sealed for good, it could turn out to be the largest offshore spill in history.
From an environmental standpoint, the BP blowout could not have occurred in a worse place. The warm currents of the Gulf make it one of the most productive ecosystems on the planet, home to 1,200 species of fish, five species of endangered sea turtles, scores of mammals like bottlenose dolphins and millions of migratory birds. Even worse, the spill took place in "biological spring," the moment when the entire Gulf comes to life – the migratory birds returning to nest, the sperm whales nudging along the edge of the continental shelf, the bluefin tuna laying their eggs, the pelican eggs cracking open in the rookeries. In the first three months alone, the spill has killed 1,978 birds, 463 sea turtles and 59 marine mammals – and that's just the official tally.
"No list can ever do justice to what's happening in the Gulf," says Doug Inkley, a senior scientist for the National Wildlife Federation. "The birds that get sick and die in the wetlands will never be found. And there are so many things we are not counting. Who is out there counting the mortality among deepwater squid, which are important to the survival of sperm whales? Who is out there counting the impact on plankton, which are key to the Gulf's food chain?"
The true scope of the catastrophe is best viewed from the air. Flying out to sea, just a few miles offshore from the mouth of the Mississippi River, it's easy to see how the oil and gas industries have systematically ravaged the Gulf Coast over the past 75 years. The wetlands and marshes are sliced by canals and pipelines, eroding the barrier islands and making the region more vulnerable to storms. Every 38 minutes, a patch of wetland the size of a football field vanishes under the weight of energy development. All told, some 2,300 square miles of coastal land have been lost in Louisiana since the 1930s. Runoff from fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers has also had a devastating impact, creating an oxygen-starved dead zone in the Gulf the size of New Jersey.
But the damage done by decades of development is being rapidly accelerated by the catastrophic nature of the BP spill. Viewed from the sky, streaks of oil appear not far from the swampy coast – black stripes in the water, 50 or 100 feet wide, stretching out across the bays and inlets. Farther out, the streaks get wider and nastier – some of them brown, some of them gold, some of them caught in riptides, turned into a thick, orange goop floating on the surface. It is not one slick but many – great sheets of oil covering 35,000 acres of water at a time, according to the Coast Guard.
Here and there, bobbing about like tiny insects trapped in the oil slick, are boats pulling what look like loops of rope off each side – skimmers. The skimmers are supposed to operate as giant sponges, soaking up the oil. But from the air, it is obvious what a colossal failure the skimming operation has been. In its pre-spill response plan, BP claimed to have a skimming capacity of some 500,000 barrels a day – more than enough to soak up a worst-case spill like the one in the Gulf. But in fact, like almost everything else in BP's response plan, that claim proved to be hollow. By early July, BP had skimmed only 67,000 barrels out of the water – roughly the amount that is blowing out of the well each day. All the sophisticated technology in the company's command center, it turns out, means nothing against the vast tide of oil that is blasting out of the bottom of the sea.
"The technology and hardware that are deployed all look impressive at first glance," says Rick Steiner, a marine scientist who played a central role in the cleanup effort after the Exxon Valdez. "But none of it really works very well. In fact, it is all theater."
The Macondo Reservoir, which BP was tapping into when the blowout occurred, is estimated to hold up to 500 million barrels. The reservoir is not particularly large by industry standards: It contains about as much oil as Americans consume in a month. But because Macondo has a high permeability – a measure of how mobile the oil is within the rocks that contain it – the blowout was "like uncorking a volcano," says Doug Rader, chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund.
According to BP's response plan, mandated by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, a disaster of this magnitude was a virtual impossibility. The plan was a 582-page joke, filled with boilerplate instructions, bureaucratic forms and a total lack of preparation for anything like a blowout of this scale and complexity. More important, in the two decades since the Exxon Valdez, the oil industry has invested billions of dollars to develop new ways to access oil – multidirectional drilling, sophisticated imaging systems to locate reservoirs – but very little to improve the technology needed to clean it up. "The tools we have today aren't substantially different than the tools we had 20 years ago," concedes Thad Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who is commanding the cleanup operation.
When it comes to dealing with oil on the water, there are really only three options: skim it up, burn it off or use a chemical agent to disperse it. "Each tool has trade-offs," says Allen. Skimming the oil off the surface of the water is by far the safest and least damaging option, but the technology is cumbersome and expensive. It takes time to get the equipment deployed, and you need good weather. Even under ideal conditions, a big skimmer soaks up only a few thousand barrels of oil a day; you would need a whole fleet in operation to capture the tens of thousands of barrels blowing out into the Gulf every day. But there was no fleet of skimmers in the Gulf – at least not one that could be launched quickly.
That left burning the oil or dispersing it. "In situ burning," as it is called by the industry, can be an effective way to get oil out of the water, but it's an environmental nightmare, polluting the air and sending a lot of heavy residue to the seafloor. It's also dangerous, especially in open water, where workers have few resources on hand should a fire burn out of control. "Until this spill, no one had ever done offshore burning of this magnitude in the history of this country," Allen says. Although BP initially planned for burning, it would be more than a week after the spill before the conditions were right for major burns. So the company, in a move that only served to worsen the environmental nightmare unfolding in the Gulf, decided to rely on dispersing.
Chemical dispersants work in a similar way to dishwashing detergent, causing the oil to break up into smaller droplets and moving it from the ocean surface down into the waters below. In theory, those droplets make it easier for bacteria and other natural processes to digest the oil. Many dispersants are made from petroleum byproducts: The dispersant that was stockpiled around the Gulf, which is sold under the trade name Corexit, was developed by Exxon in the 1970s. Dispersants, which can be sprayed from ships or planes, are quick and easy to apply – they are often used to break up small spills near land, where they can help keep oil from hitting fragile shorelines. But dispersants are full of chemical compounds, some of them toxic to humans and animals. One variety used heavily in the early days of the spill, Corexit 9527, contains an agent called 2-butoxyethanol, known to cause internal bleeding and kidney damage. For this reason, dispersants should never have been the primary tool to respond to an oil spill like the BP disaster.
But with the Deepwater Horizon, they were. The day after the rig sank, BP sprayed 1,900 gallons of Corexit on the site. Within a week, it was dropping tens of thousands of gallons out of airplanes. Because the use of dispersants had been preapproved in BP's response plan, there was little oversight provided by federal health or safety agencies. As long as the chemicals were applied according to certain conditions – sprayed at least three miles off shore and in water at least 30 feet deep – there were no limits to how much could be used.
In the first weeks, BP discovered that dispersants did indeed help break up the oil slicks and drive the oil down into the water. But the chemicals also had another, more disturbing effect: They made the skimmers less effective. The best technology – known as an oleophilic, or oil-attracting, skimmer – uses mops or other absorbent materials to blot the oil out of the water. "Normally, the oleophilic skimmers should have been the backbone of our operation," says Mark Ploen, BP's offshore operations section chief at the command center. "But with all the dispersants being used, we found that less oil was sticking to the skimmers, and they were far less effective."
That meant the biggest skimmers in the Gulf, including a 174-foot-long, high-volume skimmer known as the HOSS barge, were of little use in the spill. It also meant that BP had to rely on a technology known as weir skimmers, which are placed just below the surface of the water, drawing both oil and water into a sump. But weir skimmers work best in thick, heavy oil spills; in the Gulf, where the oil was rising up from the seafloor and spreading out into a thin sheen, weir skimmers often picked up far more water than oil, making them troublesome and ineffective. By early July, with the cleanup effort undercut by chemical dispersants, BP was skimming up less than 1,000 barrels of oil a day.
But instead of dialing back on dispersants and deploying more skimmers, BP decided to wage chemical warfare in the Gulf. Within three weeks of the blowout, the company had dumped 300,000 gallons of Corexit into the ocean. By mid-July, the total had surpassed 1.8 million gallons. BP argued that dispersing the spill reduced the number of brown pelicans and sea turtles coated in oil, and prevented it from reaching fragile shorelines, where it is difficult to clean and deadly to breeding grounds for shrimp and other sea life. But the chemicals also benefited the company by effectively covering up the spill, breaking it up into thousands of smaller slicks that don't look so bad on the nightly news. "It's about PR," says Steiner, the scientist whose expertise helped contain the Valdez disaster. "It's about keeping the oil out of sight, and out of the public mind, so fewer people really understand what is happening in the Gulf and get outraged by it." During the Valdez response, he adds, Corexit earned a telling nickname: "Hides-it."
Whatever its motives, BP was slow to provide respirators to workers in the Gulf, leaving them exposed to a dangerous combination of oil and chemicals. Many complained of illnesses, headaches, nausea, and BP's own tests have shown that more than 15 percent of the response workers in the Gulf have been exposed to 2-butoxyethanol. "When oil goes into the water, nothing good happens," concedes Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral overseeing the cleanup. "It's always a trade-off to try to minimize consequences."
Those consequences would be disastrous for the Gulf even if BP had refrained from using dispersants. Crude oil is poison to most living things. To make matters worse, the nasty chemical compounds in crude oil – benzene, toluene and heavy metals – don't stick together very long. Once oil blows out of a well and begins its hours-long journey to the surface, it undergoes a process that geologists call "fractionation," the heavier compounds drifting to the bottom of the ocean, the lighter compounds rising toward the surface. Where all these compounds go, and how they interact with living organisms in a complex ecosystem like the Gulf, is one of the great unknowns of oceanography.
One of the central factors in determining how oil moves is the loop current, which swirls around in the center of the Gulf like an underwater conveyor belt, transporting water in and out of the basin in a giant circle. "My initial fear was that this oil was going to get caught up in the loop current and moved right to the pristine beaches of Cuba and the Florida Keys, then up the coast as far north as North Carolina," says Rader, the chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund. But a few weeks after the blowout occurred, an unexpected and fortunate thing happened: A large eddy developed in the Gulf, cutting off the current from the Florida Straits and keeping the oil largely contained in the Gulf itself. "We got lucky," Rader says.
The cutoff eddy lasted until late June. Now, however, it has separated into two eddies – which means the loop current could begin transporting the oil to more distant regions. But even if the oil remains in the Gulf, its effects on the environment could be felt thousands of miles away. Great migrations of fish visit the Gulf each spring and summer, using the waters as a spawning ground. "If they pass through the oil, billions of larvae and babies will be killed," says Rader. "It could have a large impact on populations outside the area."
The oil from the BP spill is not just swirling in the loop current. As it drifts up from the blowout site, it's also collecting in vast underwater plumes – some of them 10 miles long and three miles wide – composed of fractionated oil and methane. As bacteria begins to devour the oil in the plumes, they could leave behind huge swaths of water with little oxygen – massive dead zones that would suffocate any life within them. The plumes are also direct evidence that the oil is mixing at every level of the ocean, from the fragile coral reefs at the bottom of the Gulf to the shallower spawning grounds of the bluefin tuna. "The largest part of the Gulf ecosystem is out of sight beneath the surface," says Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M. "It's incredibly sensitive to the toxic effects of oil and dispersant."
As tragic as the images of dead seabirds are, scientists studying the environmental consequences of the Gulf spill are most concerned about the effects on the ecosystem that could take years to begin showing up. Scientists studying a spill off Cape Cod in 1969 are finding that 40 years later, fiddler crabs are still sluggish from the narcotic effects of oil. Studies after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 found that oil ingested by marine life accumulates in tissues, lowering reproductive rates and increasing disease and mortality rates. Oil continued to kill pink salmon eggs incubating in Alaskan streams for at least four years after the spill. As many as 700,000 seabirds died in the first few months, and sea otters and harlequin ducks suffered large, long-term losses. What's more, scientists found, the spill created a "cascade" of negative impacts up and down the food chain. The Pacific-herring population collapsed after the spill, and one pod of killer whales had its population cut by 40 percent. Two decades later, the whales are now doomed to extinction.
When you add dispersants to the mix, the environmental calculation gets even more complicated. Dispersants not only increase the amount of toxic chemicals in the Gulf, they spread the oil more widely – exposing far more plants and animals to a stew of hazardous compounds. "By breaking up oil slicks, you might reduce the number of acutely oiled pelicans and sea turtles," Rader points out. "But what about the rest of the food chain?" Observers in the Gulf have noticed what one environmentalist calls "drunk-dolphin syndrome" – pods of dolphins unusually close to shore, behaving in strange ways. "Is this a sign of environmental stress related to oil or dispersants?" says Ziccardi, the wildlife veterinarian. "We don't know." The same is true, he says, of the death of more than 450 endangered sea turtles: "It's a very high number that we can't explain yet."
The evidence of the disaster is most visible at the pelican rookeries of Barataria Bay. Cat Island, a tiny spit of land not far from Grand Isle, is teeming with birds – not just brown pelicans, but great egrets and roseate spoonbills. It is a Manhattan of birds, hundreds of them crowded together on a few hundred yards of mangroves, flapping, preening, basking in the sun. It's as if all the troubled birds in the bay have come here, seeking refuge, like animals fleeing a forest fire.
As it turns out, however, it was a foolish place to seek shelter. Barataria Bay has been hard hit by the spill, with oil moving in and out with the tides and the wind. Cat Island is surrounded by two rings of containment booms – but the concerted effort has failed to keep the oil away. The crude is thick among the mangrove trees, where it coats roughly half of the birds on the island. The oil doesn't look all that thick on their feathers – but that doesn't mean it won't do serious damage.
"We're not sure what the impact of this is going to be," says Melanie Driscoll, a bird-conservation director with the National Audubon Society. "We're definitely seeing more lightly oiled birds, which are more capable of escaping rescue attempts than heavily oiled birds. We're also seeing birds that are wet to the skin, which is unusual. There is some thought that the dispersants might be having an impact on their feathers, but we're not sure. Are these birds better off in the long run than the heavily oiled birds? We don't know. We don't know yet about their survival rate weeks or months from now, or about their reproductive capacity in the future. Frankly, there are just a huge number of unknowns here – and that's what concerns me."
BP hasn't let the unknowns slow it down. Every morning, weather permitting, a group of small planes take off from private airports in Louisiana and Mississippi and fly over the Gulf, looking for oil slicks. The spotters are experts at seeing the rainbow ribbons of water and oil – the guys at the command center say they have "calibrated eyes," because they're able to make distinctions about the oil and determine whether it's best suited for skimming, burning or dispersing.
When they report their findings to the command center, the information is fielded by the operations section and directed to Nick Benson, a subcontractor with O'Brien's Response Management, a firm that specializes in helping oil companies respond to spills. Benson, who grew up nearby, bristles with clean-cut efficiency: He has five pens in his pocket, two BlackBerries and a look of permanent worry. His desk – little more than a laptop and a mess of papers – sits in the middle of the command-center operations room. Benson is in charge of deploying and tracking all of the cleanup equipment in the Louisiana region. "I've worked hundreds of spills," he says. "Small, big, anywhere – I've done it, I've been there."
You don't have to spend more than 10 minutes watching Benson work before you figure out one reason BP has favored the use of chemical dispersants in the Gulf: Skimmers are slow, dull and prone to breakdown. Dispersants, on the other hand, are fast, sexy and usually delivered by specially equipped planes like C-130s or DC-3s, as well as a newer BT-67 – which happens to be painted red, white and blue. ("I get so pumped up when we use it," Benson says.)
When Benson hears from the spotters, he reviews the conditions at slicks they have picked out – dispersants work best on fresh oil and when there are light waves to mix them in with the water. If conditions are good, he dispatches sprayer planes that carry as much as 2,000 gallons of dispersant. The planes approach the oil as if they were on a bombing run, swooping low over the water and spraying the dispersant out of nozzles on the wings. Benson calls it "dropping their payload." On some days, a plane will make as many as seven runs. By mid-May, BP was spraying an average of 24,000 gallons of dispersants on the Gulf each day.
And that's just the delivery from the air. To keep the oil blowing out of the well from reaching the surface, BP is also using robots to pump dispersants 5,000 feet beneath the water and inject them into the plumes at the blowout site. This delivery method – unimpeded by bad weather – is taking place virtually 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Benson is unabashed in his enthusiasm for dispersants. He calls them "the best tool in the toolbox." Says they are getting "more refined" in their targeting, as well as "more efficient." Bombing the oil with chemicals certainly fits well with the military mode of the cleanup operation. Dispersants are the oil-spill equivalent of pounding the Taliban with predator drones. '
The Obama administration has tried to rein in BP's use of dispersants, but its efforts barely made a dent in the company's all-out chemical warfare. In early May, the company asked the Environmental Protection Agency for permission to inject dispersants 5,000 feet underwater at the blowout site. "One of BP's main arguments was that you would be able to use much less dispersants if they were injected directly into the oil stream, rather than sprayed at the surface," says Lisa Jackson, the head of the EPA. The move would protect response workers from chemical exposure and reduce the tons of dispersant that BP was spraying on the surface of the Gulf each day. But it would also spread the oil and chemicals far deeper and wider, putting the entire food chain at much greater risk. After a few days of testing, Jackson reluctantly signed off on the operation. "It was the toughest decision I've ever made," she told her aides.
Then, as Jackson touched down at the New Orleans airport for a tour of the region on May 23rd, she checked her BlackBerry. The day before, her staff had discovered, BP had dumped an unprecedented amount of dispersants – 70,000 gallons – in a single day. Instead of reducing its surface injections, BP had moved into toxic overdrive. Jackson was livid. "She was not at all happy to get the news," says an EPA staffer.
Around the same time, Jackson was engaged in a concerted effort to get BP to use a less toxic brand of dispersant in the Gulf. Corexit was hardly the best option available: Of the 18 dispersants on the EPA's pre-authorized list, 12 are more effective on southern Louisiana crude than Corexit – and some are far less toxic. So why did BP go for a chemical that worked worse and did more harm? The company claims that the choice was driven by availability: Corexit was already
stockpiled around the Gulf. But politics likely played a part: The board of the company that manufactures Corexit is made up of Big Oil veterans, including former ExxonMobil vice president Daniel Sanders and former BP executive Rodney Chase.
Initially, Jackson tried to hide behind bureaucratic camouflage. "If it's on the list and they want to use it," she declared on May 12th, "then they are pre-authorized to do so." But a few days later she changed her tune, telling a Senate panel that the EPA was "working with manufacturers, with BP and with others to get less toxic dispersants to the response site as quickly as possible." On May 19th, the EPA issued a directive to BP, telling the company that it had 24 hours to find a new, less toxic dispersant.
A day later, Doug Suttles, a top executive at BP, fired back a letter to the EPA, announcing that the company had every intention to keep using Corexit. Since then, the company has dumped more than 1.1 million gallons of Corexit in the Gulf.
The day she landed in New Orleans, Jackson traveled to BP's command center in Robert, Louisiana, and met with David Rainey, BP's vice president of exploration for the Gulf. She and Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry, who was the federal on-scene coordinator at the time, told Rainey that BP had to reduce its use of dispersants, especially on the surface of the Gulf. After all, reducing the air-bombing of chemicals was one of the central reasons that Jackson had approved subsurface injection in the first place. "I certainly made it very clear to BP that we were getting the worst of both worlds and that they were not being judicious enough in their use of that tool," Jackson says. One of her aides is more blunt: "It was a very heated meeting."
That night, Jackson and Landry worked out a three-point agreement with BP, which became the basis for a formal directive issued by the EPA and the Coast Guard on May 26th. The agency ordered the company to eliminate surface application of dispersant except "in rare cases" approved by the Coast Guard, to limit subsurface application to 15,000 gallons a day and to reduce overall dispersant use by 75 percent from its maximum daily levels.
If the purpose of the directive was to push BP to reduce the use of dispersants, it largely failed. The company – which applied for and received a waiver from the Coast Guard almost every day – continued to apply an average of 10,000 gallons a day to the water's surface. It exceeded the limit of 15,000 gallons for subsurface application at least four times, at one point injecting 33,000 gallons beneath the water on a single day. And by late June, it had cut its overall use of dispersants by roughly 2,000 gallons a day – a decrease of only nine percent.
Although BP has clearly flouted the spirit of the EPA order, Jackson insists that the company is doing nothing wrong, noting that its daily use of dispersants is now far lower than its peak of 70,000 gallons. "Personally and professionally, if I felt like BP weren't complying, I wouldn't hesitate to go to the president," she says. "The president has made clear that he sees it well within EPA's duties and authority to watch this process very closely. It would be unfair of me to characterize it as if somehow we are being dragged along. We are well aware of the trade-offs here."
I ask Jackson if she believes that BP is using dispersants to hide the oil and downplay public fears about the scale of the catastrophe. "I have no idea what BP is thinking," she tells me, her voice laced with exasperation. "In my view, they just don't understand why they can't just use dispersants all the time."
By any measure, however, the administration has failed miserably in its attempt to reduce the amount and toxicity of chemicals that BP is dumping into the ocean. "The EPA is full of smart, competent, hardworking scientists who are trying to do the right thing," says Wilma Subra, former vice chair of the EPA's National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy, who has led the battle against dispersants in the Gulf. "But politically, they are no match for BP."
On the way back from visiting the pelican rookery in Barataria Bay, our boat cuts though an inlet that is crowded with barges and supply ships headed out to the blowout site. The inlet is a vulnerable point in the barrier islands, the place where the Gulf meets the bay, the place where oil-laden waters can gain access to fragile marshlands. To protect the inner bay, Gov. Jindal and other local leaders want to build rock barriers across inlets like this one. "It's a very bad idea," says Denise Reed, a coastal scientist at the University of New Orleans. Reed explains that barriers, which interrupt the natural currents that flush the bay, are likely to do far more harm than good. Not that Jindal really cares – he is out to score political points against the Obama administration for its mishandling of the Gulf spill. But the widespread frustration directed at Washington is not misplaced. For a president who has promised to "guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch," there is not a lot of it on display in the Gulf. From the initial permitting of BP's well to the ongoing cleanup, the oil spill has been a story of federal ineptitude and corruption in the face of corporate greed and power.
As we cut across the bay, it's hard not to feel the overwhelming tragedy of the place – not just the acrid smell of oil in the air and the islands of weathered crude in the bay, but the fact that this entire region has been turned into a sacrifice zone for the oil and gas industry. It's the water-world equivalent of the Appalachian Mountains, where Big Coal reigns supreme. Still, the resiliency of nature is surprising. We cut the engine and drift through a pod of dolphins frolicking in the bay – mothers and calves surface beside the boat. I hear the dolphins exhaling as they surface. A few sound like they are coughing – scientists who study dolphins call it "chuffing," and it is not uncommon among dolphins reacting to environmental stress.
Once the blowout is capped for good, an accounting will begin. Steiner, the veteran of the Valdez response, estimates that when all is said and done, less than 10 percent of the oil spilled into the Gulf will be recovered. Lawyers will fight for years over exactly how much oil was spilled, how large the penalties should be, how much economic damage was done. It's easy enough to figure out the lost wages of a shrimper, the decline of tourism at a resort – but how do you put a price tag on hundreds of dead sea turtles or a pod of chuffing dolphins? How do you tally up a bill for the poisoning of an entire ecosystem? How do you track the future pain and suffering – human and animal – caused by exposure to cancer-causing chemicals? BP will spend millions of dollars on the best lawyers in the business, all in an effort to make sure that the answers to such questions, if they ever come, are as small and distant and insignificant as possible.
As for political reforms, every oil spill – like every coal-mine disaster and airline crash – provokes new laws and regulations designed to make sure that this kind of thing never happens again. There will undoubtedly be new laws enacted in the aftermath of BP's spill – raising the liability for oil companies responsible for such catastrophes, ensuring that more cleanup resources are on hand in the event of a blowout, perhaps even putting some of the most pristine and sensitive waters off-limits to drilling. But if that is where it ends, then this will turn out to be an ugly story indeed, just one more chapter in the larger narrative about America's stupid and self-destructive addiction to oil.
"This can be the pivotal moment," says ecologist Carl Safina. "We need to turn this catastrophe into something positive. We need policy changes to prevent this from happening again, and a national energy plan to truly phase us off fossil fuels. Otherwise, the disaster in the Gulf is just a nightmare, with no redeeming qualities."


text:
← The Five Nails – Commentary on the Northern Treasures Accumulation Practice by Tulku Tsultrim Zangpo (Tulku Tsulu)
Dr. Martin J. Boord (Rig-'dzin rdo-rje) →
Tulku Tsulo (Tsultrim Zangpo) (1884-c.1957)
TULKU TSULO aka TSULTRIM ZANGPO (1884-c.1957)*
Tulku Tsulo (སྤྲུལ་སྐུ་ཚུལ་ལོ, sprul sku tshul lo), also known as Tsultrim Zangpo (Tib. ཚུལ་ཁྲིམས་བཟང་པོ་, tshul khrims bzang po)**, one of the greatest Tibetan scholars of the last century, was an important student of Tertön Sogyal Lerab Lingpa, as well as the author of his secret biography and a lineage-holder of his terma teachings. He was also a student of the Third Dodrupchen Jikmé Tenpé Nyima and of Amye Khenpo Damchö Özer of Dodrupchen Monastery. Khenpo Damchö said of him on one occasion, "I am just a dog, but I have a lion for a student." Although it was notoriously difficult to meet Dodrup Jikmé Tenpé Nyima in his later years, Tsulo was able to do so because of his work as a scribe. He copied many texts for Dodrupchen Rinpoche's personal library and used the work as an opportunity to get access to Rinpoche and to receive clarifications.
Tsultrim Zangpo's father was Gonpo Wangyal, lineagholder of the khordong tradition of Nuden Dorje) and his mother was Shyiwam Tso, daughter of Khordong Terchen Nuden Dorje. His main residence was at Shukjung (shugs 'byung) monastery in the Do Valley, which is located about 15 to 20 miles from Dodrupchen Monastery and which belongs to the Northern Treasures (Byang gTer) tradition. He also spent time at Khordong monastery, which was under the care of his younger brother, Gyurme Dorje.
Tulku Tsulo was a monk who upheld the Vinaya, as well as an accomplished tantric adept, and among his writings is a two-volume commentary on Ngari Panchen's Ascertainment of the Three Types of Vows (sDom gSum rNam Nges), as well as several texts on Dzogchen, including an instruction manual (Khrid Yig) for the Gongpa Zangthal, which has been translated into English by Tulku Thondup#, and a commentary on the famous Prayer of Kuntuzangpo. His other writings include a commentary to Padmasambhava's Garland of Views+ and many works related to the tantras of the New Translation tradition.
His unpublished commentary on Jikmé Lingpa's Treasury of Precious Qualities, based on teachings by Dodrupchen Jikmé Tenpé Nyima, was recently discovered in Tibet.
Those who saw him say that he looked statuesque, seated in meditation posture, hardly ever moving, and with an impressive white beard.
He was the root teacher of Khordong Tertrul Chhimed Rigdzin Rinpoche, popularly known as C.R. Lama (1922-2002), as well as Tulku Gyenlo and Zhichen Öntrul, who passed away recently in Tibet.
He had two main reincarnations, Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche of Nango Gonpa Trango and Tulku Longtok or Lungtok.
Zhichen Ontrul Rinpoche recounted to Gyalwang Drukchen Rinpoche[2]:
The day before Tulku Tsultrim Zangpo passed away, there had been a domestic dispute between his niece and his young monks. When he was told of the problem, he felt, "I have been teaching for more than 30 over years and yet my teachings have not helped those people, even my own people are not able to live harmoniously, so there is no point to live on."
Therefore, Tulku Tsultrim Zangpo 'caught' a flu the same evening of the dispute, and he passed away peacefully in meditation posture the following day. After that, he stayed in Tukdam for six weeks, and the wondrous smell of his body permeated equally in about 1 km radius. As soon as he left his meditative state, all the followers requested Zhichen Ontrul Rinpoche to take the responsibility of cremation. On the night of cremation, Zhichen Ontrul Rinpoche dreamt of Tulku Tsultrim Zangpo riding confidently on a white horse in the direction of a high and gigantic spiraling mountain, telling him, "I am leaving for Zangdokpalri to be reunited with Guru Rinpoche. And you will follow my footsteps, but not now."
* The birth year of 1884 is given in Tulku Thondup's Masters of Meditation and Miracles. According to the Khordong website he died at the age of seventy-three. We know that he wrote the secret biography of Tertön Sogyal in 1942.
** There are several ways to transcribe his names: Tshulthrim Zangpo, Tulku Tsurlo, Tulku Tsollo, Tulku Tsorlo, Tulku Tsullo and others. The Tibetan writing in Wylie is Tshul Khrims bZang Po aka Sprul sKu Tshul Lo.
# This translation of the commentary to the Gongpa Zangthal is partly now available here The Five Nails – A Commentary on the Northern Treasures accumulation praxis.
+ The Garland of Views by Padmasambhava was translated by James Low and is available in his book Simply Being: Texts in the Dzogchen Tradition (Antony Rowe Publishing Services, 2010). Also available in French and German.
This author´s books:
The Five Nails – Commentary on the Northern Treasures Accumulation Practice by Tulku Tsultrim Zangpo (Tulku Tsulu)
Kun bZang dGongs Pa Zang Thal – Boundless Vision by Tulku Tsultrim Zangpo (Tulku Tsulo)
Aus dem Handgepäck eines tibetischen Yogi by James Low
This entry was posted in Authors. Bookmark the permalink.


WORK to improve safety on the A538 Wilmslow stretch started today (Monday).
The £1m Altrincham Road project covers a mile and runs from the Moat House Hotel to Nansmoss Lane.
The safety programme includes widening and changes to junctions.
Drivers are warned to expect delays and to find alternative routes whenever possible.


text:
May 2021 – Chairman's Blog
New Bench
The unveiling of the bench in memory of Stan Philips on the village green was a memorable occasion. A number of people, all socially distanced, gathered on the Green for the event and Stan's daughters, Tracey and Rachel, cut the ribbon. Paul Marsh, the organiser of the hugely successful fund-raising, gave thanks to the village for residents' generosity and Vicar Stewart Jones gave a short address and dedicated the bench for the enjoyment of all. A remarkable amount of money was collected for the bench and its location near the play area was very appropriate.
The development of the village green as a leisure area is beginning to take shape and it cannot now be long to wait for the wild flower areas to show signs of growth.
Service of Recognition
There will be a small Service of Recognition on the 9th May at St. John's Church to give thanks for the contribution many residents have made during the pandemic. This will not replace the larger village celebration which it is hoped will take place late summer, August/ September time.
My period of office as Mayor came to an end on April 20th, three weeks sooner than expected. The Government is anxious that public meetings revert to the traditional meeting format and have instructed that virtual meetings by zoom etc should cease at the beginning of May. Because of the numbers involved it was not possible to identify a large enough venue in the Borough where mayor making could take place allowing social distancing rules to be followed and because of this an established Council Meeting already in the diary was chosen for the changeover.
The Mayoress and I took adva ntage of our last weekend in post and visited the village hall to complete the last of our village duties. The clock tower was dedicated to the village and Maggie Linehan was presented with a plaque to commemorate her late husband, Councillor Patrick Linehan's, services to the village.
Patrick was joint founder and Chairman of the Barlaston Community Group, was instrumental in establishing the Barlaston Open Gardens event and was Chairman of the Best Kept Village Committee as well as Chairman of the Village Hall Committee. Patrick was a larger than life character and a great loss to the community.
Renee and I would like to express our appreciation for the support that we have received from Barlaston residents. We were fortunate to have 23 months in office and we really enjoyed the experience.
Gareth Jones


text:
\section{Motivation}

3HWC J1908+063 is one of the brighest, highest-energy gamma-ray sources, with the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory observing emission extending past 200 TeV~\cite{3hwc,lorentz,HECatalog}.

\begin{figure*}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{J1908-spectraWithHardening.png}
\caption{The HAWC spectrum of 3HWC J1908+063, with the last few energy bins subdivided into smaller bins of equal width to more clearly see the spectral hardening feature.}.
\label{fig:j1908}
\end{figure*}

As discussed in ~\cite{j1908ICRC}, this source appears to show hints of spectral hardening above $\sim$ 75 TeV. This effect can be seen more clearly when the last three quarter-decade log-energy bins typically used by HAWC (as defined in ~\cite{Crab}) are subdivided into six smaller bins of equal width in log-energy space.  In the four significantly detected (TS $>$ 4.0) bins, the flux points appear roughly flat in E$^{2}$/dNdE space, deviating from the best-fit log-parabola spectrum.

This effect is not presently significant. The last two flux points are a 1.5$\sigma$ and a 1.8$\sigma$ deviation from the best-fit line, respectively. Adding those two values in quadrature, the total significance is ~$\sim$2.3$\sigma$.  However, if shown to be significant with more data, this feature is potentially interesting as it may indicate that there are multiple populations of particles contributing to the TeV gamma ray emission. This shape is difficult to fit with single-population models. A hard spectrum at the highest energies could be indicative of hadronic emission. Searches for spectral hardening around 100 TeV could aid in identifying PeVatron candidates.

HAWC is an extensive air shower array located at an altitude of 4100 meters in Puebla, Mexico. Its energy range extends past 100 TeV, and it has a wide field-of-view ($\sim$2 sr) that makes it a good instrument for performing surveys. Here, we search through HAWC's third catalog of sources (\cite{3hwc}, hereafter referred to as the ``3HWC catalog") to see if this spectral hardening feature is widespread among TeV gamma ray sources.

\section{Method}

We downselect 65 sources reported in the 3HWC catalog to choose intriguing candidates for spectral hardening.  Sources must have a high enough significance that flux points can be obtained across the entire energy range. We impose a TS value of 50.

The sources should also have an energy range that extends past 56 TeV. Table 2 of reference ~\cite{3hwc} contains the energy interval that is expected to contain 75$\%$ of a source's significance. This is not a perfect criterion; for example it is well-known that the Crab Nebula emits above 100 TeV~\cite{Crab} but it is removed by this cut because most of its significance comes from lower energy bins. Therefore, we cross-reference the list with HAWC's catalog of sources emitting above 56 TeV~\cite{HECatalog} and add in any sources that are missing. In practice, this only adds the Crab Nebula back into the list, as the rest of the highest-energy sources are selected using the first cut. Table \ref{tab:sources} shows the 19 sources of interest.

\begin{table*}
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.15}
\begin{center}

 \begin{tabular}{ | c | c | c | c | c |}
 \hline
 Source name & RA ($^{\circ}$) & Dec ($^{\circ}$) & TS & Energy range (TeV) \\
  \hline
  3HWC J0534+220 (Crab Nebula) & 83.63 & 22.01 & 35736.5 & 1.6 - 37.4 \\
  3HWC J0634+180 (Geminga region) & 98.75 & 18.05 & 36.2 & 3.7 - 102.0 \\
  3HWC J1809-190 & 272.46 & -19.04 & 264.8 & 7.7 - 177.3 \\
  3HWC J1813-125 & 273.34 & -12.52 & 51.9 & 2.6 - 69.2 \\
  3HWC J1813-174 & 273.43 & -17.47 & 416.0 & 7.7 - 174.7 \\
  3HWC J1819-150 & 274.79 & -15.09 & 93.8 & 2.2 -62.5 \\
  3HWC J1825-134 & 276.46 & -13.4 & 2212.5 & 9.2 - 183.4 \\
  3HWC J1831-095 & 277.87 & -9.59 & 237.7 & 4.2 - 106.7 \\
  3HWC J1837-066 & 279.40 & -6.62 & 1542.7 & 2.2 - 57.3 \\
  3HWC J1843-034 & 280.99 & -3.47 & 876.6 & 6.2 - 142.6 \\
  3HWC J1849+001 & 282.35 & 0.15 & 427.5 & 9.9 - 195.3 \\
  3HWC J1908+063 & 287.05 & 6.39 & 1320.9 & 8.9 - 182.7 \\
  3HWC J1922+140 & 290.70 & 14.09 & 176.6 & 2.1 - 60.0 \\
  3HWC J1928+178 & 292.10 & 17.82 & 216.7 & 5.9 - 140.5 \\
  3HWC J1951+293 & 297.99 & 29.40 & 68.7 & 4.0 - 108.6 \\
  3HWC J2006+340 & 301.73 & 34.00 & 67.4 & 3.3 - 83.5 \\
  3HWC J2019+367 & 304.94 & 36.80 & 1227.5 & 11.7 - 211.7 \\
  3HWC 2031+415 (Cygnus Cocoon region) & 307.93 & 41.51 & 556.9 & 6.3 - 147.8 \\
  3HWC J2227+610 & 336.96 & 61.05 & 52.5 & 14.3 - 292.7 \\
  \hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{The sources selected for the analysis. Adapted from ~\cite{3hwc}. TS refers to the test statistic from the likelihood fit. The energy range is the interval containing 75$\%$ of the source's significance.}\label{tab:sources}
\end{center}
\end{table*}

The procedure to search for spectral hardening is as follows: first, each region is fit using HAWC's nominal energy bins (quarter-decade widths in log-energy space) to determine the best spectral shape and morphology. The ``ground parameter" energy estimator is used~\cite{Crab}.  The free parameters in the spectral and morphological models are simultaneously fit via a likelihood fit. The HAL (HAWC Accelerated Likelihood)\footnote{\url{https://github.com/threeML/hawc_hal}} plugin to the 3ML (Multi-mission Maximum Likelihood) framework~\cite{threeml} is used. The definitions of the morphological and spectral shapes are contained in the \textit{astromodels}\footnote{\url{https://github.com/threeML/astromodels}} software package.  Three different spectral shapes are considered: a power-law, a power-law with an exponential cutoff, and a log-parabola. The Bayesian information criterion for each likelihood fit are then compared to determine which spectral shape provides the best fit to the data. Spectral points are then  obtained using the procedure detailed in ~\cite{Crab}.

Some of the sources from Table \ref{tab:sources} have been the subject of dedicated follow-up papers by the HAWC Collaboration. For those sources, we deviate from the procedure above. If the source has previously been studied more in depth, the spectrum and morphology from the dedicated analysis is used. For example, 3HWC J2031+415 has been resolved into multiple sources. As discussed in ~\cite{Cocoon}, this region actually consists of a large extended source (the Cygnus cocoon) along with a high-energy pulsar. We simply use the reported best-fit spectral shapes and morphology from ~\cite{Cocoon}.

When performing the fits, 3HWC sources within 2.5 degrees of the source of interest are included in the model. This reduces contamination from nearby sources.

After the best spectral shape and morphology are determined, each source is fit again. The last three quarter-decade log-energy bins, corresponding to energies above 56 TeV, are subdivided into six smaller bins of equal length. The boundaries of each bin are reported in Table \ref{tab:energies}.  Sub-dividing the highest energy bins allows for a better energy resolution and makes it easier to see if spectral hardening is present.

\begin{table*}
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.15}
\begin{center}

 \begin{tabular}{ | c | c | c | }
 \hline
 Bin name & $E_l$ (TeV) & $E_h$ (TeV) \\
  \hline
  a & 0.316 & 0.562 \\
  b & 0.562 & 1.00 \\
  c & 1.00 & 1.78 \\
  d & 1.78 & 3.16 \\
  e & 3.16 & 5.62 \\
  f & 5.62 & 10.0 \\
  g & 10.0 & 17.8 \\
  h & 17.8 & 31.6 \\
  i & 31.6 & 56.2 \\
  j$_1$ & 56.2 & 75.0 \\
  j$_2$ & 75.0 & 100 \\
  k$_1$ & 100 & 133 \\
  k$_2$ & 133 & 177 \\
  l$_1$ & 177 & 234 \\
  l$_2$ & 234 & 316 \\
  \hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{The energy bin boundaries for the flux points reported in Section 3. $E_l$ and $E_h$ are the low and high values, respectively. They are different from the typical HAWC energy bins; bins above 56 TeV are narrower to allow for better energy resolution when searching for spectral hardening. This analysis is restricted to reconstructed energies above 1 TeV, so bins $a$ and $b$ are not used. }\label{tab:energies}
\end{center}
\end{table*}

We then search for hints of spectral hardening by calculating how much the flux points deviate from the best-fit spectrum.

\section{Selected results}

Selected results are shown in Figures \ref{fig:crab} through \ref{fig:cocoon}.

\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=0.37\textwidth]{Crab-3hwcSigMap.png}
\includegraphics[width=0.63\textwidth]{Crab-spectralHardening.png}
\caption{Left: HAWC significance map of the region around 3HWC J0534+220, the Crab Nebula. Right: The spectrum of the Crab Nebula. No spectral hardening is observed.}
\label{fig:crab}
\end{figure*}

Figure \ref{fig:crab} shows the significance map and spectrum of the Crab Nebula. This source is commonly used as a standard candle in gamma-ray astrophysics. No evidence of spectral hardening is observed. The last two flux points have very low TS values and the uncertainties are vey large. The rest of the flux points lie right along the best-fit log-parabola line. This shows that the feature observed in 3HWC J1908+063 is likely not an instrumental effect related to mis-modeling the effective area of the HAWC detector at the highest energies.

\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=0.37\textwidth]{J1809-3hwcSigMap.png}
\includegraphics[width=0.63\textwidth]{J1809-spectralHardening.png}
\caption{Left: HAWC significance map of the region around 3HWC J1809-190. Right: The spectrum of 3HWC J1809-190}
\label{fig:j1809}
\end{figure*}

The other two sources show some of the more promising candidates for spectral hardening.

Figure \ref{fig:j1809} shows the significance map of the 3HWC J1809-190/3HWC J1813-174 region. Due to the proximity of these sources to each other, they are fit simultaneously. The figure of 3HWC J1809-190 is also shown. The source is not significantly detected in the last bin; the TS value is 0.30. This explains why the uncertainty on that flux point is so high.  The two bins before that, bins m and n, have TS values of 9.6 and 5.6, respectively. Each of these flux points deviate from the best-fit log-parabola line by approximately 1$\sigma$. Adding these two points in quadrature, the total amount of the deviation is approximately 1.4$\sigma$.

\begin{figure*}
\includegraphics[width=0.37\textwidth]{Cocoon-3hwcSigMap.png}
\includegraphics[width=0.63\textwidth]{Cocoon-spectralHardening.png}
\caption{Left: HAWC significance map of the region around 3HWC J2031+415. Right: The spectrum of the Cygnus Cocoon, which is a large, angularly extended superbubble surrounding a region of massive star formation and is contained in the region. }
\label{fig:cocoon}
\end{figure*}

Figure \ref{fig:cocoon} shows the significance map around the 3HWC J2031+415 region, along with the flux points for the Cygnus Cocoon source. By eye, it looks like the spectrum may be flattening out, which a slight deviation from the best-fit powerlaw spectrum. The last two flux points have TS values of 5.7 and 3.4, respectively, and deviate from the best-fit spectrum by 1.4$\sigma$ and 1.1$\sigma$, respectively. This gives a total deviation of 1.8$\sigma$.

\section{Conclusions}

As discussed in ~\cite{j1908ICRC}, the spectrum of 3HWC J1908+063 may exhibit spectral hardening at the highest energies. The deviation from the best-fit spectrum is approximately 2.3$\sigma$. This is potentially interesting as it could aid in determining the origins of the emission.

Here, we search through sources in the 3HWC catalog to see if indiciations of spectral hardening are widespread. Many of these sources are much dimmer than 3HWC J1908+063. No significant spectral hardening is observed. The most significant sources exhibit deviations from their best-fit spectra of less than 2$\sigma$.

Upgraded HAWC reconstruction algorithms, especially those that provide for better gamma/hadron separation and/or energy resolution, could aid in determining whether spectral hardening is present. A re-analysis with data including HAWC's recently completed outrigger array could be particularly informative. Systematic uncertainties, both related to mis-modeling of the detector and due to potential source confusion, need to be investigated in-depth. This work is in progress.

\acknowledgments

We acknowledge the support from: the US National Science Foundation (NSF); the US Department of Energy Office of High-Energy Physics; the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program of Los Alamos National Laboratory; Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnolog\'ia (CONACyT), M\'exico, grants 271051, 232656, 260378, 179588, 254964, 258865, 243290, 132197, A1-S-46288, A1-S-22784, c\'atedras 873, 1563, 341, 323, Red HAWC, M\'exico; DGAPA-UNAM grants IG101320, IN111716-3, IN111419, IA102019, IN110621, IN110521; VIEP-BUAP; PIFI 2012, 2013, PROFOCIE 2014, 2015; the University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation; the Institute of Geophysics, Planetary Physics, and Signatures at Los Alamos National Laboratory; Polish Science Centre grant, DEC-2017/27/B/ST9/02272; Coordinaci\'on de la Investigaci\'on Cient\'ifica de la Universidad Michoacana; Royal Society - Newton Advanced Fellowship 180385; Generalitat Valenciana, grant CIDEGENT/2018/034; Chulalongkorn University's CUniverse (CUAASC) grant; Coordinaci\'on General Acad\'emica e Innovaci\'on (CGAI-UdeG), PRODEP-SEP UDG-CA-499; Institute of Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR), University of Tokyo, H.F. acknowledges support by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002. We also acknowledge the significant contributions over many years of Stefan Westerhoff, Gaurang Yodh and Arnulfo Zepeda Dominguez, all deceased members of the HAWC collaboration. Thanks to Scott Delay, Luciano D\'iaz and Eduardo Murrieta for technical support.

\bibliographystyle{JHEP}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Fayette County News
Complete FCN PDF
Peachtree City>
Slain pets were in good health, police say
Post author:Fayette News
Post category:Crime / News / Peachtree City / Top Stories
When 72-year-old Peachtree City resident Richard McAllister took his four pet dogs one-by-one into his garage and killed them, he reportedly told police he could no longer care for the animals and thus put them down.
According to Peachtree City Police reports, that incident took place on Jan. 19 at McAllister's home on Brander Pass. Since then, the arrest warrants used to incarcerate McAllister have been published into the public record, and they reveal details that have some people scratching their heads as to McAllister's motives for what he is accused of doing.
Police say McAllister has admitted to shooting each of the dogs in the head with a .22-caliber pistol and then dumping their bodies into a garbage can. According to the warrants (one for each dog), McAllister killed a 10-year-old Husky, a nine-year-old Yorkshire Terrier, a five-year-old Yorkshire Terrier, and a five-year-old Shih Tzu.
In the narrative of each of the warrants, the police officer wrote, "The canine was not suffering in any known pain at the time of the incident."
Fayette County Animal Control Director Rani Rathburn noted that all of the dogs were popular breeds for adoption, and she said the younger ones would have probably been placed in homes rather quickly. If not being able to afford the food and medical care had been a problem, she said that, too, can usually be sorted out through donations and discounts available through local humane societies.
McAllister was charged with four counts of Cruelty to Animals, but police have not said much about what, if any, explanation McAllister gave for killing the dogs. A phone number listed for McAllister's address has been disconnected.
A woman listed as a witness on each of the four warrants, and whose last name is also McAllister, declined to comment when reached by telephone.
PTC approves bowling center
Tax Commissioner, LifeLink team up to save lives
BOE offers first look at 2021 budget
Copyright 2020 The Fayette County News. All Rights Reserved.


We have a small range of stemless glassware for those wishing to stand out from the rest. These are popular at establishments that like to differentiate themselves from the norm. Also commonly purchased by company that operate on boats, as the lower centre of gravity helps prevent breakages. These can also be purchased for home use through our website.


Via Email, SMS, DM or Call received Inquiries for curated Gift-Sets. Ready for delivery (national & international) or "self pick up" IN STORE.
Whenever you need a Gift, Gift-Set, Hamper, Goodie Bag on short or long notice - get in touch with me.
I make it easy for you and will propose back to you via SMS, Email, DM suggestions according to your budget and preferences. If you then like to go ahead with the order you'll get a "dummy placeholder" like shown below to process the payment.
Either Pick Up from the store or national / international delivery available.
Custom Box | "Home Essentials" | Ben F.
Custom Order | J. R-H.


~ Art Inside ~ "On Artist's Journey"
Saturday & Sunday - June 18 & 19, 2016.
and visitors who became new friends and invitations to dinner.
A theatre weekend was good medicine!
stayed at in the past. And, finally did get a room at The Downtown Cleveland Westin Hotel.
coming for another visit. And, so that is exactly what I did for this recent get away.
the red carpet had been rolled out.
floor is the Club Lounge - where pre theatre foods and drinks were available to us.
the PlayHouse Square complex never fails to leave me in awe.
after hours for a dinner menu - we were allowed to order what ever we desired.
are attending theatre and art and cultural events.
"The Art Of Never Knowing ~ One Artist's Journey"
~ The Art Of Not Knowing"
today's "not knowing" came as an absolute surprise. A very happy surprise!
how a particular Blog made a positive difference in their day.
An unplanned package - what surprise could it hold? You just never know!!
person. We are Facebook friends; But. . . . . I have not seen her for a good two years.
that "reads my posts regularly and enjoys them greatly".
that she has enjoyed so much, herself. I am touched beyond words.
So, I say, "you just never know............"
"Always believe that something beautiful is about to happen"
the egg white crepe with sundried tomato tapenade. Excellent and huge.
to use local products whenever possible.
Her mobile "pop up" kitchen is really quite a bohemian idea & as the saying goes. . .
If you want it, she can create it.
right around the counter and visit while I savored a wonderful crepe.
Please make a point, REALLY, of enjoying her French crepes.
" Day Of Art ~ One Artist's Journey"
since I wrote my last Blog. A lot of water over the dam since then.
is a surprise in itself!
piece of art that was going to a show.
art, I forgot to take a photograph.
Of The Month" in August. And, I gladly accepted the invitation.
From there I was headed to the Gallery at Cravings in downtown Sharon, Pa..
likeness and spirit of the person who she has painted.
happy - her work is contagious with inspiration.
A Little Old ~ And New In Process ~ "One Artist's Journey"
A metamorphosis of sorts is taking place in my Studio, today.
I am intoxicated with my world.
the studio just to let myself be with the flow of creativity.
looking around, walking to the different stations there in . . . .
and blocked. I feel excited - but, not sure where to place it.
~ One Random Expression ~ "One Artist's Journey"
I made a very enjoyable visit to Gallery 29 Of Sharon; 150 East State Street.
to be a part of a group of such very talented people.
on display - ranging from sculptures, mixed media and photography.
that I have had as a part of an exhibit.


June 11 was a very exciting day for Corsica – it was Inauguration Day for the first fab lab there, Fab Lab Ajaccio. This endeavor is part of Corsica's innovation vision for the future, and the first public and private partnership fab lab in France.
Fab Lab Ajaccio opened its doors to the public on Tuesday, June 16. It will offer a range of workshops and open access for Ajaccio youth, DIY and businesses this summer.
Fab Lab Ajaccio brings together several public and private partners: Le Centre du Sport et de la Jeunesse de Corse (CSJC); Le Crédit Agricole de la Corse and its Fondation, A Fundazione; CampusPlex; and Fab Lab Connect.
A second fab lab in Corsica is expected to open in September at Corte University.
For the latest developments with Fab Lab Ajaccio, Follow it on Twitter and Like it on Facebook.


text:
Heterocampa athereo är en fjärilsart som beskrevs av Harris 1869. Heterocampa athereo ingår i släktet Heterocampa och familjen tandspinnare. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Källor

Tandspinnare
athereo