EDMONTON - Less than two weeks after Alberta enacted legally enforceable pollution limits for its oilsands region, industry figures already suggest they will soon be breached by emissions of two major gases causing acid rain.
Regulatory documents for Shell's proposed Jackpine mine expansion say annual levels of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide are likely to push past limits contained in the province's Lower Athabasca Regional Plan if all currently planned developments proceed.
The documents, filed late last week, also provide what may be the clearest picture yet of what impact two decades of development have had on northeastern Alberta.
For Mitt Romney’s campaign, the outlook in the battleground states is even worse than the national polls.
According to a GOP source with access to private polling being done by independent Republican groups (who are spending a lot of money tracking public opinion in the battleground states), Romney is in trouble in two must-win states:
Ohio: Romney down 5 percent.
Virginia: Romney down 4 percent.
Most troubling for Romney: the Ohio trend has been consistent for several weeks and is not a "sugar high” resulting from the Democratic convention.
These internal state-by-state tracking polls show some positive signs for Romney, but nowhere near enough to compensate for Ohio and Virginia. The good news:
In Wisconsin, which Obama won by 14 points, Romney is only down 2 percent, putting the state within reach.
In Nevada, which Obama won by almost 13 points, the race
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Unlike the Republican platform, which has mostly been ignored outside of the abortion issue, the Paul Ryan budget is the core document of the 2012 campaign. It is the most explicit expression of the Republican agenda, endorsed by the party’s presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, and backed by decisive majorities of House and Senate Republicans.
That much is known. What people have not been talking about enough is that the Ryan budget contains an $897 billion sinkhole: massive but unexplained cuts in such discretionary domestic programs as education, food and drug inspection, workplace safety, environmental protection and law enforcement.
The question at the core of America’s upcoming election isn’t merely whose story most voting Americans believe to be true – Mitt Romney’s claim that the economy is in a stall and Obama’s policies haven’t worked, or Barack Obama’s that it’s slowly mending and his approach is working.
If that were all there was to it, last Friday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the economy added only 96,000 jobs in August – below what’s needed merely to keep up with the growth in the number of eligible workers — would seem to bolster Romney’s claim.
But, of course, congressional Republicans have never even given Obama a chance to try his approach. They’ve blocked everything he’s tried to do – including his proposed Jobs Act that would help state and local governments replace many of the teachers, police officers, social workers, and fire fighters they’ve had to let go over the last several years.
Sometimes life in a homeless shelter is more than a 14-year-old can handle.
Francheska Luciano, who is among a growing number of homeless children in the city, said living in a shelter was "like living in hell.”
"I’m tired of this,” she said Friday while sitting on a curb outside a shelter intake center in the Bronx with her mother and little sisters. "It’s a nightmare every day.”
The number of children in the city’s shelters hit 19,000 last week, the most recent city data available show.
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