NEW RULES-BIG CHANGES IN FINANCIAL WORLD

Central Coast growers, environmentalists spar over proposed water quality rules By Donna Jones djones@santacruzsentinel.com Updated: 07/09/2010 08:42:50 PM PDT

WATSONVILLE — Proposed rules to clean up Central Coast waters could damage agriculture and put thousands of farmworkers out of work, according to growers.But environmentalists say nitrate from fertilizers and pesticides is poisoning the region's water supplies, and without more regulation, public health is at risk.On Thursday, the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Review Board heard hours of testimony from both sides. Nearly 200 people packed the City Council chamber to participate in the discussion.The board was to decide on new rules designed to protect drinking water supplies and aquatic habitat from agricultural runoff this month, but delayed a vote until February to give opposing sides time to hash out their differences.Everybody is in favor of clean water, said Julie Engell, a Monterey County environmentalist.The question is, what are we willing to do about it?
The water quality board staff proposes replacing voluntary programs with mandates to reduce, eliminate or treat agricultural runoff, to monitor individual farming operations, and to protect existing riparian buffers around crops or create new ones to act as natural filters.Growers say in the past two decades they've taken steps to reduce pollution. Strawberry growers, for instance, have moved away from water sprinklers to drip irrigation, which allows them to use less water and fertilizer since they can concentrate both on the plant's roots.But, they say, they're being asked to clean up legacy nitrates left over from earlier generations that weren't as sparing with water and fertilizer.I'm not doing the things my grandfather used to do,said Erik Jertberg, a Pajaro Valley strawberry grower.Nevertheless, Jertberg said though the amount is much smaller than in the past, the salts from fertilizers build up near the roots, and he worries the new rules will mean he won't be able to flush them farther away to protect the plants.This will stop strawberry production on the Central Coast,Jertberg said.Agricultural groups want more flexibility in the rules. A one-size-fits-all scheme won't work given diverse crops, operations and conditions on the ground, they said.

Their proposal calls for farm operations to have plans in place to protect water quality and confidential and voluntary monitoring designed to guide growers rather than penalize them.Environmentalists support the rules proposed by the board's staff. If anything, some would like to see them more stringent.Dipti Bhatragar, the Northern California program director for the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, told the board of the recent discovery of a contaminated well serving a farm labor camp in Pescadero.According to a Bay Area News Group article, a San Mateo County health official said nitrates in the Pescadero water were as high as 290 milligrams per liter, more than six times the federal standard.These are the people most vulnerable to contamination from nitrates,Bhatragar told the board.When you make your decision, I hope you will consider them.

Palestinian village to be encircled by barrier By KARIN LAUB, Associated Press Writer - JULY 10,10

WALAJEH, West Bank – Israel has started construction on a new section of its West Bank separation barrier that Palestinian residents say could sound a death knell for their hamlet.The barrier, running much of the length of the West Bank, has already disrupted lives in many Palestinian towns and villages in its path. But it threatens to outright smother Walajeh: The community of about 2,000 on the southwest edge of Jerusalem is to be completely encircled by a fence cutting it off from most of its open land, according to an Israeli Defense Ministry map.Walajeh old-timers are determined to stay, but doubt their children will feel the same way.We will cling to the village by our teeth,said Adel Atrash, a village council member.But we don't know how the next generation will look at things. Maybe they won't be able to live with all the difficulties and decide to leave.Israel began building the barrier in 2002, saying it would be a temporary bulwark against Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen who have killed hundreds of Israelis. However, the barrier's zigzag through the West Bank brought allegations that Israel is unilaterally drawing a border and grabbing land by scooping up dozens of Jewish settlements.Six years ago Friday, the International Court of Justice said in a nonbinding ruling that the barrier's path through occupied territory violates international law and that Israel should tear down what it has built.

Israel rejected the decision, saying the barrier is crucial for keeping Israelis safe, and denies it is drawing a border.In future negotiations (on Palestinian statehood), the route of the security barrier will not constitute a political factor,Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said.Construction of the barrier continues as Israel and the Palestinians hold indirect negotiations the U.S. hopes will eventually lead to face-to-face talks on a peace treaty establishing a Palestinian state. But the Palestinians have refused direct negotiations without a complete freeze on settlement building.Today, the barrier, almost two-thirds complete, runs for more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) through the West Bank and east Jerusalem, war-captured territories claimed by the Palestinians for a state. Once finished, the barrier would put 9.4 percent of the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, on the Israeli side, along with 85 percent of half a million Israeli settlers, according to a U.N. report.The barrier — walls of cement slabs in urban areas and wire fences in the countryside — has made it harder for tens of thousands of Palestinians to reach farm land, schools and medical care.Those who live in the seam zone between Israel and the barrier or have farm land there need special permits they can't always obtain and cross through gates that aren't always open, according to the U.N. report, issued on the anniversary of the world court ruling.

Walajeh's fate appears to be sealed because it is virtually surrounded by Israeli settlements.The barrier will make a large dip into the West Bank to keep the settlements, including Har Gilo and the Gush Etzion bloc, on the Israeli side. Within that pocket, an extra loop of barrier is to surround Walajeh on three sides, with a fenced settler road to Har Gilo closing off the fourth side, according to the Defense Ministry map of the projected route.Moreover, the loop runs tightly around Walajeh's built-up area, penning it within less than a square mile and isolating it from almost all its farmlands. Of 36 Palestinian villages that are or will be caught in the seam zone,none are as closely encircled as Walajeh, said Ray Dolphin, a U.N. barrier expert in Jerusalem.Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman Shlomo Dror said Friday he could not comment on the details of construction around Walajeh, but noted the route withstood a challenge in an Israeli court four years ago.The Israeli military would not comment on how villagers are to get in and out of their enclave. Israel has raised the possibility of an access road with a checkpoint, Atrash said, as well as gates so farmers could reach their lands. Residents are skeptical, considering the difficulties farmers elsewhere have had.In recent weeks, bulldozers began leveling land and uprooting trees near Walajeh in the run-up to construction.

Ahmed Barghouti, 63, who lives close to the fence's path, says he lost 88 olive trees last month and now fears for a nearby family burial plot. The village's lawyer, Ghiath Nasser, says he won a temporary order to stop work on that section until Israel's Supreme Court decides what should be done with the graves of Barghouti's parents and grandmother.The house of a neighbor, Omar Hajajla, lies just outside Walajeh's barrier loop. Hajajla said Israeli officials last week informed him his home would be surrounded by its own electric fence.This is like putting my entire family in jail,the father of three young boys said. My children need to cross four gates to go school. We don't know how it will work out, but I'm sure it will be hell for my entire family.The barrier is just the latest blow for Walajeh, which has lost most of its land to Israel in decades of conflict. Israeli forces took control of the village in the 1948 Mideast War, and residents fled, some resettling on parts of its lands that ended up in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank.After 1967, Israel expanded east Jerusalem's boundaries and absorbed half of Walajeh. But residents were still classified as West Bankers, not Jerusalemites, limiting their rights and freedom of movement.Since then, Walajeh has lost more acres to expanding settlements and roads, said Matteo Benatti, a U.N. official. From its pre-1948 size of 4,400 acres, Walajeh now has around 1,100 acres, nearly half of which will be cut off by the barrier if built as projected, he said.

Plans have been floated to build more homes for Israeli settlers in the area. In November, Israel's government gave preliminary approval to expand the nearby east Jerusalem's Gilo settlement. Private developers propose building apartments for Israelis on the lands surrounding Walajeh and have been lobbying to include the village on the Israeli side of the barrier, so far to no avail. Dror, the Defense Ministry spokesman, said he did not believe the developers would get their plan approved.Also, more than two dozen houses in Walajeh have been demolished over the years and 41 out of about 200 remaining homes face Israeli demolition orders on grounds they were built without permits, said Meir Margalit, a Jerusalem city council member. Margalit, who supports the village, says permits are impossible to obtain.Walajeh faces an uphill battle for survival, said Margalit. In any scenario, my feeling is that Walajeh will disappear.Associated Press writer Dalia Nammari in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.

New rules, big changes coming for financial world By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer - JULY 10,10

WASHINGTON – Big changes are in store for the financial world from a government crackdown more than a year in the making. Democratic leaders in the Senate are trying to secure the final votes needed to pass legislation this coming week that would impose the most sweeping rules on banks and Wall Street since the Great Depression.The financial industry and consumers already are anticipating — in some cases bracing for — the impact.Banks might see their bottom lines suffer. Lenders will have to disclose more information. Borrowers will have to prove their ability to repay. The masters of high finance will find it harder to sidestep regulations. Government watchdogs will be under orders to look more suspiciously at risky behavior.Not all the changes will occur overnight once Congress gets the legislation to President Barack Obama. Throughout the 2,300-page bill, federal monitors are given one to two years to write the new rules of the road for Wall Street. In some instances, the timing isn't even specified.Diana Farrell, deputy director of the White House's National Economic Council, says some adjustments already are under way as big banks re-examine their trading business and prepare for a new oversight system that will require them to write their own funeral plans in the event of failure.

There is some immediate impact,said Scott Talbott, senior vice president at the Financial Services Roundtable, an industry group representing some of the bigger banks in the United States. But it will take about two years before the full impact is felt, before the uncertainty starts to dwindle.Overall,said Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America, starting with the consumer regulations, this is landmark legislation.Votes on the bill have broken along highly partisan lines. The House passed it June 30 with only three Republicans voting in support.It needs 60 votes in the Senate. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., delayed a final Senate vote until after the July Fourth holiday because of the death of Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and hesitation from three Republicans who previously had supported the legislation. One of those Republicans, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, has since announced her endorsement.The other two Republicans — Sens. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe of Maine — said they wanted to study the bill over the holiday break. Both have indicated the bill is more to their liking after House and Senate negotiators dropped a plan to impose a $19 billion tax on large banks and hedge funds to pay for the bill.Also, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who had voted against a Senate version of the legislation in May, has said she will now vote for the bill.But a fourth Republican who supported the Senate version — Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa — has reservations about the alternative financing mechanism negotiated by Senate and House Democrats and the White House. The new method of covering the cost of the bill would use $11 billion generated by ending the unpopular Troubled Asset Relief Program — the $700 billion bank bailout created in the fall of 2008 at the height of the financial scare. Democrats also agreed to increase premium rates paid by commercial banks to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to insure bank deposits.Grassley's spokeswoman, Jill Kozeny, said the senator is concerned using the FDIC fees as a credit to the FDIC and as an offset, and prefers that the remaining bailout money help pay down the debt.

That leaves little room for error in the vote counting. Without Grassley and with the timing of seating a replacement for Byrd still uncertain, Cantwell, Collins, Snowe and Brown would give the bill exactly the 60 votes needed to overcome potentially fatal procedural delays.The finished legislation hews closely to the plan that Obama's administration released in June 2009.That's been one of the most pleasant surprises of this process,Farrell said in an interview.In some instances, the final bill is even tougher. The administration and Democrats in Congress squabbled over details on capital standards for banks and the breadth of restrictions on their derivatives business. Derivatives are financial instruments whose values change based on the price of some underlying investment. They were used for speculation, fueling the financial crisis.The most symbolic and high-profile defeat for the president was an exception in the bill carved out for auto dealers, who won't fall under the supervision of a new consumer protection bureau. Obama had looked upon consumer protections for home and auto buyers as features that would sell the bill to the public, but auto dealers proved to be a tough lobbying and political foe, pressing their case with lawmakers that they merely assembled loans and didn't administer them. While Obama would have preferred an earlier conclusion for the bill, its passage less than four months from the general election is as good as it can get politically.The partisan lines will lead Democrats to cast Republicans as the party of Wall Street, exploiting a populist, anti-big bank sentiment among voters. Republicans will portray it as big government overreach.The legislation is a blend of specific prescriptive remedies that regulators must undertake and broader regulatory guidance.For example, it spells out what the Federal Reserve must take into account in setting new limits on the fees that banks charge merchants who accept debit cards.At the same time, it gives regulators leeway in such areas as the definition of a commercial user of complex derivatives — typically large manufacturers and industries such as airlines that use derivatives as hedges against market fluctuations. Regulators also would decide how much money those users should put up to cover their bets.The bill directs regulators and other government agencies to undertake more than 60 studies that will determine if or how new rules will be put into place. Online: White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/wallstreetreform
House Financial Services Committee: http://tinyurl.com/37e65h8
Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee: http://banking.senate.gov/public/ Financial Services Roundtable: http://www.fsround.org/ Consumer Federation of America: http://www.consumerfed.org/

If it's June it must be warm, wet and windy By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer – Fri Jul 9, 1:27 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Warm, wet and windy! That was June, depending on where you lived in the United States.The month was exceptionally hot in the South and East, wetter than normal across a northern tier of states and may have had the second most tornadoes of any June on record, the National Climatic Data Center reported Friday.Nationally averaged, June was warmer than normal, a pattern that has been continuing in recent years as greenhouse warming caused by industrial and other emissions increases. June global climate data were not yet available.But the climate center said it was the hottest June on record for New Jersey, Delaware and North Carolina, as a high pressure area directed hot, sunny weather over the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.It was the second hottest June on record in Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, the agency added.In the contiguous 48 states only Washington and Oregon were cooler than normal, and both were also wetter than unusual.That was thanks to conditions in the Pacific Northwest which directed storms across the northern and central states, bringing wetter than normal conditions.It was the wettest June on record for Michigan and near-record rainfall fell in Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska.In addition, the federal Storm Prediction Center said there were 387 preliminary tornado reports during June.If confirmed, this will be the second most active June on record — behind 1992.The center said there were 67 preliminary tornado reports in Minnesota, topping the previous record of 35 tornadoes during June 2005.The climate and storm centers are both agencies of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Online: http://www.noaa.gov

Weekend total solar eclipse visible to lucky few By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer –Fri Jul 9, 12:23 pm ET

LOS ANGELES – A total eclipse of the sun occurs Sunday, but don't be so quick to take out your special viewing glasses.Unlike recent solar eclipses, this year's complete blotting out of the sun will be visible only in a narrow slice of the Southern Hemisphere.The spectacle begins at sunrise some 1,200 miles northeast of New Zealand. The moon's shadow will sweep across the South Pacific, darkening skies over the Cook Islands, Easter Island and parts of southern Chile and Argentina.The time of greatest eclipse will occur over open water, lasting 5 minutes and 20 seconds.Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff recently traveled to remote Easter Island with a small group of students to observe what would be his 51st eclipse. They planned to set up telescopes to image the sun's glowing corona — the usually invisible outer atmosphere of the sun — which appears as a pearly white crown during an eclipse.I am sad that so few people will be able to view this year's eclipse since it doesn't pass over major cities, Pasachoff said in an e-mail.A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the sun and Earth. The moon blocks the light from the sun and casts a shadow on Earth.Last year's total solar eclipse — the longest one of the 21st century — fell over a wide swath of Asia, but clouds and drizzle in some places prevented some revelers from getting the full experience. The key thing is to have good weather,Pasachoff said.

Some eclipse chasers who can't view the exotic sun show at home joined tours. Fifty people left on the Fourth of July for a nine-day trip to the South Pacific. The tour was led by the Planetary Society, a space advocacy group.Tourists island-hopped around Tahiti, the French Polynesian island of Moorea and will head to the Anaa atoll, where they will wake up early to view the eclipse expected to last three minutes. The price? $4,995 a person, not including airfare.Scientists recommend that people wear special viewing glasses during a total solar eclipse and avoid looking directly with the naked eye.The next total solar eclipse will occur in November 2012 and will be visible from northern Australia and the South Pacific.Online:
NASA eclipse page: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/solar.html

Gulf oil spill panel to look at root causes By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer – Fri Jul 9, 1:08 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The new presidential oil spill commission will focus on how safety, government oversight and the ability to clean up spills haven't kept up with advances in drilling technology, the panel's leaders say.The commission will also dig into what it calls the root causes of the April 20 BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, looking deeper than just equipment failures.Why were some of the decisions made with respect to both regulation and to immediate response? asked panel co-chairman William Reilly.They look irregular to the casual observer.Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, panel co-chairman, also said in a Friday teleconference that the panel will focus mostly on how things can be improved for the future.The seven members of the panel hold their first meetings Monday and Tuesday in New Orleans. They will first hear from Gulf Coast victims of the oil spill and from state officials.The hearing itself is to give voice to the region, Reilly said. The commissioners also plan individual visits to the Gulf states to see the results of the disaster for themselves.Reilly, who headed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, said he's already seen enough to fault the way the spill is being cleaned up.He called current clean-up technology primitive.He suggested the panel may learn enough about the use of oil dispersants to change the way the spill is being addressed.Online:
http://www.oilspillcommission.gov/