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The plan to protect the Chesapeake is failing, and it’s Pennsylvania’s fault

In early January, members of the Chesapeake Bay Commission sat in a gray conference room in Annapolis, Maryland, for a routine meeting. The 21-member legislative body, with representatives from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, convenes regularly to coordinate interstate efforts to restore and protect the Chesapeake Bay. But as the meeting drew to a close, EPA Chesapeake Bay Program director Dana Aunkst got up and delivered a demoralizing message to the group.

“The TMDL itself is not enforceable,” he said. He was referring to the Total Maximum Daily Load, a set of science-based limits for three pollutants — nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment — flowing into the bay. The states in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed have agreed to achieve the TMDL by 2025, and the EPA committed to enforcing it under the terms of a 2010 settlement. But Aunkst went on to describe the TMDL as merely “an informational document” that was “aspirational.”

Aunkst’s comments were jarring to some in the room, but they weren’t entirely out of left field. Pennsylvania, by far the largest source of pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, has failed to meet its pollution reduction benchmarks for years, with little response from the EPA. This single state’s negligence threatens the success of the entire regional program.

The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in the United States, a nationally significant economic resource, and a crucial habitat for thousands of species. But the influx of pollution from upstream sources has led to fishery declines, recurring “dead zones” where pollutants starve aquatic animals of oxygen, and regular algae blooms that suffocate underwater plant life. Even after nearly 10 years of strategic planning and implementation of these pollution reduction plans by neighboring states, its overall health is still poor.

And Pennsylvania seems increasingly to blame. In August of last year, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection released its third and final Watershed Implementation Plan, or WIP. The plan admitted that PA was only about 30 percent closer to achieving its target for nitrogen pollution than it had been in the 1980s. Not only was the Keystone State entering the final phase of the cleanup far behind where it should have been, but the state’s plan for phase three still had it falling 25 percent short of the 2025 target. That underwhelming plan also had a funding deficit of about $324 million per year. In December, the EPA signed off on the plan with no indication of imposing consequences.

According to Harry Campbell, the Pennsylvania executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit that works closely with watershed states on the cleanup effort, there are a few reasons the state is having such a hard time making progress.

Of all the sources of pollution going into the watershed, Pennsylvania has already tackled the lowest-hanging fruit — wastewater treatment plants. In fact, the state met its 2017 pollution reduction goals for wastewater treatment plants three years early. But the vast majority of PA’s contribution doesn’t come from these easy “point source” targets, it comes from “non-point sources,” like stormwater from the thousands of municipalities in the watershed, and runoff from 33,000 small farms.

About 80 percent of the nitrogen Pennsylvania needs to tackle comes from those farms. And convincing 33,000 farmers — who are already operating on razor-thin profit margins because of trade wars and a poor farm economy — to shoulder new conservation practices is a time- and labor-intensive process. “You have to work with individual farmers, meet them at their table, oftentimes provide the technical and financial assistance necessary to actually design and implement those practices,” said Campbell.

Part of the problem was also the planning process the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection employed for its earlier WIPs, which was not very inclusive of the various communities and entities whose buy-in was necessary for success. But according to Campbell, a lack of funding and leadership from the legislature have also plagued the state’s performance. “If the legislature and the administration invested in implementation of those plans, we’d be in a far better place than we are right now,” Campbell said.

When it came time to draw up the WIP for phase three of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup, the state finally made an effort to start from a more grassroots level. It created workgroups for each sector that included farmers and county commissioners. But Campbell, who was on the Local Area Goals Workgroup, said that even though the process was improved, the funding gap hung over the proceedings. “We just see it every day — whether it be the local county conservation districts or the partners on the ground, like watershed groups and land trusts — this persistent and consistent scarcity-like mentality, that we just don’t have enough to get the job done,” he said. “And so everyone was able to sense it, feel it, or otherwise acknowledge it.”

The governor of Pennsylvania, Democrat Tom Wolf, has proposed a tax on natural gas extraction in the state to raise money for infrastructure projects for five years straight. His latest proposal, the Restore Pennsylvania Plan, would raise $4.5 billion and fund many of the water pollution reduction strategies written into the WIP. But the tax is unlikely to make it through the Republican-controlled legislature.

Over the years, the EPA has penalized Pennsylvania for its lack of progress in small ways. It has objected to permits for wastewater treatment plant expansions, temporarily withheld funding, and most recently, redirected funding in order for it be used more efficiently. But those consequences have not been enough to get the attention of elected officials who continue to devalue the program, putting the entire cleanup effort at risk, said Campbell.

One of Pennsylvania’s neighbors has had enough. Following Aunkst’s comments at the meeting, the Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, who’s administration has spent a record $5 billion on Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts, directed his attorney general to sue both Pennsylvania and the EPA. But it’s unclear whether EPA can be held liable for not enforcing the TMDL in Pennsylvania.

In response to the lawsuit, Governor Wolf’s office suggested that Hogan’s time would be better spent using his sway as a Republican to help Wolf secure more funding for the program. “Instead of protracted litigation that will take resources away from our efforts to improve water quality in the watershed and undermine the partnership that has helped make progress, Governor Hogan and the foundation’s time would be better spent convincing Republicans that control the legislature in Pennsylvania to support Governor Wolf’s plan,” said J.J. Abbott, a spokesperson for Wolf.

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The plan to protect the Chesapeake is failing, and it’s Pennsylvania’s fault

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Boko Haram Has Been Terrorizing Nigeria for Years. Why Did We Just Start to Care?

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the April kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls by the terrorist group Boko Haram, fearsome images of the militants—in army fatigues and turbans, brandishing automatic weapons and rounds of ammo—have been splashed over the front pages of the international press. But the Al Qaeda-linked group has been slaughtering Nigerians by the hundreds since 2009. They’ve also kidnapped scores of women and children and attacked dozens of schools over the past year, with little attention from the Western media. Why did the foreign press decide to start paying attention now?

Part of the reason is the sheer scale of the kidnapping. According to the latest numbers, nearly 300 schoolgirls were abducted on April 15 from Chibok boarding school in the northern Nigerian state of Borno. Last year, Boko Haram abducted handfuls of children, as well as Christian women, whom the group converts to Islam and forces into marriage. The group attacked 50 schools last year too, killing more than 100 schoolchildren and 70 teachers. The number of kids taken during the raid on the Chibok school is staggering, however. “It is the largest number of children abducted in one swoop in the country,” says Nnamdi Obasi, a senior Nigeria analyst for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit conflict resolution organization. “Certainly not a minor incident that could be ignored.”

But it’s not just the shock value of the Chibok school attack that’s put a recent spotlight on Boko Haram. The group has terrorized the country on this scale before, having killed thousands over the past five years. In November 2011, the militants attacked police facilities in the northern state of Yobe, killing 150. That year, the group also carried out a brazen attack on the UN compound in the capital city of Abuja. In January 2012, coordinated bombings by the Islamist militants in the city of Kano killed about 150. And in July of that year, the group attacked multiple Christian villages in the north, killing more than 100. Those attacks prompted obligatory reports by the likes of the New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC.

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Boko Haram Has Been Terrorizing Nigeria for Years. Why Did We Just Start to Care?

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Does the Heartbleed Bug Mean You Should Stay Off the Internet?

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, news broke that the safeguard many websites use to protect sensitive information on the internet has had a major security flaw for about two years. These sites use a security system called OpenSSL to encrypt data like content, passwords, and social security numbers. But thanks to a small coding error in a popular version of OpenSSL, nicknamed “Heartbleed,” hackers can potentially steal sensitive data from vulnerable websites. Richard Bejtlich, chief security strategist at FireEye, a network security company, notes that there’s no evidence that malicious hackers have exploited the flaw yet. But the secrecy-minded Tor Project, which enables anonymous Internet browsing, nevertheless recommended on Monday that, “If you need strong anonymity or privacy on the Internet, you might want to stay away from the Internet entirely for the next few days while things settle.” Here are seven reasons why you might want to stop looking at cat videos right now:

1. Lots of popular websites have the security problem.

According to the New York Times, up to two-thirds of sites on the Internet rely on OpenSSL. A user on Github, an open-source coding site, compiled a list of sites that were allegedly vulnerable after a test was conducted on Tuesday. The Github list included Yahoo, Flickr, OkCupid, and Eventbrite, among dozens of other companies. (Some may have since updated their security.) Facebook and Google both released statements confirming they are not affected by the flaw. If you’d like to test a specific site to see whether it’s could be exploited—although this doesn’t meant that it has—go here.

2. Your most sensitive personal information is at risk.

When websites use SSL, that’s a good thing. The security layer is deployed during sensitive transactions to protect data like bank details, social security numbers, and passwords. Runa Sandvik, a staff technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), says that she’s heard, “this is even worse than if SSL wasn’t used at all, because it’s used to protect sensitive information. A site that isn’t protected at all, you might not submit sensitive information there in the first place.” The good news is, some security researchers are reporting that hackers may not be able to get the private keys to an entire website’s content. The bad news is, the flaw is still “a great way to steal passwords from recent logins” according to researchers at Errata Security.

3. Canada is freaking out.

The Canada Revenue Agency announced on Wednesday that it is temporarily shutting down its online services as a result of the Heartbleed bug. The moves come mere weeks before Canadians are expected to file their taxes. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service said in a statement Wednesday that its website has not been affected by the bug.

4. Right now, hackers are racing to get at that information.

“With these things, you can practically hear the shotgun go off. We’re in a race now between the attackers and the defenders, to see how quickly attackers can build viable attacks, and how quickly the defenders can put out their defenses,” says Christopher Budd, a spokesperson for Trend Micro, a Japanese security software company. He notes that while exploiting the vulnerability right now is fairly difficult, as hackers share information, people could build tool kits and it will become significantly easier.

5. You won’t necessarily know if your information has been hacked.

“It’s a serious bug in that it doesn’t leave any trace,” David Chartier, chief executive at Codenomicon, told the New York Times. “Bad guys can access the memory on a machine and take encryption keys, usernames, passwords, valuable intellectual property, and there’s no trace they’ve been there.”

6. It won’t be easy for websites to fix the problem.

Budd says fixing the problem is “simple, but not easy.” While there is a fixed OpenSSL version that websites can download, it can take time to roll out the new program across a website’s entire infrastructure. Budd notes that companies will have to weigh the risk of an attack against the potential that the entire website might come crashing down if a new coding error is introduced. That might dissuade companies from acting quickly. Additionally, after a website installs the new “fix,” it needs to update its SSL certificate, a process that can take a little time. Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that even if a website has downloaded the fix, if it hasn’t updated its certificates, it “could still be subject to a man-in-the-middle-attack on its users.”

7. Changing your passwords right away isn’t necessarily going to help you.

After news of Heartbleed broke, you probably got a lot emails from people telling you to change your passwords. Not so fast, experts say. If you change your password prior to a site getting rid of the bad SSL, your new password could be just as vulnerable as your old one. Sandvik from CDT says, “I’m in the same situation as everyone else. I would look for statements issued by companies before logging in, and if there is no statement, contact them and ask them. Also test their website.” Budd advises, “This is one of those situations where the best thing people can do is stick to best practices, don’t panic, and wait to hear information from people to know what’s going on. If you get instructions, follow them.”

Or you know, go read a book.

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Does the Heartbleed Bug Mean You Should Stay Off the Internet?

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