AN EXCERPT:  Evidence of ancient life on Mars, if any such evidence exists, might be detectable at shallower depths below the planet’s surface than has been thought, a new study says – which would improve the chances that NASA’s newest Mars rover, scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet next month, finds it.

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http://www.space.com/16455-mars-life-search-curiosity-rover-msl.html

DemocracyNow.org – Four years after the 2008 economic crisis, not a single top Wall Street executive has gone to jail. “These executives knew that they could take these huge risks and even break laws and pay no real price, and that’s what happened,” says Glenn Greenwald, author of “With Liberty and Justice For Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful,” and a blogger for Salon. “It’s not just a travesty of justice that we haven’t punished them for past transgressions. The real danger is that we’re continuing to send the signal to the world’s most powerful financial actors that they don’t have any fear of criminal accountability when they commit these obvious crimes.”

Glenn Greenwald

ZEPHYR COMMENT:  Are you kidding me? Is nothing sacred? Will anyone in the mainstream environmental community oppose this kind of recreational use in a national park?  This is an utter disgrace…JS

AN EXCERPT:     A small group of mountain bikers set out on an exploratory mission down a stretch of Utah’s Green River last autumn in search of remote and untarnished riding territory. Floating on inflatable rafts retrofitted with bike racks, the team navigated 68 miles of water between the towns of Green River and Mineral Bottom, armed only with a topo map and the roughest idea of which places they wanted to scout.

The crew—Diamondback riders Kelly McGarry and Eric Porter, along with photographer Haruki Noguchi, filmer Justin Olsen and a river-rat guide named Stephen ‘Chalupa’ Darrigo—spent nine days on the journey, encountering riverbank vermin and a slew of previously unridden terrain.

The arid arroyos to the north of Canyonlands National Park yielded more mind-blowing riding than any of the group had expected—from miles of pristine, animal-trodden singletrack to natural halfpipes in slickrock slot canyons and giant, Rampage-scale spines.

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http://www.bikemag.com/news/video-green-river-recon-featured-in-july-issue-of-bike/

We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all A boom in oil production has made a mockery of our predictions. Good news for capitalists – but a disaster for humanity

AN EXCERPT:    The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike….There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground. Twenty years of efforts to prevent climate breakdown through moral persuasion have failed, with the collapse of the multilateral process at Rio de Janeiro last month. The world’s most powerful nation is again becoming an oil state, and if the political transformation of its northern neighbour is anything to go by, the results will not be pretty.

‘The great profusion of life in the past – fossilized in the form of flammable carbon – now jeopardizes the great profusion of life in the present.’ (Illustration by Daniel Pudles)

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NOTE: Climate change…environmental issues don’t even rank in the Top 8.

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http://www.gallup.com/poll/155162/Satisfaction-Slips-Slightly.aspx

CLICK THE IMAGE TO FIND THE LINK…GREAT SONG BY MY PAL DAVE YARBROUGH & HIS MUSICAL PARTNER,  BECKY DUNKEL—‘DISTANT DUET‘

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To order their CD or MP3, click here:

AN EXCERPT:  Americans no longer see climate change as the world’s number-one environmental issue, according to a public opinion poll released Tuesday amid an ongoing heat wave in much of the United States.

Twenty-nine percent cited water and air pollution as the most pressing concern, the Washington Post-Stanford University poll indicated, followed by 18 percent who pointed to climate change — way down from 33 percent in 2007.

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http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-no-longer-tops-us-environment-worries-134721404.html

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”

AN EXCERPT:  BEIJING — Construction of a copper factory in central China has been halted, an official said Tuesday, after days of angry protests over fears of pollution culminated in clashes that saw riot police fire stun grenades and tear gas to break up a crowd of thousands….Residents of the town of Shifang, Sichuan province, have been slowly gathering around a local city government office since Saturday, the day after a foundation-laying ceremony put on by Sichuan Hongda – a conglomerate specializing in minerals, real estate and finance – to celebrate the first phase of construction on the $1.64 billion proposed molybdenum-copper alloy refinery nearby.

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http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12540935-protesters-defy-stun-grenades-to-halt-construction-of-16-billion-factory-in-china?lite