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MADRID – The European Union has launched an investigation into a prized Spanish wetland that has turned bone dry through mismanagement of water resources and is now on fire underground, white smoke now rising from areas where fish once swam.
The EU wants the Spanish government to explain how it plans to save Las Tablas de Daimiel National Park in the central Castilla-La Mancha region, European Commission spokeswoman Barbara Helfferich told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The park, one of Spain's few wetlands, is classified as a UNESCO biosphere site and an EU-protected area because of its birdlife.
But it has been drying up for decades, largely because of wells dug by farmers on the edges of the park to tap an aquifer that feeds the wetland's lagoons. Many of the wells are illegal. Environmentalists call this case a particularly glaring example of how a natural resource can be abused.
In August, intense summer heat and parched soil caused the peat just under the surface of the soil to spontaneously ignite. Now, several areas of the park are on fire underground and white smoke seeps out of deep cracks in the parched soil.
"We have seen a situation where there is continuous degradation of territory," Helfferich said from Brussels.
The EU told the Spanish government about its investigation last week and Spain has 10 weeks to explain how it plans to respond to the crisis, Helfferich said.
"Underground fires at the moment cannot be extinguished," she said, adding that the 27-nation bloc has asked Spain how it plans to deal with it.
In a worst-case scenario, the EU could punish Spain with a hefty fine if it deems that the government's management of the wetlands was insufficient.
Josep Puxeau, the Environment Ministry's top official on water issues, said the government has an emergency plan to pump in torrents of water from a river to put out the fires and restore the acquifer.
It will also continue with a policy of buying up land and farms outside the park to halt water being drawn from wells, he told reporters.
The park lies 90 miles (150 kilometers) south of Madrid. Not all of it is wetland. The area capable of holding water covers about 4,500 acres (1,800 hectares) but less than 1 percent of that actually has water.
Park ranger Jesus Garcia Consuegra, who grew up in the area, remembers lusher times. He would go fishing there as a boy, venturing out at night in a rowboat equipped with a lantern to draw fish to the surface.
"It was so clear you could see to the bottom. You could see the fish there. You could watch them and it was simply marvelous," he said in a documentary on the park's Web site.
Jose Manuel Hernandez, spokesman for the environmental group Ecologists in Action, placed the blame for the wetland's demise squarely on excessive use of underground water tables for irrigation. He said climate change has nothing to do with the problem because La Mancha is dry anyway and rain levels have not dropped that much.
Rather, the culprit is a government policy over the past 20 years that allowed farmers to shift from non-irrigated crops like olive groves and wheat to thirsty ones like grapes and melons, he told the AP.
The Guadiana River, for instance, which once flowed through La Mancha, has essentially vanished for this reason and peat fires like the ones in Las Tablas de Daimiel have been common in that riverbed for years.
"The Guadiana has been burning for 20 years," Hernandez said. "People are just waking up now because the fires have cropped up in a national park."

He called the idea of bringing in huge amounts of water to put out the fires and restore the acquifer a pointless stopgap measure: the land is so dry and the water table now so low that water brought in from outside will simply get sucked up by the soil and not reach the acquifer.

It is artificial to try to save a wetland this way, and better to manage the existing water more efficiently by cutting down on use of wells, Hernandez said.

"What we need to do is recover the dynamics of the ecosystem."

WASHINGTON – In the largest single strike at Mexican drug operations in the U.S., federal officials on Thursday announced the arrests of more than 300 people in raids across the country aimed at the newest and most violent cartel.
La Familia has earned a reputation for dominating the methamphetamine trade and displaying graphic violence, including beheadings. U.S. officials said the cartel, based in the state of Michoacan, in southwestern Mexico, has a vast network pumping drugs throughout the United States, specializing in methamphetamine.
The arrests took place in 38 cities, from Boston to Seattle and Tampa, Fla., to St. Paul, Minn., in 19 states.
Attorney General Eric Holder pledged to keep hitting La Familia and the cartels responsible for a wave of bloodshed in Mexico. He said the U.S. would attack them at all levels, from the leadership to their supply chains reaching far into the United States.
"To the extent that they do grow back, we have to work with our Mexican counterparts to cut off the heads of these snakes, to get at the heads of the cartels, indict them, try them, if they're in Mexico, extradite them to the United States," Holder said at a news conference.
Michele Leonhart, who heads the Drug Enforcement Administration, said La Familia's power has grown quickly, in part due to its quasi-religious background. DEA officials say the cartel professes a "Robin Hood mentality" of aiding the poor by stealing from the rich. Some drug proceeds are used to give bibles and money to the poor, according to investigators.
The Obama administration has directed more agents, resources and money to fight the cartel's presence along the Mexico-U.S. border. But the arrests over the past two days occurred far beyond that region.
"The problem is not just along the southwest border, it is all over our country now," said Kenneth Melson, head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
In Dallas alone, 77 people were charged by a number of different federal and local law enforcement agencies.
On Wednesday and Thursday, more than 3,000 federal agents and police officers carried out arrests in more than a dozen states, as part of a long-running effort that has netted nearly 1,200 arrests over almost four years.
The suspects face a combination of federal and state charges.
In the latest legal assault on La Familia, a New York grand jury has indicted an alleged cartel leader, Servando Gomez-Martinez. He is linked to one of the more brazen acts of cartel violence.
In July, after a dozen Mexican police officers were found murdered, officials say Gomez-Martinez publicly proclaimed his membership in La Familia and said the cartel was locked in a battle with Mexican police.
Many of the new charges are centered on the cartel's methamphetamine distribution, but other charges involve cocaine and marijuana, the officials said.
The officials said states where arrests were made or charges filed include Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington state.
___
On the Net:
Justice Department: http://www.justice.gov/

Drug Enforcement Administration: http://www.dea.gov

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives: http://www.atf.gov/

The Nation --

We've got a new "Think Again" column called, believe it or not, "I'll See Your Testicles...' (Catfight on the Right)" and it's here. (though perhaps they changed the title later in the day)

Also, I did an op-ed on the move away from AIPAC-style politics for American Jews for the IHT, which is up on the NYT site, here.

Classified section: I'm selling fifty or so Miles Davis cds--everything on Columbia during the key period--mostly in beautiful box sets, etc, and would love to sell the whole thing as a package. Email if genuinely interested. Also, I have two lousy seats for Bruce on 11/8 and one for 11/7 I need to get rid of. Email below....

Ok, here's Pierce

Charles Pierce Newton, MA.

Hey Doc:

"Daddy ran whiskey in a big black Dodge/Bought it at an auction at the Masons lodge."

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "My Mama Told Me So." (The B-3 Organ Summit): Price Waterhouse couldn't fake the numbers to calibrate exactly how much I love New Orleans.

Short Takes:

Part The First: Considering that the money behind the sainted American Football League fifty years ago belonged to the Hunt family in Dallas, the pre-eminent wingnut sugar daddies of the 1950's and '60's, it's pretty rich that, even in the beginnings of what may be a collective-bargaining armageddon, both the labor and management sides of the modern NFL have declined to be associated with the former Jeff Christie. The weeping in the wingnuttosphere leaves me strangely unmoved. It does, however, move me to gales of helpless laughter. Dude, I am not. You are not. You are, however, an idiot.

Part The Second: There is no way I am not buying this. "Here comes Santa Claus/Here comes Santa Claus/Right down Highway 61."

Part The Third: My knowledge of Russian libel law is admittedly limited, but I'm thinking this case is kind of a longshot.

Part The Fourth: Good nominees, I think this is a good list. But, check out the list of judges in the nonfiction category. Apparently, Waldo The Drunk Security Guard at Salon has a brother who works for the National Book Foundation. We're damned lucky Glenn Beck isn't a finalist, I guess.

Part The Penultimate: this was the best treatment of the whole Nobel business that I read anywhere. The Pooka McPhellimey and I will brook no debate on this point.

Part The Ultimate: The ongoing scandal in Texas regarding that state's eminently successful execution of Cameron Willingham has begun to fascinate me, even at a considerable distance. (For those of you who want to get up to speed quickly, Josh's joint has done an exemplary job of aggregating the local reporting.) In brief, it appears that Texas, over the signature of Governor Rick (Goodhair) Perry--pace, Molly I.--executed a fellow who was most likely innocent and did so on the basis of cheesy arson science apparently drawn from the extended research of Professor Otto Yerass. It also appears that Perry signed off on the execution despite his being aware of the fact that the evidence was so full of holes you could use it for a flute. I say these things "appear" to be true because there's an investigation going on down there, but it's being hamstrung because, every time the probe gets too close to his own personal nether regions, Perry fires another couple of the investigators. Perry, it should be recalled, is currently running for re-election in a hot Republican primary against Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Token.)

What's disturbing--if undeniably compelling--about the case is the self-evident fact that Texas is apparently governed at the moment by a complete fucking barbarian. The evidence suggests quite clearly that Perry didn't give the hindquarters of a rat as to whether or not he was signing the death warrant for an innocent prisoner. And the evidence quite clearly suggests that Perry further will defy any attempt to judge his conduct in the matter. What is even more disturbing is that there is almost no chance that the state-sanctioned murder of Cameron Willingham, an innocent man, will be any kind of an issue in that aforementioned primary hooley. (They're kinda/sorta upset about the cover-up ( but not the crime itself.) The Texas GOP is exclusively the province of the party's knuckle-dragging base--Check out the state party platform sometime. It will curl your hair--and that base doesn't care how many mistakes are made in the death chamber as long as it keeps humming.

In that sense, it was the stormy petrel of what came to pass for the national Republican party once its various deals with various devils came due. For the conservative "movement," the death-penalty never has had anything to do with criminal justice. It was always about boosting your political testosterone count, or denigrating that of your opponents. It's about killing people to make yourself feel strong, or safe, and about bravely hiring people to do the killing for you. (Come to think of it. That's pretty much what the "movement" has for a foreign policy, too.) The governor of Texas likely arranged the death of an innocent man, either through deliberate neglect or through the abject dereliction of his constitutional duties. He is now engaged in a public cover-up that would have embarrassed H.R. Haldeman. That he still has a chance to stay in office is an indictment of our politics far beyond anything else that happened this week.

Name: Ed TraceyHometown: Lebanon, New Hampshire

Professor, it's not on-line as near as I can tell -- but Terry Adams once explained why NRBQ hired Lou Albano as a 'manager' of sorts: "Some situations in life are challenging to deal with -- but The Captain knows how to handle things".

I, too, will "stick with the Guiding Light".

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WASHINGTON – Early estimates from congressional budget umpires show that House Democrats are close to President Barack Obama's $900 billion target for health care legislation, a spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday.
The House versions, including a government-run insurance plan as an option for consumers, would cost under $900 billion over 10 years, said Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Pelosi, D-Calif. But, he said, "No final policy decisions have been made on how to proceed."
Preliminary cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office show the evolving legislation is already within range of Obama's target. The numbers remain in flux, however, because House leaders are still tinkering with details and sending in new policy ideas to budget analysts.
The ballpark figure of $900 billion reflects the cost of expanding coverage by providing tax credits to help people buy health insurance, and also by broadening the Medicaid health program to reach more low-income people, Daly said.
It does not include some $240 billion over ten years that lawmakers want to spend to address a shortfall in Medicare payments to doctors. The White House says those costs should not be included in the pricetag for the health care overhaul. But the Medicare provision was part of the original House bill.
The final House bill is expected to include a government-sponsored insurance plan that would compete with private health insurers. Leading Democratic lawmakers say support is building for a Medicare-like plan in which the government would set the payment levels for medical providers, instead of negotiating.
Health care legislation is expected to be on the House floor in early November. In the Senate, Democratic leaders hope to be on the floor at around the same time, but they must first reconcile differences between two committee-passed versions.