‘Horribly Mutated’ Seafood in The Gulf of Mexico

I love seafood, but I stopped eating all seafood from Louisiana. I am originally from there in the southern part, and I hate not supporting them but my health is more important. So from this spill, not only has it affected the wild life, it has affected the whole business world for the south and beyond!

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worldtruth/BP oil spill: The ‘horribly mutated’ creatures living in the Gulf. Fish, shrimp, and crabs are missing eyes and suffering strange deformities, according to a harrowing new report — yet the FDA insists the seafood’s safe to eat.
Shrimp born without eyes, clawless crabs, and fish with visible tumors are among the “horrible mutated”marine animals found in the waters off the Gulf Coast, according to a new report from Al Jazeera. Scientists say the problem is a side effect of the April 2010 explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which killed 11 people and spilled at least 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean. Here, a brief guide to the damage:


“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”
Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

Eyeless shrimp Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”
“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” Tracy Kuhns added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”

Among the disturbing mutations: Shrimp with tumors on their heads; fish that lack eyes or are missing flaps over their gills; fish with oozing sores; crabs with holes in their shells; crabs that are missing claws and spikes, or are encased in soft shells instead of hard ones.

Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.
“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”

While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head“.
“We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added.
Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.

Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”

Is it just the oil that caused mutations?

No. Also to blame are the nearly 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol, used for the subsequent clean-up. The solvents used in the aftermath of the spill, long known to be “mutagenic,” are powerful enough to dissolve oil, grease, and rubber, says Casey Chan at Gizmodo. That’s great for sopping up oil, “but terrible for the environment.”"The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.
The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.
Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.

Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.
“Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline,” Subra told Al Jazeera. “We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation.”
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PAHs “are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned”.

“The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as other lab experiments,” explained Cowan. “There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome.”

What does BP say?
“Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is among the most tested in the world,” the energy company says in a statement. And “according to the FDA and NOAA, it is as safe now as it was before the accident.”

Al Jazeera contacted the office of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, who provided a statement that said the state continues to test its waters for oil and dispersants, and that it is testing for PAHs.
“Gulf seafood has consistently tested lower than the safety thresholds established by the FDA for the levels of oil and dispersant contamination that would pose a risk to human health,” the statement reads. “Louisiana seafood continues to go through extensive testing to ensure that seafood is safe for human consumption. More than 3,000 composite samples of seafood, sediment and water have been tested in Louisiana since the start of the spill.”

BP refused Al Jazeera’s request to comment on this issue for a television interview, but provided a statement that read:
“Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is among the most tested in the world, and, according to the FDA and NOAA, it is as safe now as it was before the accident.”

The FDA, EPA and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) all refused to comment on the awfulness that’s happening in the Gulf. BP, the company who created this mess in the first place, refuse to take the blame, saying the seafood in the Gulf is “as safe now as it was before the accident.” The evidence, of course, indicates otherwise.

The Gulf of Mexico provides nearly half of the seafood caught in the US (40%). With its inhabitants dying or suffering mutations before they’re caught, it looks like seafood shortages are inevitable. According to various fishermen, brown shrimp catch has dropped by two-thirds, white shrimp have been wiped out and some fishermen’s seafood catch are ten percent of what they normally are. Seafood, as America knows it, has changed. And without the proper funding or commitment or BP accepting the blame, these effects might last longer than anyone thinks.

On Wednesday April 18,2012 BP sealed an out-of-court, $7.8 billion settlement with lawyers acting on behalf of thousands of individuals and businesses affected by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Under the deal, the Gulf seafood industry is slated to receive over $2 billion for economic loss.

 

Doctor Shortage Likely to Worsen With Health Law

Always more laws to govern our lives. And that would be ok, but why does everything cost US money!?

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nytimes/In the Inland Empire, an economically depressed region in Southern California, President Obama’s health care law is expected to extend insurance coverage to more than 300,000 people by 2014. But coverage will not necessarily translate into care: Local health experts doubt there will be enough doctors to meet the area’s needs. There are not enough now.

Other places around the country, including the Mississippi Delta, Detroit and suburban Phoenix, face similar problems. The Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that in 2015 the country will have 62,900 fewer doctors than needed. And that number will more than double by 2025, as the expansion of insurance coverage and the aging of baby boomers drive up demand for care. Even without the health care law, the shortfall of doctors in 2025 would still exceed 100,000.

Health experts, including many who support the law, say there is little that the government or the medical profession will be able to do to close the gap by 2014, when the law begins extending coverage to about 30 million Americans. It typically takes a decade to train a doctor.
“We have a shortage of every kind of doctor, except for plastic surgeons and dermatologists,” said Dr. G. Richard Olds, the dean of the new medical school at the University of California, Riverside, founded in part to address the region’s doctor shortage. “We’ll have a 5,000-physician shortage in 10 years, no matter what anybody does.”
Experts describe a doctor shortage as an “invisible problem.” Patients still get care, but the process is often slow and difficult. In Riverside, it has left residents driving long distances to doctors, languishing on waiting lists, overusing emergency rooms and even forgoing care.
“It results in delayed care and higher levels of acuity,” said Dustin Corcoran, the chief executive of the California Medical Association, which represents 35,000 physicians. People “access the health care system through the emergency department, rather than establishing a relationship with a primary care physician who might keep them from getting sicker.”
In the Inland Empire, encompassing the counties of Riverside and San Bernardino, the shortage of doctors is already severe. The population of Riverside County swelled 42 percent in the 2000s, gaining more than 644,000 people. It has continued to grow despite the collapse of one of the country’s biggest property bubbles and a jobless rate of 11.8 percent in the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metro area.
But the growth in the number of physicians has lagged, in no small part because the area has trouble attracting doctors, who might make more money and prefer living in nearby Orange County or Los Angeles.
A government council has recommended that a given region have 60 to 80 primary care doctors per 100,000 residents, and 85 to 105 specialists. The Inland Empire has about 40 primary care doctors and 70 specialists per 100,000 residents — the worst shortage in California, in both cases.
Moreover, across the country, fewer than half of primary care clinicians were accepting new Medicaid patients as of 2008, making it hard for the poor to find care even when they are eligible for Medicaid. The expansion of Medicaid accounts for more than one-third of the overall growth in coverage in President Obama’s health care law.
Providers say they are bracing for the surge of the newly insured into an already strained system.
Temetry Lindsey, the chief executive of Inland Behavioral & Health Services, which provides medical care to about 12,000 area residents, many of them low income, said she was speeding patient-processing systems, packing doctors’ schedules tighter and seeking to hire more physicians.
“We know we are going to be overrun at some point,” Ms. Lindsey said, estimating that the clinics would see new demand from 10,000 to 25,000 residents by 2014. She added that hiring new doctors had proved a struggle, in part because of the “stigma” of working in this part of California.
Across the country, a factor increasing demand, along with expansion of coverage in the law and simple population growth, is the aging of the baby boom generation. Medicare officials predict that enrollment will surge to 73.2 million in 2025, up 44 percent from 50.7 million this year.
“Older Americans require significantly more health care,” said Dr. Darrell G. Kirch, the president of the Association of American Medical Colleges. “Older individuals are more likely to have multiple chronic conditions, requiring more intensive, coordinated care.”
The pool of doctors has not kept pace, and will not, health experts said. Medical school enrollment is increasing, but not as fast as the population. The number of training positions for medical school graduates is lagging. Younger doctors are on average working fewer hours than their predecessors. And about a third of the country’s doctors are 55 or older, and nearing retirement.
Physician compensation is also an issue. The proportion of medical students choosing to enter primary care has declined in the past 15 years, as average earnings for primary care doctors and specialists, like orthopedic surgeons and radiologists, have diverged. A study by the Medical Group Management Association found that in 2010, primary care doctors made about $200,000 a year. Specialists often made twice as much.
The Obama administration has sought to ease the shortage. The health care law increases Medicaid’s primary care payment rates in 2013 and 2014. It also includes money to train new primary care doctors, reward them for working in underserved communities and strengthen community health centers.
But the provisions within the law are expected to increase the number of primary care doctors by perhaps 3,000 in the coming decade. Communities around the country need about 45,000.
Many health experts in California said that while they welcomed the expansion of coverage, they expected that the state simply would not be ready for the new demand. “It’s going to be necessary to use the resources that we have smarter” in light of the doctor shortages, said Dr. Mark D. Smith, who heads the California HealthCare Foundation, a nonprofit group.
Dr. Smith said building more walk-in clinics, allowing nurses to provide more care and encouraging doctors to work in teams would all be part of the answer. Mr. Corcoran of the California Medical Association also said the state would need to stop cutting Medicaid payment rates; instead, it needed to increase them to make seeing those patients economically feasible for doctors.
More doctors might be part of the answer as well. The U.C. Riverside medical school is hoping to enroll its first students in August 2013, and is planning a number of policies to encourage its graduates to stay in the area and practice primary care.
But Dr. Olds said changing how doctors provided care would be more important than minting new doctors. “I’m only adding 22 new students to this equation,” he said. “That’s not enough to put a dent in a 5,000-doctor shortage.”

DHS gears up for civil unrest

Lets prepare folks, this isnt looking good.

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Reuters / Frank Polich

TAGS: Protest, USA, DHS

RT/The Department of Homeland Security has ordered masses of riot gear equipment to prepare for potential significant domestic riots at the Republican National Convention, Democratic National Convention and next year’s presidential inauguration.
The DHS submitted a rushed solicitation to the Federal Business Opportunities site on Wednesday, which is a portal for Federal government procurement requisitions over $25,000. The request gave the potential suppliers only one day to submit their proposals and a 15-day delivery requirement to Alexandria, Virginia.
As the brief explains, “the objective of this effort is to procure riot gear to prepare for the 2012 Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the 2013 Presidential Inauguration and other future similar activities.”
The total amount ordered is about 150 sets of riot helmets, thigh and groin protectors, hard-shell shin guards and other riot gear.
Specifically, DHS is looking to obtain:
- “147 riot helmets” with “adjustable tactical face shield with liquid seal”
- “147 sets of upper body and shoulder protection”
- “152 sets of thigh and groin protection”
- “147 hard-shell shin guards” with “substantial protection from flying debris, non-ballistic weapons, and blows to the leg” and “optimized protective design for severe riot control or tactical situations.”
- “156 forearm protectors”
- “147 pairs of tactical gloves”
The riot gear will be worn by Federal Protective Service agents who are tasked with protecting property, grounds and buildings owned by the federal government.
The urgency of the order can be explained by the fact that there is a growing anticipation that many demonstrators will travel to the Republican National Convention (RNC), scheduled for August 27-30 in Tampa Bay, Florida, and Democratic National Convention (DNC), planned for September 3-6 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The RNC itself, for example, will have free speech zones, which will serve as containment quarters for the protesters by not allowing them to leave the designated areas and cause trouble.
Another recent DHS move to gear up was back in March of this year, when it gave the defense contractor ATK a deal to provide the DHS with 450 million .40 caliber hollow-point ammunition over a five year period.
On top of that, the DHS has recently purchased a number of bullet-proof checkpoint booths and hired hundreds of new security guards to protect government buildings.

 

Should Congress Have Power to Audit the Fed?

Just my opinion, but if you and I can get audited, I feel that the feds should too. How about you please give your output!

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yahoo/It is often said that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is the second most powerful person in the world, with unrivaled influence and clout domestically and abroad. Although our central bank will mark its 100th anniversary next year, its authority has never been greater, its portfolio never larger, and its global dealings never more extensive. This is why so many in Congress say it's time to reign in the Federal Reserve and bring it back under government control.

"We want to know what deals are being been made with whom, how much money is going out, what has been promised to central banks throughout the world," says California Congressman Duncan Hunter in the attached video. "In the end, it's about transparency. It's about letting the American people know what the Federal Reserve is doing with your money."
Rep. Hunter is one of more than 200 co-sponsors of the Audit the Fed bill, a piece of legislation written by outgoing Texas
Congressman and former Presidential candidate Ron Paul that overwhelmingly passed the House last week by a huge 327-98 margin.
The timing of the vote is also noteworthy, coming just days ahead of a Fed meeting that many believe could be the backdrop for another round of stimulus, often referred to as quantitative easing or QE3.
As much as Bernanke has his critics, he has lots of allies too, who not only say he has steered the nation away from depression, but has lead and created the most transparent Fed ever. Rep. Hunter says part of Bernanke's openness is due to the mere presence of this pending legislation, which has "all of a sudden made the Fed more forthcoming over the past year or two."
A nasty 3-year lawsuit by Bloomberg News under the Freedom of Information Act also fanned the flames after it delivered a bombshell last year when it unearthed trillions of dollars of previously secret dealings by the central bank, much of which was with foreign banks and other non-U.S. entities.
"At least let us see what we think is important, not necessarily what the Fed thinks is important to tell us," Rep. Hunter says, as the Audit the Fed movement makes its way to the Senate where it will face a far cooler reception.

 

Uganda Ebola outbreak: patients flee hospital

The Ebola virus causes hemorrhagic fever, an acute disease characterised by high fever and bleeding into the skin. Photograph: Michael Freeman/Corbis

guardian/Terrified patients fled from a hospital in western Uganda as soon as news broke that a mysterious illness that killed at least 14 people in the region was Ebola, one of the world's most virulent diseases.
Ignatius Besisira, an MP for Buyaga East County in the Kibaale district, said people had at first believed the unexplained deaths were related to witchcraft. "Immediately, when there was confirmation that it was Ebola … patients ran out of Kagadi hospital (where some of the victims had died)," he told the Guardian. "Even the medical officers are very, very frightened," he said.
Government officials and a World Health Organisation representative confirmed the Ebola outbreak at a news conference in Kampala on Saturday. "Laboratory investigations done at the Uganda Virus Research Institute ... have confirmed that the strange disease reported in Kibaale is indeed Ebola haemorrhagic fever," they said in a joint statement.
Health officials said at least 20 people had been infected and of those 14 had died.
There is no treatment or vaccine against Ebola, which is transmitted by close personal contact and, depending on the strain, can kill up to 90% of those who contract the virus.
It has a devastating history in Uganda, where in 2000, at least 425 people were infected, of whom more than half died. Ebola was previously reported in the country in May last year, when it killed a 12-year-old girl.
During an outbreak in 2007, which claimed at least 37 lives, President Yoweri Museveni advised people not to shake hands and public gatherings were also discouraged.
One of those who succumbed to the outbreak in Kibaale was a clinical officer, Besisira said. The other fatalities came from a single household in Nyamarunda subdistrict, he added.
Joaquim Saweka, WHO's representative in Uganda, said the suspected infections emerged in the region in early July but the confirmation came only on Friday.
The Ugandan government said a national emergency taskforce had been set up and urged the population to remain calm. The government, WHO and the US Centres for Disease Control have sent experts to Kibaale to tackle the outbreak.
Besisira said officials in Kibaale had released radio broadcasts outlining precautionary measures on Saturday. "We have assured (the people) that we have a very strong team … who are making sure the disease is controlled … I am very confident we can contain it," he added.
Besisira had not heard of people moving out of the region, but the Daily Nation newspaper in neighbouring Kenya said on Sunday that people were leaving the area around Kagadi town, where the disease first appeared.
"We have to move to safer places because we can easily get infected by this disease here," the paper quoted a resident, Omuhereza Kugonza, as saying.
The WHO describes Ebola as "a viral haemorrhagic fever and one of the most virulent diseases known to humankind". It says the disease was identified in 1976 in a western equatorial province of Sudan and a nearby region of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). It takes its name from a river in the DRC.
Kibaale is near Uganda's border with the DRC.
Ebola is transmitted by direct contact with the body fluids and tissues of infected persons. It can also be transmitted by handling sick or dead infected wild animals, such as chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, forest antelope and fruit bats.
Symptoms include sudden fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat, followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rashes, impaired kidney and liver function and bleeding.

 

Second India blackout in two days cuts power to 670 million

Very sad times were going into. Our world is so dependent on Electricity, that we cant even survive anymore.

And now with the heat as high as it is, it is almost unbearable .

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  Passengers sit on a platform for their train to arrive as they wait for electricity to be restored at a railway station in New Delhi July 31, 2012. Grid failure hit India for a second day on Tuesday, cutting …more
  

• (Reuters) - Grids supplying electricity to half of India's 1.2 billion people collapsed on Tuesday, trapping coal miners, stranding train travelers and plunging hospitals into darkness in the second major blackout in as many days.

Stretching from Assam, near China, to the Himalayas and the northwestern deserts of Rajasthan, the outage was the worst to hit India in more than a decade and embarrassed the government, which has failed to build up enough power capacity to meet soaring demand.
"Even before we could figure out the reason for yesterday's failure, we had more grid failures today," said R. N. Nayak, chairman of the state-run Power Grid Corporation.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to fast-track stalled power and infrastructure projects as well as introduce free market reforms aimed at reviving India's flagging economy. But he has drawn fire for dragging his feet.
By the afternoon rush-hour, only about 40 percent of power was back up. Electricity had not been restored to all of the sweltering capital, New Delhi, and streets were clogged with commuters trying to get home.
"It's certainly shameful. Power is a very basic amenity and situations like these should not occur," said Unnayan Amitabh, 19, an intern with HSBC bank in New Delhi, as he was giving up on the underground train system and flagging down an auto-rickshaw to get home.
"They talk about big ticket reforms but can't get something as essential as power supply right."
Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde blamed the system collapse on some states drawing more than their share of electricity from the over-burdened grid.
Asia's third-largest economy suffers a peak-hour power deficit of about 10 percent, dragging on economic growth.
"This is the second day that something like this has happened. I've given instructions that whoever overdraws power will be punished," said Shinde, hours before he was promoted to interior minister in a cabinet reshuffle.
More than a dozen states with a population of 670 million people were without power.
Two hundred miners were stranded in three deep coal shafts in the state of West Bengal when their electric elevators stopped working. Eastern Coalfields Limited official Niladri Roy said workers at the mines, one of which is 700 meters (3,000 feet) deep, were not in danger and were being taken out.
Train stations in Kolkata were swamped and traffic jammed the streets after government offices closed early in the dilapidated coastal city of 5 million people.
The power failed in some major city hospitals and office buildings had to fire up diesel generators.
By mid-evening, services had been restored on the New Delhi metro system.
"PUSHED INTO DARKNESS"
On Monday, India was forced to buy extra power from the tiny neighboring kingdom of Bhutan to help it recover from a blackout that hit more than 300,000 million people.
Indians took to social networking sites to ridicule the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, in part for promoting Shinde despite the power cuts.
Narendra Modi, an opposition leader and chief minister in Gujarat, a state that enjoys a surplus of power, was scornful.
"With poor economic management UPA has emptied pockets of common man; kept stomachs hungry with inflation & today pushed them into darkness!," he said on his Twitter account.
The country's southern and western grids were supplying power to help restore services, officials said.
The problem has been made worse by a weak monsoon in agricultural states such as wheat-belt Punjab and Uttar Pradesh in the Ganges plain, which has a larger population than Brazil.
With less rain to irrigate crops, more farmers resort to electric pumps to draw water from wells.
India's electricity distribution and transmission is mostly state run, with private companies operating in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Less than a quarter of generation is private nationwide.
More than half the country's electricity is generated by coal, with hydro power and nuclear also contributing.
Power shortages and a creaky road and rail network have weighed heavily on the country's efforts to industrialize. Grappling with the slowest economic growth in nine years, the government recently scaled back a target to pump $1 trillion into infrastructure over the next five years.
Major industries have their own power plants or diesel generators and are shielded from outages. But the inconsistent supply hits investment and disrupts small businesses.
High consumption of heavily subsidized diesel by farmers and businesses has fuelled a gaping fiscal deficit that the government has vowed to tackle to restore confidence in the economy.
But the poor monsoon means a subsidy cut is politically difficult.

On Tuesday, the central bank cut its economic growth outlook for the fiscal year that ends in March to 6.5 percent, from the 7.3 percent assumption made in April, putting its outlook closer to that of many private economists.

"This is going to have a substantial adverse impact on the overall economic activity. Power failure for two consecutive days hits sentiment very badly," said N. Bhanumurthy, a senior economist at National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.

2nd Highest Tornado on Record in Colorado

 

Can you imagine? Almost 12,000 feet of suction!?

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The National Weather Service estimates this tornado touched down at about 11,900 feet in elevation on Mt. Evans in Colorado. (Photo courtesy: Sheila Gavin)

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weather/A tornado that touched down in the Colorado mountains on Saturday, July 28, is the second highest tornado in elevation ever recorded in U.S. history.
The tornado touched down on the northeast side of Mount Evans at an elevation of 11,900 feet.  Mount Evans is about 60 miles west of Denver in the Rocky Mountain range.
"North America's highest paved road goes up to the summit of Mt. Evans," says weather.com Senior Meteorologist Jon Erdman. "Having traveled up this road, I can't imagine witnessing a tornado, there."

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Bob Glancy, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Boulder, Colorado told NBC News that this tornado is "not unheard of," but "just unusual." Most tornadoes in high terrain are weak, he said.
July 2012 will go down as the lowest July tornado count since 1951.
"The preliminary tornado count for July 2012 is 24 tornadoes (as of July 30)," reports Tornado Expert Dr. Greg Forbes.
"It got so hot and dry early (in the summer), and we've just continued to cook and dry out over the Central U.S.  That's caused the below average tornado count in July 2012."
However, just because the pattern isn't favorable, doesn't mean tornadoes can't happen.
(More: Tornado Safety | Tornado Risk Map)
"Incredibly, a July 21, 1987 F4 tornado in the Tetons of northwest Wyoming traveled 24 miles and was up to 2.5 miles wide, leading to a massive blowdown of trees," said weather.com's Senior Meteorologist Jon Erdman. "That tornado touched down between 8,500 and 10,000 feet in elevation."
Colorado has averages about 50 tornadoes a year, for the past two decades. Most of those, however, occur on the plains east of Denver and not in the mountains.
The highest record tornado occurred in 2004 when a twister touched down in California's Sequoia National Park at an elevation between 12,000 and 12,500 feet.