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The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority must repay $146 million over the next two months for a credit line used to buy oil to generate electricity.  Credit Dennis M. Rivera-Pichardo for The New York Times

dealbook.nytimes.com - by Michael Corkery - July 1, 2014

Puerto Rico’s electrical utility is running out of money and time to negotiate a deal with its lenders, part of a broad reckoning for an island that relies on Wall Street to finance some of its most basic functions.

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority must repay $146 million to Citigroup over the next two months for a credit line used to buy oil to generate electricity. It is also uncertain whether the authority will be able to renew a $550 million credit line from Scotiabank for fuel purchases, people briefed on the matter said.

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Sites like Pueblo Bonito in northern New Mexico reached their maximum size in the early A.D. 1100s, just before a major drought began to decrease birth rates throughout the Southwest. Credit: Nate Crabtree

Scientists chart an ancient baby boom—in southwestern Native Americans from 500 to 1300 AD

phys.org - June 30, 2014

Washington State University researchers have sketched out one of the greatest baby booms in North American history, a centuries-long "growth blip" among southwestern Native Americans between 500 to 1300 A.D.

It was a time when the early features of civilization—including farming and food storage—had matured to where birth rates likely "exceeded the highest in the world today," the researchers write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A crash followed . . .

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CLICK HERE - PNAS - RESEARCH - Long and spatially variable Neolithic Demographic Transition in the North American Southwest

timesofindia.indiatimes.com - June 17, 2014

SYDNEY: Large concentrations of trash in the oceans, also known as "plastic soups", are as dangerous as climatic change, one of the experts in the field, Mike Moore said, Australian media reported.

These high concentrations of ocean garbage "are currently killing a more animals than climate change", Moore said.

. . . "We are facing a new phenomenon. In fact, it is a new habitat which does not have precendents in the planet's history," Moore added.

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CLICK HERE - Tracking the garbage deserts of the ocean

RESEARCH - Origin, dynamics and evolution of ocean garbage patches from observed surface drifters

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