The Bristol Community Events Committee has announced that its Summer Concert Series will open on Thursday, July 1, with the Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki Trio performing traditional Celtic music and classic Irish sing-alongs, as well as the group’s own compositions.
Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki has toured nationally, but says his primary focus is on his own group, where he plays fiddle, Matthew Jensen is on guitar, and Chris Noyes is on upright bass.
The free concerts take place in Kelley Park on Thursday nights, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The entire schedule for July and August follows: July 1 — Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki Trio;
July 8 — Uncle Steve Band; July 15 — Dancing Under the Stars NH (local celebrities in a dance competition to benefit Voices Against Violence; rain date is July 23); July 22 — Club Soda Band; July 29 — BlackLite Band; Aug. 5 — Annie & the Orphans; Aug. 19 — Morgan-Nelson Band; and Aug. 26 — Freese Brothers Big Band. There is no concert on Aug. 12 due to the annual Rotary Penny Sale taking place that evening.
Hammering Out A Compromise
Members of the New Hampshire House and Senate Committee of Conference have agreed to part of House Bill 2, which makes the statutory changes necessary to fund the main budget bill, HB1; but their discussions are continuing on some of the tougher provisions of HB2. They must submit a final report by Thursday.
Some provisions of the bill have nothing to do with the budget, but were inserted anyway, including a prohibition on abortions after the 24th week of pregnancy, with a few exceptions; it would make it a crime for a physician to perform the procedure outside of those guidelines.
The committee agreed to use taxpayers’ money to make a $10 million award to financial speculators who fell victim to Financial Resource Mortgage’s Ponzi scheme that bilked its investors of their savings.
Members approved a school voucher program; $25 million to support the building of affordable housing; money for water treatment grants; and $50 million of general fund money to stabilize the Department of Transportation budget, which supports not only highway operations, but also the Department of Safety, the Attorney General’s Office, and the judicial system.
They agreed to dedicate 30 percent of the money raised through the rooms and meals tax to cities and towns, although the target was 40 percent before the state discontinued revenue-sharing during the recession.
The Rush To Go Electric
The Guardian carried a report about the environmental consequences of turning to electricity in the move away from fossil fuels. Lithium batteries play a key role in electric storage batteries, but extracting the “critical minerals” used to produce clean energy technologies may be sacrificing communities and ecosystems.
The article focuses on the the Atacama salt flat in northern Chile, where two multinational corporations, SQM and Albemarle, pump brine to the surface where evaporation ponds produce a lithium-rich concentrate.
“The entire process uses enormous quantities of water in an already parched environment,” the article states. “As a result, freshwater is less accessible to the 18 indigenous Atacameño communities that live on the flat’s perimeter, and the habitats of species such as Andean flamingoes have been disrupted. This situation is exacerbated by climate breakdown-induced drought and the effects of extracting and processing copper, of which Chile is the world’s top producer. Compounding these environmental harms, the Chilean state has not always enforced indigenous people’s right to prior consent.
We previously wrote about a more environmentally friendly method, proposed by Berkshire Hathaway, Controlled Thermal Resources, and Materials Research, which would extract lithium from the brine of the Salton Sea in Colorado after the water passes through geothermal plants. If successful, according to proponents, that approach could produce about 100,000 tons of lithium annually, or 20 times the current domestic production.
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