Press Conference Held To Save West Point Lake Water Level

Courtesy of lagrangecitizen.com

(Lagrange, GA) ? Troup County Commission Chairman Ricky Wolfe and LaGrange Mayor Jeff Lukken recently hosted a press conference at West Point Lake.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has proposed a change that would allow the lake to be full (at a recreational use level of 635 feet) only from June 1st through September 1st, for a maximum of three months out of the year. Previously, the lake has been full for five months out of the year, from June 1st through November 1st. If the proposed USACE change is put into place, it would amount to a 40 percent reduction in time that the lake could be used for recreational purposes.

Such a change would have a significant impact on the local economy. Depending on how the lake is managed, it could have an annual local economic impact ranging from $153 million to $710 million.

For example, Lukken said, organizers of the BASSmaster fishing tournament (which was held at West Point Lake last year and televised by ESPN2) would like to hold the tournament at the lake again in May 2013, but nobody knows if there will be enough water for such an event.

Wolfe and Lukken asked local citizens to sign a letter that will be sent to USACE as well as the governor, U.S. senators, and state senators and representatives. The letter will be available for signature at LaGrange City Hall (200 Ridley Ave.), Troup County Board of Commissioners Office (100 Ridley Ave.), and LaGrange-Troup County Chamber of Commerce (111 Bull St.).?Sign the petition online by clicking here.

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Watch video of the full press conference below:

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Full text of the letter regarding West Point Lake:

TO: Colonel Donald E. Jackson, Jr., Division Commander
USACE, South Atlantic Division

Colonel Eric Conrad, Deputy Division Commander
USACE, South Atlantic Division

Colonel Steven Roemhildt, District Commander
USACE, Mobile District

FROM: Undersigned Citizen

DATE: December 2012

RE: Guide Curve Change at West Point Lake

West Point Lake is a 25,684 acre mainstream Chattahoochee River impoundment that was identified by the US Congress as a recreational demonstration project and has been in existence since 1974. The Lake was authorized by Congress for five uses: 1) flood control, 2) hydroelectric power, 3) navigation, 4) sport fishing and wildlife development and 5) general recreation.

In regards to the latter two purposes, West Point Lake offers an abundance of wildlife and numerous ways to enjoy it. When the Lake was created, a forested valley was flooded; trees and other structures were left standing to provide an excellent fish habitat. Man-made fish attractors also improve fishing at the lake. Short, mild winters and long, warm summers plus gradual transitions between seasons characterize the climate?making the project conducive to year-round recreational and sport fishing use. The Lake?s impact on the local economy ranges from $153 million to $710 million, depending upon how the lake level is managed.

However, in recent years, the USACE has dropped water levels at West Point Lake for extended periods of time. Large expanses of exposed mud shoreline, bank erosion and smaller lake surfaces have become the norm, rather than the exception. Of course, I recognize that water is a limited resource throughout the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Basin and that droughts are becoming more frequent and longer in duration.

Historically, there is some seasonal variation in rainfall with the heaviest rains occurring in the winter and the lightest during the fall. This information, coupled with the fact that the USACE acknowledges that drawdowns are detrimental to recreational use, the fishery and soil erosion, makes the USACE?s decision to propose changing the guide curve for the Lake in the late summer/early fall perplexing.

Changing the guide curve and, in essence, reducing the potential for the Lake to be used for its intended Congressional authorizations during high recreational and sport fishing season by 40% is not acceptable. This decision, on an already beleaguered lake, would have detrimental effects not only on our community?s quality of life but especially to those businesses that depend upon tourism and recreation.

I strongly encourage you to reevaluate your decision and re-establish a guide curve for West Point Lake that matches the Congressionally authorized use of the Lake.

cc:
U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss
U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson
U.S. Congressman Lynn Westmoreland
Governor Nathan Deal
Pete Taylor, USACE, Mobile District
Pat Robbins, USACE, Mobile District
Randall B. Harvey, USACE, Mobile District
Senator Josh McKoon
Senator Mike Crane
Rep. Carl Epps
Rep. Randy Nix
Rep. John Pezold

Source: http://www.heardcitizen.com/press-conference-held-to-save-west-point-lake-water-level

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Americans from Central African Republic capital evacuated

Reuters

Hundreds protest in front of the French Embassy in the Bangui, Central African Republic, on Wednesday, expressing anger over the lack of response by the former colonial power to rebels advancing on the capital.

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By NBC News and wire services

U.S. diplomats and other American citizens have been evacuated from the Central African Republic and U.S. embassy operations have been suspended in the capital, Bangui, the State Department said Thursday. The move came as?rebel forces?advanced on the city.

"This decision is solely due to concerns about the security of our personnel and has no relation to our continuing and long-standing diplomatic relations with the (Central African Republic)," said State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell.

Insurgents on motorbikes and in pickup trucks have driven to within 45 miles of Bangui after weeks of fighting, threatening to end President Francois Bozize's nearly 10-year rule over the turbulent, resource-rich country.

Bozize appealed to the United States and France to help push back the rebels.

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Some U.S. Special Forces are operating in the country, trying to track down the Lords Resistance Army, a rebel group responsible for killing thousands of civilians across four African nations.?There was no indication that these forces would be used to aid Bozize against the advancing insurgents.

Earlier a senior defense official told NBC News that there were "several hundred" civilians, including Americans and citizens of close U.S. allies who may be evacuated, but comments by the State Department's Ventrell suggested fewer had left:?

"Ambassador (Laurence) Wohlers and his diplomatic team left Bangui today along with several private U.S. citizens," according to Ventrell.

The non-combatant evacuation operation transported "U.S. citizens and designated foreign nationals to safe havens in the region," according to a statement from?Defense Department spokesman Todd Breasseale. The flight out of Bangui was "wheels up" at about 7:15 p.m. ET.?

Paris said its troops would protect French nationals, but not be involved in repelling the rebels.?

Some 1,200 French nationals live in the CAR, mostly in the capital, according to the French Foreign Ministry, where they typically work for mining firms or aid groups.

French nuclear energy group Areva mines the Bakouma uranium deposit in the CAR's south ? France's biggest commercial interest in its former colony.?

Bozize on Thursday appealed for French and U.S. military support to stop the SELEKA rebel coalition, which has promised to overthrow him unless he implements a previous peace deal in full.

France: 'Those days are over'
He told a crowd of anti-rebel protesters in the riverside capital that he had asked Paris and Washington to help move the rebels away from the capital to clear the way for peace talks which regional leaders say could be held soon in Libreville, Gabon.

"We are asking our cousins the French and the United States, which are major powers, to help us push back the rebels to their initial positions in a way that will permit talks in Libreville to resolve this crisis," Bozize said.

Georges Gobet / AFP - Getty Images file

Central African Republic President Francois Bozize in 2008.

France has 250 soldiers in its landlocked former colony as part of a peacekeeping mission and Paris in the past has ousted or propped up governments ? including by using air strikes to defend Bozize against rebels in 2006.

But French President Francois Hollande poured cold water on the latest request for help.

"If we have a presence, it's not to protect a regime, it's to protect our nationals and our interests and in no way to intervene in the internal business of a country, in this case the Central African Republic," Hollande said on the sidelines of a visit to a wholesale food market outside Paris.

"Those days are over," he said.

France is increasingly reluctant to directly intervene in conflicts in its former colonies. Since coming to power in May, Hollande has promised to put ties with its former colonies on a healthier footing.

The rebel advance has highlighted the instability of a country that has remained poor since independence from Paris in 1960 despite rich deposits of uranium, gold and diamonds. Average income is barely over $2 a day.

Regional African leaders, meantime, tried to broker a ceasefire deal and rebels said they had temporarily halted their advance on Bangui to allow talks to take place.

Officials from around central Africa were to meet in Bangui later on Thursday to open initial talks with the government and rebels.

A rebel spokesman said fighters had temporarily halted their advance to allow dialogue.

"We will not enter Bangui," Col. Djouma Narkoyo, the rebel spokesman, told Reuters by telephone.

Previous rebel promises to stop advancing have been broken, and a diplomatic source said rebels had taken up positions around Bangui on Thursday, effectively surrounding it.

The atmosphere remained tense in Bangui the day after anti-rebel protests broke out, and residents were stocking up on food and water.

Government soldiers deployed at strategic sites and French troops reinforced security at the French embassy after protesters threw rocks at the building on Wednesday.

Bozize came to power in a 2003 rebellion that overthrew President Ange-Felix Patasse.

The government holds little sway outside the capital, and in some parts of the country, the consequences of conflicts in troubled neighbors Chad, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo have spilled over.

This report includes reporting by Reuters and NBC News' Courtney Kube.

More world stories from NBC News:

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and

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Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/27/16193391-us-evacuates-americans-from-central-african-republic-capital-as-rebels-close-in?lite

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WEB STREAMING | DaniWeb

How to develop web streaming in php?

Authored by happygeek in the Web Development forum, this related news story currently has 4 replies, was last posted to 4 weeks ago by seomasterx and has been tagged with the following keywords: web, browser, news, google, chrome, microsoft, internet, ie, client, stats, analysis, market. It begins, ?Over the last couple of days the online media seems to have gone crazy for ...?

firdousahmad

Junior Poster in Training

73 posts since May 2012

Reputation Points: -1

Solved Threads: 3

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Hi,

You mean video and audio streaming?

You will need to have an ffmpeg, mp4 box, flvtool2,mencoder and mplayer, ffmpeg-php capable server. You can also look into red5 media server as an option.

Additional items you would need is a reliable flash player like the ones offered by jwplayer and flowmotion.

If you have a limited bandwidth on your hosting account, make sure to have your video metadata injected with flvtool2 (flv files only), for the h264 and mp4 you can move the moov atom in the front of the video, by using mp4box. These tools will allow you to pseudo-stream your contents without translating all the media file size into bandwidth consumptions.

Lastly, you will need to know all of the basics of ffmpeg-php and the basics ffmpeg encoding commands.

veedeoo

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616 posts since Oct 2011

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firdousahmad

Junior Poster in Training

73 posts since May 2012

Reputation Points: -1

Solved Threads: 3

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You will need to look for a reliable hosting company. This is the hosting company I used for developing video streaming applications.

I think they also have a ready to install FREE video streaming applications e.g. phpmotion, clic bucket, vidiscript and many others.

MORE INFO. NOT RELATED TO YOUR QUESTION
I was one of the developer of the vidiscript open-source version 1.0 to version 1.3, but that is the old version we wrote that is still being distributed by most ffmpeg hosting companies. I was able to released all the bug fixes two years ago 2010 and then it was followed by major fix for php 5.3+ in my last year release.

I wrote version 3.7 of the open source, but got really busy at my schooling, and then I have to trashed bin all of the 3.7 version because I want to write it as a video content management using my own mvc framework with an option of smarty, twig and tinybutstrong template engines. I am still on track for my projected release date by mid 2013. This will be called veedeoo scripts which is an open source.

veedeoo

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Source: http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/threads/444164/web-streaming

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First Tennessee, BBVA unit took big Fed loans in late 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - First Tennessee Bank and a U.S. affiliate of Spanish bank BBVA were among the largest borrowers from the Federal Reserve's emergency lending program in late 2010, according to data released on Friday.

By far the largest loan in the quarter was the roughly $1.02 billion that First Horizon unit First Tennessee borrowed on November 24, 2010 for a two-day term. That one loan represented about 29 percent of all primary credit lending from the discount window for the quarter.

Company officials said they took the loan because of a technical problem relating to wire transfers between the bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Because it was the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, and the wire transfer glitches were taking too long to repair, First Tennessee agreed to take the loan as a stopgap until the holiday ended and the problems were fixed.

The BBVA unit borrowed $200 million in two transactions. A representative of the parent company in Spain said the transactions were a routine test of the discount window mechanism by its U.S. wholesale unit and said it conducts similar operations every year.

The Fed began releasing the data earlier this year, albeit with a two-year lag, under the terms of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The central bank had lobbied to keep such lending figures private for fear it could create a stigma for emergency loans in the future.

Other small but frequent borrowers during the final quarter of 2010 were First National Bank of Jeffersonville, New York, and Grand Bank of Hamilton, New Jersey. Representatives at both banks were not available for comment.

Some 456 separate financial institutions took loans of one kind or another during the quarter.

The Fed data can be found at: http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/reform_discount_window.htm.

(Reporting by Ben Berkowitz and Pedro da Costa; Additional reporting by Ryan McNeill in New York; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/first-tennessee-bbva-unit-took-big-fed-loans-172404407--sector.html

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Stock Buybacks: Separating Fact From Fiction ... - Yahoo! Finance

You hear it on financial television or read it in the paper all the time: Company XYZ issues a huge stock buyback program. Conventional wisdom says buybacks are sign that the company itself thinks its stock is cheap. In theory, this would be the ultimate "inside information." The reality is quite different.

In this edition of Investing 101, Greg Milano, co-founder & CEO of Fortuna Advisors, a company specializing in shareholder value consulting, walks us through some of the basics on stock buybacks and sheds light on whether or not they're a reliable signal to buy shares alongside the company itself.

What's a Buyback?

Simply enough, Milano says a buyback is just the "act of a company taking some of its cash or some money it might borrow, and buying some of its own shares."

Significantly, an actual buyback versus one that's just announced, are different things. Often times a company will set a buyback policy of bidding for a stock under the current prices. It's a way for the board of directors to start buying its own shares when the stock price dips.

Why Would a Public Company Buy Its Own Shares?

It's not as silly a question as it may seem. Being public means selling a portion of the company to raise cash; usually for the purposes of cashing out insiders and investing in corporate opportunities. Selling shares to the public then buying them back sounds dangerously close to trading your own shares.

Milano says there are two basic reasons for buybacks. First, the company may not have anything better to do with its cash and they view this as having a better potential return than an investment in its own shares. In other words, the board of directors simply thinks a stock is too cheap.

The second reason is to increase earnings per share. Fewer shares mean EPS reports look more impressive than they really are.

Do Buybacks Lead to Higher Stock Prices?

Milano says yes in the short term. After that, not so much.

"Over time the companies that buy back more stock tend to produce worse shareholder returns,"he says. Earnings per share may have the appearance of growth, but Wall Street sees through the illusion.

"If you're growing EPS in a way that's really just financial engineering, the market doesn't think much of that," Milano states. Investors want real growth, not a shuffling of assets.

Add it up and buybacks are a lot of sizzle without much steak. They may give a short term pop to a stock, but once the excitement fades the shares tend to give back the gains, even with the company buying alongside regular investors.

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/stock-buybacks-separating-fact-fiction-130319620.html

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Easy resolutions to boost your family life - Lifestyle, Frontpage ...

TRADITIONALLY many of us look at January 1 as the opportunity for a fresh new beginning. We use it to quit smoking, start diets or join the gym. We see it as a tangible new start where we can set about improving ourselves with goals and ambitions for a new year that stretches ahead, filled with promise.

Resolutions are generally all about self-improvement, but for 2013, why not consider making a resolution that will improve your whole family's lives, and not just your own? From cooking to hugging to swimming, take inspiration from these 10 suggestions below.

Learn something new

Few of us are blessed with perfect students, and, for many, homework proves a real challenge. What better way to show your support then by going back to school yourself? Sign up for a class in 2013, whether it's a new language or skill like photography, playing an instrument or sewing. Let your children see that learning can be fun, and that it doesn't need to be done under duress. Better still, empower them by asking for their help when you are practising your lessons.

Go swimming together

Most parents recognise the importance of taking their children to swimming lessons. It's an essential life skill that may go on to save your child's life someday. While most children love water some dislike the hassle of swimming lessons and it can be a challenge to get them into the pool each week.

So, for 2013, vow to go swimming together as a family every so often. Rather than just drop them off at lessons, get into your swimsuit, jump in with them, dive, play, race and splash -- basically, be a kid for an hour with your kids.

Hug more

Hugs are good for us. They release a hormone called oxytocin which makes us feel more relaxed and content. In our house, we have a tradition called a Family Hug, where both of us scoop up the three kids and sing "Family hug, family hug, family hug" to the tune of "Here we go, here we go, here we go!" The kids love this 60-second bonding ritual and often request a Family Hug out of the blue. I recommend starting a hugging ritual that leaves everyone feeling warm and fuzzy afterwards.

Teach the kids to cook

Childhood obesity is a real problem and we, as parents, are the ones with the power to turn these frightening statistics around. You don't need to be Nigella or Rachel Allen to give your kids great tasting food. Whether you're a decent cook or hopeless case you should click on www.breakingeggs.com in 2013. This brilliant online cookery show is for parents and children and shows Connemara chef Cliodhna Prendergast cooking real food at home with her three young children.

Exercise more

There's more to being healthy than eating well, and exercise is key. Children follow example, so if they see mum or dad slumped in front of the TV seven nights a week then that normalises laziness. On the other hand, if they know dad goes for a run on a Saturday morning or Mum does Zumba during the week then they grow up accepting that exercise is a fun and normal hobby. Let them try karate or gymnastics or skateboarding until they find something they love. But be the first to lead by example. Make 2013 the year you commit to regular exercise and invest in your health.

Explore your county

Invest in your family's wellbeing by spending more quality time together in the New Year. Family time doesn't have to cost money, and shouldn't simply be a trip to the cinema where you all sit in the dark without talking. Take a leaf out of older generations' books and make day trips your modus operandi for 2013. From a DART trip around Dublin Bay to a trek in the mountains, a windswept walk on a favourite beach or visit to a museum or art gallery, try to enjoy a new experience every few weeks. The weather may be too cold to contemplate picnics, but as soon as spring kicks in break out the packed lunches and make your family trips even more memorable.

Get to know

your cousins

Never underestimate the value of your extended family. Emigration has, once again, torn families apart, so if you're lucky enough to have siblings living in Ireland then make 2013 the year you spend more time together. Your children will learn a lot about family and relationships by the way you interact with your parents, brothers and sisters. Sow the seeds of love now and let them see that a brother or sister is a gift for life. Give your children the opportunity to know their cousins and encourage them to build special friendships with their extended family.

Play board games

When the obsession with the new Wii, PlayStation and Nintendo has worn off, why not introduce a new family night? Once a fortnight switch off the TV, consoles, mobiles and laptops and sit down together with the family's favourite board games for some good, old-fashioned entertainment. From traditional card games to Connect 4, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Cranium and Pop to the Shops (for the little ones), board games can provide hours of fun and laughter. If the tech-heads object to this, then it's up to you to show them how much fun can be had.

One-on-one time

Resolve to indulge each of your kids with a little one-on-one time. Pick a fun activity you know each child will love and make the day all about them. Whether it's shopping, going to a match, cycling or a trip to the zoo, let them become the centre of mum or dad's world for the day. Be sure all siblings get taken on an outing of equal appeal and try to do this a few times a year.

If in doubt, bake a cake!

Kids of all ages love cakes. Most adults do, too. If you've broken every other resolution on this list, set aside an hour and bake a cake together. (Baking is surprisingly simple, but if it terrifies you then buy a pack of foolproof cake mix) Sharing warm cake from the oven (in moderation, of course) will guarantee you Parent of the Year status for another year.

A perfect resolution.

- Jillian Bolger

Source: http://www.herald.ie/lifestyle/easy-resolutions-to-boost-your-family-life-3337963.html

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