In a recent application to the state, Pacific Gas and Electric asked to raise service rates by 5 percent for their best energy-conserving customers, typically smaller households.
The reason? To give price breaks of 2.5 to 5.7 percent to their biggest energy clients who use between 131 and 300 percent or more than the baseline monthly average.
PG&E uses a five-tier system to differentiate their customers. The system is supposed to promote efficiency by charging lower rates to customers who use the least amount of energy.
But the company, with profits up 4.6 percent in the third quarter of this year, said they’re just trying to be fair.
TVNL Comment: Meet America's real enemy!
A large number of American generals and at least 1,500 US soldiers arrived in Israel this week for one of the largest joint land exercises ever held between the two nations.
The genome of a domestic horse has been successfully sequenced by an international team of researchers. The work, published in the journal Science, may shed light on how horses were domesticated.
The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a new investigation into a covert Bush administration Defense Department program that used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage.
One of the 23 Americans convicted today by an Italian court says the United States "broke the law" in the CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.
If you’ve ever read George Orwell’s, 1984, you know that, “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.” This seems eerily similar to the lie that we’ve been sold about the terrorist threat to our country. The lie that we need a “100-year war” because this enemy doesn’t abide by the “traditional” rules of war (whatever THAT means), and that we need to take the battle to them so we don’t end up with a “mushroom cloud” over here, is just that: a LIE. Perhaps a quick review of history will drive home this point:
The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.
I grew up in a fundamentalist missionary family that in the 1970s and 80s morphed into my father's activity as one of the founders of the Religious Right. We would hobnob with Republican leaders from Ronald Reagan to Gerald Ford and the Bush family, Jack Kemp and many others. One day it dawned on me that the far right of the Republican Party --- in other words its base --- actually hates America.
Among the many dubious provisions in the 2005 energy bill was one dubbed the Halliburton loophole, which was inserted at the behest of — you guessed it — then-Vice President Dick Cheney, a former chief executive of Halliburton.
