By Kevin Spak An American woman married her longtime Mexican beau on a raft in the middle of the Rio Grande river yesterday, in a strange ceremony designed to exploit an obscure treaty loophole. Ruben Alfonso Fierro and Stephanie Guerra have been living together in America for years, and have four American children…
From: http://www.newser.com/story/166083/us-bride-mexican-groom-wed-on-border-raft.html
By The Huffington Post News Editors
A US citizen has married her Mexican fiance on a raft on the river border between their two countries, a unique ceremony designed to meet US immigration requirements.
Stephanie Guerra, 26, and Ruben Alfonso Fierro, 27, defied the swirling currents of the Rio Grande and boarded a Zodiac raft that took them from the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo to the United States.
Guerra is a US citizen, but Fierro is not. The couple have four young children, all US citizens. Fierro had been living for years in the United States but had not legally immigrated.
When he temporarily left the country, he was not allowed to return.
The fastest way for the family to reunite was to tie the knot in the United States.
Guerra and Fierro cleverly took advantage of an 1848 treaty that allows free navigation for both sides along the Rio Grande, the river that forms nearly half of the 3,200 kilometer (2,000 mile) long US border with Mexico.
Judge Hector Liendo from Laredo, Texas climbed aboard the couple’s raft — in the river but technically in US territory — and conducted Wednesday’s ceremony that legally bound the couple until death does them apart.
US law enforcement personnel stood nearby just to make sure that none of the people aboard the raft, which included Mexican relatives, did not set foot on US soil.
While binational couples have married on bridges between the two countries for years, this is the first time that a marriage takes place on the Rio Grande river, according to the Big River Foundation, the US-based environmentalist group that sponsored the event.
Fierro told reporters that the marriage will now make it easier for him to legally immigrate to the United States and return to his family.
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More on Hispanic Heritage
From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/11/american-marries-mexican-_n_3059511.html
By Tyler Crowe, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
In sports, people love to hear about the next big thing. That sense of potential makes us tune in to see what all the chatter is about. So in the spirit of seeking future greats, let’s look at an unconventional energy play in the U.S. that has some industry experts proclaiming it as the next great American energy play.
Sizing it up
Using the same sports analogy, we need a standard to compare with. Much as basketball fans use the term “the next Jordan” as the bar of excellence, oil companies use two unconventional shale plays as the standard bearers for the industry: the Eagle Ford and the Bakken. While there’s some debate as to which play is better than the other, it’s not too much of a stretch to claim that they’re head and shoulders above the other areas.
Although both energy plays are different in many ways, they both have one thing in common: a strong liquids portfolio. So when we talk about the next great American energy play, we’re going to make sure it isn’t a gas-heavy giant like the Marcellus shale. The Bakken has a distinct advantage in the type of crude it produces. Continental Resources‘ wells in the Bakken are producing crude with an average API gravity of 42 degrees, a sulfur content about one-third less than other U.S. crudes, and one of the highest gasoline percentages of any crude in the country.
The Eagle Ford‘s advantage comes from its location. Hugging the Rio Grande just before it spills into the Gulf of Mexico, the basin has the advantage of being right next to the heart of America’s oil and gas refining. Being so close to this region, which has been in the energy business for more than a century, also gives it a robust pipeline infrastructure to move product to its final destination.
So if you’re scoring at home, we want a liquids-heavy play with high-quality crude and immediate access to pipelines and refineries.
So what’s the SCOOP with this new energy play?
Source: U.S. Geological Survey
The next great energy play has yet to come up with a definitive name, because it more or less straddles the Woodford shale and the Anadarko basins. Some have come to know it as the Anadarko-Woodford formation. Others call it the South Central Oklahoma Oil Province, or SCOOP. Whatever you want to call it, you should pay attention, because it could be making a big splash in the American energy market very soon.
How does this basin rate based on the criteria I just mentioned? Like the Eagle Ford, it has multiple fairways depending upon what you want to drill for. In Continental’s recent investor-day presentation on SCOOP, it said liquids content in the oil fairway were has high as 85%, but it also has NGL and gas fairways mixed in where a company can expect as much as 40% gas. With API gravity ranging from 45 to 60 …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
By hnn
President Obama, who has been criticized for favoring oil and gas development over land conservation in his first term, on Monday will designate five new national monuments, according to officials briefed on the decision.
They are the First State National Monument in Delaware and Pennsylvania; the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in New Mexico; the San Juan Islands National Monument in Washington State; Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument in Ohio and a monument commemorating Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railway in Maryland….
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at History News Network – George Mason University
By Kenneth Rapoza, Contributor
Oh, what will the middle class teen in Brazil do without someone to cook their rice and beans, press their clothes and make their beds every day? The days of average white Brazilians from Rio de Janeiro on to the Gaucho lands of Rio Grande do Sul living like families on novellas are over. I do declare it. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Officials at Bandelier National Monument say a search is under way for a missing hiker who was in northern New Mexico to look for the buried treasure of a Santa Fe antiquities dealer.
Members of the New Mexico Search and Rescue team and the Los Alamos Police Department say dispatchers received a call Friday from a man in Texas who reported that his girlfriend was missing.
The woman arrived at the monument on Thursday to hike to the Upper Falls. She called her boyfriend to let him know she would return the next day. She hasn’t been heard from since.
Searchers believe she headed toward the Rio Grande. The trail from the Upper Falls to the river is rough terrain, having been washed out by a flash flood in 2011.
