State fair goes green

The N.C. State Fair opens today in Raleigh, and this year it's embracing a green ethos. Organizers are offering a Green NC exhibit to help attendees adopt more environmentally sustainable living practices, and there will be greater attention paid to recycling, use of more energy-efficient light bulbs, and collection of used cooking oil from all those delicious fried foods for conversion to biodiesel. You can read more about the fair's environmental efforts in today's News & Observer here.

Science Café to address drought crisis

Want to learn more about the drought and what we as a community can do to conserve water? Come to January's Science Café, a monthly gathering sponsored by the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences and local chapters of Sigma Xi, a scientific research society.

The event will be held Tuesday, Jan. 15 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Irregardless Café at 901 W. Morgan St. in Raleigh. A talk by State Climatologist Ryan Boyles will begin at 7 p.m. followed by a question-and-answer session. To attend, RSVP to katey ahmann@ncmail.net. For more details, contact Ahman at 919-733-7450, ext. 531.

Public invited to attend Harris fire safety meeting Tues. a.m.

A top Nuclear Regulatory Commission official will be in Raleigh this week to meet with several watchdog groups and discuss ongoing fire safety concerns at Shearon Harris and other nuclear power plants, and the public and media are invited to come and listen in.

NRC Commissioner Gregory B. Jaczko will meet with representatives of the N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, Union of Concerned Scientists, Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and Beyond Nuclear on Tuesday, Oct. 16 from 9 to 10 a.m. in the Department of Insurance Hearing Room on the third floor of the Dobbs Building, 430 N. Salisbury St. (click here for directions). The groups launched a legal action a year ago over the Harris plant's 14 years of violating regulations to prevent fires, a leading risk factor for nuclear accidents.

The meeting comes as the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, and the NRC's Office of Inspector General are looking into fire safety at nuclear plants. The GAO got involved at the request of U.S. Rep. David Price (D-N.C.). N.C. WARN Executive Director Jim Warren said he expects that GAO and OIG officials will attend the Tuesday meeting.

Local Democracy Under Siege: A reading at Quail Ridge Books

On Thursday, Sept. 27, University of North Carolina faculty members Donald Nonini and Dorothy Holland will be at Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books to read from their new work titled Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interest and Private Politics.

To examine the state of U.S. democracy, Nonini, Holland and their five co-authors (Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick-McGlathery, Thaddeus Guldbrandsen, and Enrique Murillo Jr.) lived for a year in five North Carolina communities where they observed public meetings, conducted interviews, and listened in on conversations at bus stops, barber shops, soccer games and workplaces. Their collaborative ethnography sheds light on how diverse members of a community think about and experience politics in ways that transcend merely voting, and on the relationship between neoliberal economics and democracy.

The reading begins at 7 p.m., and all proceeds from the book's sales go to Democracy North Carolina, a Durham-based organization that works for democratic reform of the electoral process. Quail Ridge Books is located at 3522 Wade Ave.