Saving digital files in commercial memory banks called cloud storage is a cheap and convenient way for long-term storage of documents, photos, music and video. Private users as well as businesses can access them from anywhere and share them with whomever they give the password to. Providers, such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3, claim almost absolute security. But computer scientists say the protection should be in the users’ hands. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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From: MeNeedIt

Management experts are always coming up with innovative ideas to improve the work environment, inspire employees and raise productivity. Big companies in Germany, like Lufthansa, Siemens, Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen’s Audi, are bringing harmony to the workplace by having symphony orchestras and encouraging employees to play music together. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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From: MeNeedIt

Amazon’s diligent, computerized know-it-all is the latest technology to enlist in NORAD Tracks Santa, the military-run program that fields phone calls and emails from children around the world eager to ask when Santa will arrive.

Now entering its 62nd year, NORAD Tracks Santa will go live Sunday, with about 1,500 volunteers answering calls and emails at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Updates will be posted on social media and at www.noradsanta.org.

And if you have Amazon’s voice-activated Echo device, you can ask Alexa once you enable the function.

Technology has always been at the heart of NORAD Tracks Santa, which got its start in 1955 with an old-school glitch.

An advertisement in a Colorado Springs newspaper that year invited kids to call Santa, but it mistakenly listed the number for the hotline at the U.S. Continental Air Defense Command. CONAD, as it was called, had the job of monitoring a vast radar network from a combat operations center in Colorado Springs, searching the skies for any hint of a nuclear attack by the onetime Soviet Union.

Col. Harry Shoup, who was in charge of the operations center, took the first child’s call. Once he figured out what was happening, he played along, he said in a 1999 interview with The Associated Press.

“Here I am saying, ‘Ho, ho, ho, I am Santa,’” said Shoup, who died in 2009. “The crew was looking at me like I had lost it.”

He told his staff what was happening and told them to play along, too.

It’s not clear what day the first call came in, but by Friday, Dec. 23 of that first year, the AP reported that CONAD was tracking Santa.

“Note to the kiddies,” the story began, under a Colorado Springs dateline. “Santa Claus Friday was assured safe passage into the United States by the Continental Air Defense Command combat operations center here which began plotting his journey from the North Pole early this morning.”

Maybe hoping to soothe a jittery nation, the story added: ”CONAD, Army, Navy and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the U.S. against possible attack from those who do not believe in Christmas.” That was likely a reference to the officially atheist Soviet Union.

The history of the program over the next few years isn’t well documented, said Preston Schlachter, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD, a U.S.-Canadian command that eventually succeeded CONAD.

But TV and radio stations began broadcasting Christmas Eve bulletins from CONAD and NORAD. And by the 1980s, NORAD was soliciting phone calls from children. (The number is now 877-Hi NORAD or 877-446-6723.)

NORAD added its Santa-tracking website in 1997. It went on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in 2008. Mobile apps came in 2011, Instagram in 2016.

Last year, NORAD Tracks Santa got nearly 154,200 phone calls and drew 10.7 million unique visitors to its website. It snared 1.8 million Facebook followers, 382,000 YouTube views and 177,000 Twitter followers.

And this year, Alexa joins the party.

Technology and the Santa Claus story have a long but uneasy history together, said Gerry Bowler, a Canadian historian whose books include ”Santa Claus: A Biography” and ”Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday.”

“Every new technology gets tried on Santa,” Bowler said. In the late 1800s, for example, he was depicted chatting with children on the telephone, then a new and wondrous invention.

But NORAD’s Santa tracker is one of the only technological upgrades the public has welcomed into the Santa story, Bowler said.

“I think that it will be ultimately incompatible with most technology,” Bowler said. “I’m sure of it, because he represents something timeless, and we don’t want him to become dated.

“We don’t want him using a fax machine or carrying around one of those 5-pound cellphones,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt

For those interested in experiencing life on the Red Planet, the time has come. There are four operating stations in the world where the environment on Mars is replicated: in the U.S., Australia, Iceland and the Arctic. VOA’s Alex Yanevskyy was given exclusive access to the research station in the Utah dessert. Here’s his report.
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From: MeNeedIt

Quietly, Bonna Neang Weinstein wept. Her husband, Howard Weinstein, sitting next to her, held her hand, comforting her.

“It reminded me of everything and myself,” she said of a December 15 performance of “Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia” at the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The first major symphonic work to remember the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians under the rule of the Khmer Rouge regime undid Weinstein, a survivor, who arrived in the U.S. in 1984.

“I could not believe that I lived through that,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

The production is the first collaboration between composer Him Sophy and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Rithy Panh, who directed and designed the production.

Both artists survived the Khmer Rouge, which by some estimates killed 90 percent of Cambodia’s artists.

The two are in the forefront of Cambodia’s cultural renaissance, a movement to revive and preserve the ancient arts that were nearly excised, while educating new generations about their cultural heritage. Because of the Khmer Rouge genocide from 1975-1979, half of Cambodia’s population is younger than 25.

The production presented in New York is also aimed at the Cambodian diaspora. It has played on tour in Australia, where the Sydney Morning Herald described it as “light after utter darkness, a promise of resurgence…” and, after sold-out performances in Boston, it is headed to the Philharmonie de Paris next year before opening in Cambodia in 2019, the 40th anniversary of the end of the Khmer Rouge era.

Named after ceremony

“Bangsokol” is named after a ceremony performed at Cambodian funerals. A bangsokol is both the white cloth placed over the body of the deceased and the act of its removal, which signified the passage into the next life, where the spirits of the dead find rest. Bangsokol is also remembering the dead at a watt, the Buddhist temple, with prayer and offerings.

Each audience member found a bangsokol draped across their seat with a note: “We invite you to place this shroud around your shoulders for the duration of the performance.”

“Bangsokol” weaves Khmer traditional music enhanced by a Western orchestra and a Taiwanese chorus performing the libretto by Trent Walker.

Throughout the one-hour production, archival footage — the faces of Cambodian refugees and Khmer Rouge victims, black-clad Cambodians working in fields — flickered across three flat screens hung high behind the performers. Footage of aerial bombings was followed by a clip of then-U.S. President Richard Nixon saying, “Cambodia is the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.”

“Whatever the film showed, it took me there,” Bonna Neang Weinstein said. “It has been more than 30 years, almost 40 years, but I still dream that I am in the Pol Pot regime.”

For many in the audience, the power of the past showed as quick swipes with damp tissues wiping away silent tears.

“If I’d know this was about the Khmer Rouge, I would not have come,” said a weeping To Voeun, 79, of Alexandria, Virginia. The Khmer Rouge killed her husband, leaving her to raise seven children alone, two of whom remain in Cambodia.

For Bonna Neang Weinstein, the owner of the Khmer Art Gallery in Philadelphia who attended “Bangsokol” with her husband and her three children, the Nixon clip hit home.

She explained: “I cried because I am hurt that the U.S. government bombed my country,” an event that many believe gave rise to the Khmer Rouge.

‘I cannot let it go’

“The U.S. has not admitted anything and not even apologized to us,” said Weinstein, who lost eight family members to the Khmer Rouge. “It mentions at the end ‘Let it all go.’ But I cannot let it go because the perpetrators have not acknowledged their guilt and apologized.”

Sophy Him, who composed the rock opera Where Elephants Weep, told VOA Khmer that his requiem does more than commemorate those who died under the Khmer Rouge.

“We remember the deaths, but also wish and encourage people in the world to have hope and love each other,” said Sophy Him, who lost two older brothers to the regime.

“This performance is for all people in the world who have suffered from genocides and wars,” he said. “This performance is also a warning to the world about the impact of war and genocide.”

That warning was not lost on Jonathan Hulland, a senior program officer at the American Jewish World Service in New York City, who told VOA after the performance that by putting on the white shroud, he felt he was part of the performance.

Hulland, who has been to Cambodia four times, most recently in October, appreciated the warning implicit in the performance. 

“I felt some shame and some guilt,” said Hulland, who was born in the United Kingdom and is now an American citizen. “I am an American now, and I do feel like this country has such a responsibility for what happened.”

Joseph Melillo, BAM’s executive producer, said, “BAM plays a very significant role, not only here in New York City, but in this country of introducing to our culture, the work of other cultures.”

Melillo, who has been to Cambodia twice, said he decided to bring “Bangsokol” to BAM because of Phloeun Prim, the executive director of Cambodian Living Arts (CLA), “who has a clear vision of what he wants for his country.”

The performance was commissioned by CLA, a nonprofit group that works to support the revival of traditional art forms.

Mary Read, who serves on the CLA board of directors, said, “Bangsokol” showed “that there is compassion.”

“Art comes to the heart,” said Read, an Australian known internationally for her Sydney fashion boutique and online store. “By healing the heart, you can heal the spirit of the country.”

The performance ends with Chhay Yam, a joy-filled Cambodian dance accompanied by singing. Two Cambodian-American children of the production’s volunteer helpers participated, learning the steps and how to play traditional musical instruments.

Hollywood luminary Angelina Jolie, who holds Cambodian citizenship and directed First They Killed My Father ​with Rithy Panh, recently saw the performance with her children Maddox Jolie-Pitt, whom she adopted as a baby in Cambodia, and Shiloh Jolie-Pitt. They all wore white shirts and black pants, traditional Khmer funeral dress.

Jolie told VOA after the performance, “I think this was a deeply moving performance. I think it is brilliantly done. I think it is very powerful. It put you into a meditation. It’s like an hourlong prayer to pay respect, to remember, and to help us think of Cambodia the past, the ancient past, the more recent past, the present, and take us forward into a more hopeful future.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Americans are traveling in record numbers this season, according to the American Automobile Association’s (AAA) annual estimate, which forecasts more than 107 million will travel by road, rail or air between now and the start of 2018.

Despite higher gas prices, travel volume is expected to be 3.1 percent higher than last year’s holiday season, the association said.

AAA said this season marks the ninth consecutive year of rising year-end holiday travel in the United States. Since 2005, it said, holiday travel has grown by 21.6 million, an increase of 25 percent.

The majority of travelers, 97.4 million, will make their way to their destinations by road, while 6.4 million people are expected to fly to see family and friends or to take holiday vacations. Only 3.6 million are expected to take to trains, buses or cruise ships for the holiday.

Apparently, not all holiday travelers are making family visits.

AAA said, for the second year in a row, the top destinations for holiday travel are Orlando, Florida, and Anaheim, California – the homes of theme parks Walt Disney World and Disneyland.

Sunny destinations also make up the next seven entries on the top 10 destinations: Cancun, Mexico; Hawaii, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and several locations in Florida. The only non-beach destination on the list? No. 10, New York City.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

For millions of Britons, a traditional Christmas Day includes turkey, Brussels sprouts, Christmas pudding, and a special seasonal episode of “Doctor Who.” 

The global success of the venerable sci-fi series means that fans around the world will also tune in Monday to watch Peter Capaldi’s final adventure as the space-hopping Time Lord known as the Doctor. (Americans can see it on BBC America at 9 p.m. Eastern). 

The show has had a dozen Doctors over its 54-year history, and this is one of those bittersweet moments when one lead actor hands over to another. At episode’s end, viewers will see Capaldi transform, through a Time Lord process known as regeneration, into Jodie Whittaker, the first woman to play the part.

First, adventure

Before that comes a rollicking and poignant adventure that moves from the World War I trenches to the South Pole, features mysterious creatures made of glass and (of course) involves a jaunt in the Tardis, a time-and-space machine shaped like an old-fashioned British police phone box. 

The episode loops back into the show’s own history, featuring an appearance by the very first Doctor, a white-haired gent who appeared on TV screens in 1963. He was played by William Hartnell, who died in 1975; David Bradley fills the role here. 

Mark Gatiss, a regular writer for the show who guest stars in the episode as a British Army officer marooned in time, said there was “a valedictory feel” on the set of the finale.

“The sense of eras ending all over the place was very profound but at the same time it was actually a very happy experience,” Gatiss told The Associated Press in an interview.

Gatiss has loved “Doctor Who” since childhood and has written for it since 2005.​

BBC hit

He’s better placed than almost anyone to explain the enduring allure of a show that survived early years of wobbly production values and a 16-year absence from screens between 1989 and 2005 to become a childhood touchstone, an emblem of British culture, and a money-making export for the BBC.

Partly, he says, it’s due to the Doctor, an eccentric and “slightly off-kilter” hero. Partly it’s “the randomness of the adventures,” which have sent the Doctor to ancient Rome and the Stone Age, distant galaxies and the end of time. 

And partly it’s the show’s “slightly ramshackle Britishness, in the very idea of an amazing space-time machine which looks like a beaten up old box.”

“And somewhere deep down in its absolute essentials, something genuinely magical,” he added.

World-view changing

The episode is also the swansong of Steven Moffat, who has been the show’s executive producer and chief writer since 2009. 

Moffat, who also co-created detective series “Sherlock” with Gatiss, has no doubt about the show’s place in television history. He told audience members at a recent preview screening that “Doctor Who” is “the greatest television show ever made.” 

“People change their view of the world and what they are capable of because of a silly show about a man who travels around in time and space in a police box,” Moffat said.

“Count the scientists, the musicians, the scholars, the writers, the directors, the actors, who became what they are because of this show. Count, as you might say, the hearts that beat a little faster because of ‘Doctor Who.’ I don’t even know what is in second place, but without doubt and by that most important measure ‘Doctor Who’ is the greatest television series ever made.”

​New Doctor, new mood

“Doctor Who” fans have become accustomed to changes of actor, and the shifts in mood that go with each new Doctor. The announcement that Whittaker (best known from detective series “Broadchurch”) would be the next occupant of the Tardis was front-page news in Britain. Many fans were delighted, though some grumbled at the idea of a Time Lady.

Gatiss, currently working with Moffat on a new adaptation of “Dracula,” thinks the naysayers come mostly from that never-satisfied subset of fans “who will definitely watch it 28 times just to make sure they hate it.”

“This is a series about an alien with two hearts who lives in a transcendental phone box, and yet somehow can’t change sex?” he said. “That is not an argument for 2017.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Louisiana officials have chosen a sugar cane farm as the next home for residents of a tiny, shrinking island, a move funded with a 2016 federal grant awarded to help relocate communities fleeing the effects of climate change.

Dozens of Isle de Jean Charles residents are to be relocated about 40 miles (64 kilometers) to the northwest, in Terrebonne Parish, Nola.com|The Times-Picayune and The New Orleans Advocate report.

The state is negotiating to purchase the 515-acre (208-hectare) tract, which is closer to stores, schools and health care — and which is less flood-prone than the island, which has been battered by hurricanes and tropical storms.

Louisiana’s Office of Community Development expects to finalize the purchase in the coming weeks.

“Everybody seems to think it’ll be a pretty quick property negotiation,” said Mathew Sanders, the community development office’s resilience program manager.

Construction on the new settlement could begin in late 2018 or early 2019, meaning island residents most likely will have to endure at least one more hurricane season before moving.

Last year, Isle de Jean Charles became the first community in the U.S. to receive federal assistance for a large-scale retreat from the effects of climate change. About $48 million was allotted to purchase land, build homes and move the island’s approximately 80 full-time residents.

Tribe’s area mostly gone

Isle de Jean Charles is home to members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe. It has lost 98 percent of its area since 1955. Causes include erosion, sinking of coastal land, and Mississippi River levees that block replenishing river sediment.

Climate change-triggered sea-level rise is expected eventually to drown the island.

Owned by Acadia Agricultural Holdings, the sugar farm is valued at $19.1 million, but the actual purchase price may be about half that, Sanders said.

Albert Naquin, the tribe’s chief, said he looked at the site two years ago and it was immediately his favorite.

“It’s in the best part of the parish; it’s the highest area,” he said. “I pushed for that one.”

A master plan for the new development being created by the consulting firm CSRS will include not just houses but also community spaces and maybe even features such as crawfish ponds.

“We want to move the people on the island in such a way that the community can sustain itself,” Sanders said. To that end, officials may try to attract some businesses, including retail.
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From: MeNeedIt

NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless, the first person to fly freely and untethered in space, has died. He was 80.

He was famously photographed in 1984 flying with a hefty spacewalker’s jetpack, alone in the cosmic blackness above a blue Earth. He traveled more than 300 feet away from the space shuttle Challenger during the spacewalk. 

“The iconic photo of Bruce soaring effortlessly in space has inspired generations of Americans to believe that there is no limit to the human potential,” Sen. John McCain said in a statement. The Arizona Republican and McCandless were classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center said Friday that McCandless died Thursday in California. No cause of death was given.

McCandless said he wasn’t nervous about the historic spacewalk.

“I was grossly over-trained. I was just anxious to get out there and fly. I felt very comfortable … It got so cold my teeth were chattering and I was shivering, but that was a very minor thing,” he told the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, in 2006. 

During that flight, McCandless and fellow astronaut Robert L. Stewart pioneered the use of NASA’s backpack device that allowed astronauts walking in space to propel themselves from the shuttle. Stewart became the second person to fly untethered two hours after McCandless.

“I’d been told of the quiet vacuum you experience in space, but with three radio links saying, ‘How’s your oxygen holding out?’ ‘Stay away from the engines!’ ‘When’s my turn?’ it wasn’t that peaceful,” McCandless wrote in the Guardian in 2015.

But he also wrote: ”It was a wonderful feeling, a mix of personal elation and professional pride: it had taken many years to get to that point.”

McCandless was later part of the 1990 shuttle crew that delivered the Hubble Space Telescope to orbit. He also served as the Mission Control capsule communicator in Houston as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969.

During his spacewalk, “My wife was at mission control, and there was quite a bit of apprehension,” McCandless wrote. “I wanted to say something similar to Neil when he landed on the moon, so I said, ‘It may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me.’ That loosened the tension a bit.”

Born in Boston, McCandless graduated from Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in Long Beach, California. He graduated from the Naval Academy and earned master’s degrees in electrical engineering and business administration. 

He was a naval aviator who participated in the Cuban blockade in the 1962 missile crisis. McCandless was selected for astronaut training during the Gemini program, and he was a backup pilot for the first manned Skylab mission in 1973. After leaving NASA, McCandless worked for Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Colorado.

“Bruce served his country with humility and dignity, and encouraged all of us to reach new heights,” McCain said.

Survivors include his wife, Ellen Shields McCandless of Conifer, Colorado, two children and two grandchildren.
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From: MeNeedIt

A U.S. jury has convicted two former soccer officials from South America on charges of corruption, the first trial verdicts in a U.S. investigation into world soccer’s governing body, FIFA. 

The federal jury in New York deliberated for a week before Friday’s verdict and will continue deliberations next week for a third soccer official. 

The jurors convicted Jose Maria Marin, former head of Brazil’s soccer confederation, and Juan Angel Napout, former head of Paraguayan soccer, of racketeering conspiracy, the top charge against the men. Marin was convicted on six of seven counts and Napout on three out of five.

Deliberations in the case of the former president of Peru’s soccer federation, Manuel Burga, who faces one count of racketeering conspiracy, will continue.

The three soccer officials were arrested in 2015, accused of agreeing to take millions of dollars in bribes to bestow television and marketing rights to soccer matches.

U.S. prosecutors have indicted 42 officials and marketing executives as part of the investigation that shook up FIFA. At least 24 people have pleaded guilty.

The U.S. government’s main witness, a former marketing executive from Argentina, Alejandro Burzaco, testified that he and his company arranged to pay $160 million in bribes over the course of several years.

The defense argued that the former soccer officials had been framed by Burzaco and other witnesses who were trying to get leniency in their own cases.
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From: MeNeedIt

One big problem confronts Africa as it tries to predict how its weather patterns will shift in the face of climate change: Almost all the climate models for the continent were created in the United States or Europe.

Now South African climate researcher Francois Engelbrecht has changed that by developing a climate model for Africa, in Africa.

The model aims to “generate reliable projections of future climate change over Africa,” said Engelbrecht, the chief researcher for climate studies, modeling and environmental health at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

Those projections include figuring out which areas will get more or less rainfall — “a key to adapting agriculture successfully” — or looking at where African grasslands might give way to thickets as more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drives the growth of trees.

“We know that climate is changing, risks are changing, including changes in the risk of heat waves, flooding, drought, tropical cyclones, changes in growing seasons [and] rising temperatures,” said Rachel James, a visiting climate researcher at the University of Cape Town.

“People everywhere will need to adapt to these changing conditions in the years and decades to come,” she told Reuters.

“The problem is that we don’t know exactly what will happen in any one location. It’s challenging to predict which areas might get more rainfall and which might get less.”

More detail

The new African-built climate model aims to generate much more detailed and place-specific projections, to give decision makers the information they need to prepare for coming changes.

It responds, in part, to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noting in 2014 that Africa was the only region of the world in which climate forecasts had not improved in recent years.

Developed in collaboration with Australia, the model will look at things such as how El Nino patterns are likely to affect Africa in the future and how African monsoons may shift, Engelbrecht said.

Africa has a lot of expertise on its ecosystems, regional oceans, and climate, but this knowledge has not been built into models up to now, he said.

Models developed by northern hemisphere countries have tended to focus more on areas of northern interest, such as the Arctic, where sea ice is fast disappearing, he said.

And global models that include Africa generally are not specific enough to be helpful on the ground in a particular country or region, said Neville Sweijd, head of the South Africa-based Alliance for Collaboration on Climate and Earth Systems Science.

“All models are not complete representations of reality and have to be tested for sensitivity to various features and phenomena,” he said, including the direction of winds.

James noted that “climates in Africa are particularly challenging to model” because of the influence of local events such as key thunderstorms, “which occur on finer scales than the models can resolve,” she said.

A ‘game changer’

Jean-Pierre Roux, who manages the Future Climate for Africa project, an effort, backed by UK aid, to improve climate information and resilience on the continent, said he worries that weak climate information and weather information services that do not meet the needs of vulnerable communities could hurt millions in Africa.

Having African scientists involved in climate information efforts is important as African researchers naturally have more expertise on local and regional weather and climate in many cases, he said.

Also, “it gives a better chance for African priorities to shape the research agenda and leaves behind a legacy in terms of improved African capacity to conduct research,” he said.

African climate scientists say they are also worried that the continent does not yet have enough climate scientists to collaborate with other experts globally on models and other work.

“A lot of model application work is being done in Africa, but not by Africans or at African institutions. That disempowers African intellectual development in this field,” Sweijd told Reuters.

Engelbrecht sees the development of his model as a chance to build skills in everything from climate science to high-performance computing.

“It is a game changer in enhancing our human capacity in the climate and earth sciences,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Nestle, which sells Arrowhead bottled water, may have to stop taking millions of gallons of water from Southern California’s San Bernardino National Forest because state regulators concluded it lacks valid permits.

The State Water Resources Control Board notified the company on Wednesday that an investigation concluded it doesn’t have proper rights to pipe about three-quarters of the water it currently withdraws for bottling.

“A significant portion of the water currently diverted by Nestle appears to be diverted without a valid basis of right,” the report concluded.

Nestle Waters North America was urged to cut back its water withdrawals unless it can show it has valid water rights to its current sources or to additional groundwater.

The company, a division of the Swiss food giant, also was given 60 days to submit an interim compliance plan.

“We are disappointed by the fact that we have just received a copy of the report from the State Water Resources Control Board and that others appear to have received it much sooner,” Nestle said in a statement Thursday. “Once we have had an opportunity to review the report thoroughly, we will be in a position to respond.”

The move was applauded by activists who have fought to turn off Nestle’s tap in the forest.

Amanda Frye, who filed one of the complaints that prompted the investigation, said she was pleased with the result although she hadn’t read the entire report.

“I feel like it’s a victory,” Frye told the Desert Sun of Palm Springs. “I’m happy that the State Water Resources Control Board did pursue it and look into it. I feel that they’re protecting the people of California.”

Nestle took about 32 million gallons of water from wells and water collection tunnels in the forest last year. A long water board investigation concluded that it only had the right to withdraw 26 acre-feet per year, or about 8.5 million gallons.

Nestle has contended that it inherited rights dating back more than a century to collect water from the forest northeast of Los Angeles. It uses the water in its Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water.

Opponents of the water withdrawal have long sought to turn off Nestle’s tap, arguing that it lacked proper permits and that the water usage could harm the local environment and wildlife, particularly in the midst of California’s drought.

In 2015, the U.S. Forest Service was sued by environmental and public interest groups who allege the Swiss-based company was being allowed to operate its Strawberry Canyon pipeline on a permit that expired in 1988. However, the court ruled that the company could continue water operations while its application to renew the permit was pending.
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From: MeNeedIt