Starting on August 20 in Washington, D.C., “we, the people” launched a protest to raise our citizen voices against TransCanada / Cononco Keystone XL pipeline project. People are sitting in front of the gates of the White House to bring attention to this issue. The Park Police are slapping plastic handcuffs on them and keeping them under custody.

This is a two-week campaign (Aug. 20-Sept. 3) in which leading environmentalists including Wendell Berry, Naomi Klein, and Bill McKibben will join a peaceful campaign of civil disobedience to block the approval of a dirty oil pipeline that will cross the United States. As one Canadian wrote, “This [pipeline] will make the Great Wall of China look like Tom Sawyer’s picket fence.”

August Farewell – The Last Sixteen Days of a Thirty-Three-Year Romance by David G. Hallman

It was August 7, 2009, when the doctor stood at the foot of the hospital bed and with a deliberation that was both efficient and compassionate, looked directly at David Hallman and his partner Bill Conklin and said, "Our diagnosis is pancreatic cancer, stage four." In his thoughtful and deeply personal memoir, David Hallman narrates the sixteen days after Bill was diagnosed with terminal cancer and intersperses vignettes drawn from their thirty-three years together as a gay couple.