In a grassroots victory, a coal fired electricity generating facility in Holyoke will close permanently in October. The Mount Tom Power Plant currently burns about 1,200 tons of coal every day. “Now we will have less air pollution,” said Vilma Vazquez, a Holyoke resident who attended rallies to close the facility.

The movement to close the coal facility was organized by www.n2nma.org and www.ToxicsAction.org.

Police arrested 12 women for non-violent civil disobedience at the gates of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which is three miles from Massachusetts and a stone's throw from New Hampshire.

One of the women who was arrested is Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of www.CodePink.org, a direct action for peace group with offices in California and Washington, DC.

Last year, Benjamin interrupted a nationally televised speech by President Obama and asked him to close the Guantánamo Bay prison. The United States government has been torturing people at Guantánamo, according to:

On May 15, there was a rally on the Greenfield town common to protest plans for a fracked gas pipeline that would cross the valley. Massachusetts state Representative Denise Andrews of Orange, near Greenfield, told the Greenfield Recorder newspaper she is ready to risk arrest for civil disobedience to stop the pipeline. “The priority ought to be conservation, reduction, efficiency, renewables, and then the more challenging energy resources,” she said.

The Pioneer Valley, and the area around Brattleboro and Keene, are at the highest risk nationally of having privately owned forests turned into parking lots, roads, strip malls, vacation houses, and other kinds of so-called "development." That's according to the U.S. Forest Service's map, below. Susan Stein wrote the 2009 report that the map appeared in. She works for the Forest Service. “Based on today's data, the map would probably be similar,” Stein told the Valley Post earlier this month.

On April 1 at 5:30 p.m., there will be a protest at the gates of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The public is invited. Vermont Yankee is three miles from Massachusetts and a stone's throw from New Hampshire. The protest organizers' main goal is to close the reactor immediately and permanently. Other goals relate to how and when the site will be cleaned up after the reactor is closed. Vermont Yankee is currently scheduled to close permanently late this year or early next year.

The city of Northampton is logging a city-owned forest. Photos of the logging are below. Mayor David Narkewicz is rejecting all requests from journalists who want to interview him about the logging, according to a woman who answered the phone in the mayor's office on March 11.

An environmental group is asking the public to contact the mayor and tell him to stop the logging. The group has a web site at www.MAforests.org and can be reached via Chris Matera at christoforest@maforests.org or by phone at (413) 341-3878.

More information about the situation in Northampton is at:

These photos were taken at a farm in Dover, Vermont, near Brattleboro, on March 13. The first photo shows two cows looking out from their barn at a snow storm. These cows have free access to the outdoors all winter. Cows may be "healthier and happier outside" during winter in Wisconsin, according to a study by the University of Wisconsin. The study is at

www.cias.wisc.edu/outwintering-dairy-cattle-animal-health-issues

Habib Koite, a singer and guitar player who lives in Bamako, Mali, in west Africa, will play at the Iron Horse in Northampton on February 16 at 7 p.m. Koite (pronounced KWA-tee) performed an outstanding public concert in Amherst in 2011. He possesses an unusually warm voice and guitar skills that inspired Bonnie Raitt to famously tell him after one concert, "I would drink your sweat."

On February 10, the 209 nurses who work at the Greenfield hospital will go on strike. The strike was approved by a vote of the nurses. “One day last week I had to work until 10 p.m. I start at 7 a.m.,” Linda Judd told the Valley Post in October. She is a nurse at the hospital. “They don't let you leave until you finish all your paperwork.”

The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant may be more dangerous when it closes later this year than it is now, an expert told the Valley Post this week. Vermont Yankee is so dangerous that no insurance company will cover it. The facility gets its insurance from the federal government. A major accident or act of sabotage at Vermont Yankee would cause thousands of “prompt fatalities,” and leave an area the size of New England uninhabitable for generations, according to a report by the federal government.

Vermont Yankee is three miles from Massachusetts and a stone's throw from New Hampshire.