WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

As conventioneers pack up their model turbines and fly home from the 2013 Windpower exhibition at McCormick Place, they have the wind at their backs.

That’s because the nation’s largest convention center announced this week it would purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs) to offset 100 percent of its energy use with wind power. The three-year arrangement with Atlanta-based Sterling Planet will procure credits worth some 331,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to McCormick Place, or about as much as 69,000 passenger vehicles each year.

The cavernous conference center uses about 130 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, but its plan to buy RECs doesn’t mean wind turbines will now be wired to McCormick Place.

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Before Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Berry's young daughter were discovered in the basement of a Cleveland home on Monday, held captive by a neighborhood man for over 10 years, the nation was captivated by another abducted girl-turned miracle story: the case of Elizabeth Smart.

In 2002, 14-year-old Smart was kidnapped from her bedroom in Salt Lake City. She was found nine months later, only 18 miles from her home, and her captors (who also raped her repeatedly and 

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Blackhawks tamed the Wild 3-0 in Minnesota last night.

The Hawks lead the series three games to one, and can close it out tomorrow night at the United Center. After the underdog Wild played a tough physical game three, the Hawks responded and pushed back in game four.

It has been a terrific comeback for one Blackhawk-Patrick Sharp. He scored two goals last night and four in this opening series. Not bad for the Hawks left winger who missed a lot of time during the regular season with a bad shoulder. During the shorten season he only tallied six goals.

Minnesota was forced to go to their third goalie of this series when Josh Harding was injured stopping a shot by Jonathan Toews with three minutes left in the first period. Harding gave up a re-direct goal by Sharp in the opening period.

The Wild started the second period with inexperienced 23 year old Darcy Kuemper, the first shot he saw turned out to be an unassisted goal by Sharp.  Another Hawk having a good series is Bryan Bickell; he scored on an awkward wrist shot late in the game.

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June brings another month of Pride to Chicago, the LGBTQA community’s annual celebration of, resilience and progress. Pride is a call for remembrance and for visibility, and events like Dyke March and TGIF 2013 use our collective voice to say we are here, we have survived and we will thrive. Our bodies speak louder than words.

Although the month is an ode to our diversity, we too often think of Pride as a Boystown event, a celebration of men on half-naked white men on floats dancing to Katy Perry.

United Latino Pride is working to shift that and remind us what Pride can be. For organizer ULP Danny Olvera Orozco, pride is “an absence of shame, a refusal to apologize for who you are.” Being gay and Latino, Olvera Orozco stated that his community experiences Pride at “the intersections of possibility.” Olvera Orozco said, “We’re both and more. Pride is showing our beautiful queer and brown selves.”

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Unapologetically announcing that I was going out on a limb with a chainsaw, in our post-South by Southwest episode of Sound Opinions, I expanded on this blog’s earlier hyper-enthusiastic gush about the young London-based quartet Savages (I saw god and/or Savages) by declaring, “I have not seen a more galvanizing or gripping rock ’n’ roll front person since Kurt Cobain two decades ago.”

I’d amend that now, but only because I was slighting the band as a whole by singling out singer Jehnny Beth, who really does have Kurt-level charisma.

So, what did I mean by that comparison?

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The White House Council on Environmental Quality honored 12 teachers with a Presidential Award for environmental education Tuesday, but in Chicago a band of green-minded volunteers added more than 700 new students and teachers to an environmental organization present in every one of the city's 50 wards.

The Chicago Conservation Corps' student program has graduated roughly 6,500 students and teachers who have devoted some 150,000 hours of service since the program begin in 2006.

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