The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed loosening regulations on methane leaks in the oil and gas industry. The new rules would save the industry hundreds of millions with only a marginal increase in greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants.

The change would give more breathing room to the hydraulic fracking industry, which has dominated the recent growth in the oil and gas sector.

The proposed rule (pdf) would roll back some regulations of oil and gas wells, storage tanks, and processing plants by giving them more time to fix leaks (60 instead of 30 days) and more time between inspections (a year instead of half a year) among few other conveniences.

The EPA expects the new rules would save the industry $484 million between 2019 and 2025.

"These common-sense reforms will alleviate unnecessary and duplicative red tape and give the energy sector the regulatory certainty it needs to continue providing affordable and reliable energy to the American people," said EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler in a Sept. 11 release.

Savings for the industry would help boost domestic energy production, a priority for President Donald Trump, Wheeler said.

In response to the new proposal, Clean Air Task Force, an environmental nonprofit, accused the EPA of attempting to

"cozy up to the oil and gas industry" and "placing regulatory rollbacks above protecting the public from dangerous air pollution," in a Sept. 11 release.

The Syrian Army sent more troops and equipment to the Northwestern parts of the country on Sunday to reinvigorate its combat capabilities for an imminent major operation in Idlib province.

The army forwarded a long convoy of military vehicles and tank-carrying trucks along with a large number of fresh soldiers to Idlib and Northern Hama to end terrorists' presence in Idlib, Aleppo, Lattakia, and Hama provinces.

In the meantime, a field source reported that hundreds of fresh army men have been deployed at contact lines with Tahrir al-Sham Hay'at (the Levant Liberation Board or the Al-Nusra Front) terrorists and militants of the Operation Olive Branch in Afrin in recent days.

The sources further said that the army is planning to kick off a large-scale operation in different flanks to liberate Idlib province.

Meanwhile, the Arabic-language al-Mayadeen TV Network reported that the terrorists that come from China and are known as Uyghur as well as Turkistani and Uzbek militants have transferred their family members to the borders with Turkey in Idlib and Lattakia provinces.

A new book highly critical of Islam and Muslims has been flying off the shelves in Germany to become a non-fiction bestseller. Mainstream media panned it for a simplistic approach to the religion.

The controversial book titled "Hostile Takeover: How Islam Impedes Progress and Threatens Society" reached the number one spot on Der Spiegel's non-fiction list after being on the market for less than a fortnight. It's a critique of Islam as a religion, which the author sees as detrimental to people sharing it, based on a literal reading of the Koran.

Written by one-time SPD politician and former member of the executive board of the Bundesbank, Thilo Sarrazin, the work comes eight years after Sarrazin's previous take on Muslims titled "Germany Abolishes Itself". Focusing on what he called a failure of multiculturalism policies, that book accused Arab and Turkish immigrants of "dumbing down" the German society, and shifted 1.5 million copies.

The EU is doing away with the twice-yearly clock changes and has given member states until April to decide if they will remain on summer or winter time. But there are fears Europe is heading for time-zone chaos.

European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc on Friday announced that the EU will stop the twice-yearly changing of clocks across the continent in October 2019.

The practice, which was used as a means to conserve energy during the World Wars as well as the oil crises of the 1970s, became law across the bloc in 1996.

All EU countries are required to move forward by an hour on the last Sunday of March and back by an hour on the final Sunday in October.

Bulc said EU member states would have until April 2019 to decide whether they would permanently remain on summer or winter time.

Florence, the powerful storm that has already left at least 12 people dead and about one million without power on the United States East Coast, continued to move inland at an ominously sluggish pace on Saturday (Sept 15), fat with rain and threatening to deliver hardship and devastation far beyond the wind-battered coasts.

A Category 1 hurricane when it plowed ashore near Wilmington, North Carolina, early on Friday, Florence was downgraded to a tropical storm hours later, and the damage of the first blow along the coast was not as bad as many had feared. But an early Saturday report from the National Hurricane Centre had it crawling west at 3.2kmh with maximum sustained winds of 80kmh.

It is likely to mow a path north-west across nearly all of South Carolina, promising a brutal weekend of heavy rain and potential flooding for millions. Storm conditions could also lead to tornadoes and landslides, officials said.

A busload of IDF soldiers clashed with Palestinians at the Kalandia refugee camp in West Bank after the vehicle entered the camp allegedly by mistake. Israeli media reported injuries and the ongoing "rescue of the soldiers."

A teenage Palestinian boy had his hands in the air and was standing far away from the Israeli soldier who shot and killed him.

A disturbing video was posted online this week that shows the moments before a 16-year-old Palestinian boy was shot down by Israeli soldiers while he stood in a field, with his hands in the air.

The boy has been identified as Ahmed Masabah Abu Tuyur, and he was pronounced dead on Saturday morning, as a result of the injuries he sustained from the shooting on Friday, according to a report from Haartz. The shooting reportedly occurred during a protest, and Abu Tuyur can be seen picking up a rock off of the ground and hurling it into the air.

The defense attorneys representing the illegal alien accused of murdering 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts say it is the foreign national's "constitutional right" to receive American taxpayer funding to fight the murder charges against him.

As Breitbart News reported this week, 24-year-old illegal alien Cristhian Bahena-Rivera has been given $5,000 in U.S. taxpayer dollars to hire an independent investigative team to fight the murder charges against him.

Last month, law enforcement officials announced that Tibbetts' body was found in a cornfield in her rural hometown of Brooklyn, Iowa after she was last seen jogging on July 18.

Illegal alien Cristhian Bahena-Rivera, a 24-year-old from Mexico, has been charged with first-degree murder in Tibbetts' death after police say he admitted to confronting and chasing down the young woman. The illegal alien lived in a region of Iowa that was surrounded by sanctuary cities, as Breitbart News noted, and an initial autopsy report revealed that Bahena-Rivera allegedly stabbed Tibbetts to death.

"You have blood on your hands. You're a murderer," shouted one of the protesters at Judge Brett Kavanaugh during the Senate hearings of his nomination to the Supreme Court. This apocalyptic rhetoric had been espoused before - at none other than the Yale Law School, immediately after President Donald Trump announced the school's graduate as his chosen replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy. There, a group of alumni and professors circulated an open letter declaring that selecting Kavanaugh "presents an emergency - for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country." People "will die" if Kavanaugh is confirmed, the letter announced. By the time of the hearings, Kavanaugh had gone from being a future murderer to an actual one.

These protests, intended to shut down the proceedings - and the fantastical social-media charge that one of Kavanaugh's former clerks displayed a white-power sign during those hearings - showed how academic identity politics is transforming the non-academic world. To be sure, there were differences: the Capitol police actually intervened to restore order and the Judiciary Committee is ideologically balanced. But the long-term prognosis for reason and civility is not good.

The key feature of academic diversity ideology is the assertion that to be a member of an ever-growing number of favored victim groups at a college today is to be the target of pervasive bigotry on campus - despite, well, being favored. Taught by a metastasizing campus-diversity bureaucracy to believe that they are subject to an existential threat from circumambient bias, students equate nonconforming ideas with "hate speech," and "hate speech" with conduct that should be punished, censored and repelled with force if necessary. This victimology fuels the efforts to shut down speech that challenges campus orthodoxies. Dozens of times in the past several years alone, classrooms have been invaded; professors, accosted and even assaulted; and outside speakers, silenced.

Biscayne Park Police Chief Raimundo Atesiano used to brag about solving 100 percent of the town's crimes. However, this week he admitted to how he accomplished such an impossible feat - he framed innocent black people.

A scathing report from the Miami Herald details that on multiple occasions, former chief Atesiano told his cops to target random black people and charge them with crimes in open cases so they could boast their clearance rate - which is defined as the amount of open cases solved by the department.

According to the Miami Herald, Atesiano, 52, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge of depriving the three suspects of their civil rights because he and the officers framed them. Although race was not a factor in the federal case against the former police chief, the three wrongly arrested men are black.

"If they have burglaries that are open cases that are not solved yet, if you see anybody black walking through our streets and they have somewhat of a record, arrest them so we can pin them for all the burglaries," one cop, Anthony De La Torre, said in an internal probe ordered in 2014, according to the Herald. "They were basically doing this to have a 100% clearance rate for the city."