For years, petroleum companies have practiced hydraulic fracturing (better known as “fracking”) in California, with virtually no government regulation or oversight. A 2011 investigation by Environmental Working Group revealed that fracking has been widely used in California for decades, contrary to assurances by officials that its use was uncommon in the state—even though they had never attempted to track the use of the controversial extraction method.
Now the Department of Conservation/Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR), the state agency nominally in charge of drilling, is considering new rules. Its “Pre-Rulemaking Discussion Draft” reveals few substantive changes and scant protection for the public.
California Wine Confronts Fracking
Bridge To Nowhere? NOAA Confirms High Methane Leakage Rate Up To 9% From Gas Fields, Gutting Climate Benefit
Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have reconfirmed earlier findings of high rates of methane leakage from natural gas fields. If these findings are replicated elsewhere, they would utterly vitiate the climate benefit of natural gas, even when used to switch off coal.
Indeed, if the previous findings — of 4% methane leakage over a Colorado gas field — were a bombshell, then the new measurements reported by the journal Nature are thermonuclear:
Al Jazeera completes deal to buy Current TV
Current TV, the small cable news channel that was co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, has been sold to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based media company.
The acquisition gives Al Jazeera, which is funded by the Qatar government, the opportunity to establish a footprint in the United States, where it already has an English-language version of its Qatar service -- called Al Jazeera English -- but only limited reach.
EXCLUSIVE: Vietnam Combat Vet Rips Zero Dark Thirty and the NRA!
I served in the 101st Airborne as a grunt in Vietnam in 1966 and as a Door Gunner in a Gun Ship with the 129th in 1967. I also served time in the stockade where I was tortured for speaking truth to power after I survived my tour across the pond. ‘Just saw Zero Dark Thirty and thought you might enjoy the rant.
The NRA has nothing to do with gun rights for anyone. The NRA is nothing but a ‘store front’ set up for the gun and bullet makers. Our fellow citizens are so stupid as to believe that the NRA has something to do with the 2nd Amendment. It never did…
Renditions continue under Obama, despite due-process concerns
The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.
U.S. agents accused the men — two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain — of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, then clandestinely taken into custody by the FBI and flown to the United States to face trial.
The secret arrests and detentions came to light Dec. 21 when the suspects made a brief appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom.
Study Suggests Lower Mortality Risk for People Deemed to Be Overweight
A century ago, Elsie Scheel was the perfect woman. So said a 1912 article in The New York Times about how Miss Scheel, 24, was chosen by the “medical examiner of the 400 ‘co-eds’ ” at Cornell University as a woman “whose very presence bespeaks perfect health.”
Miss Scheel, however, was hardly model-thin. At 5-foot-7 and 171 pounds, she would, by today’s medical standards, be clearly overweight. (Her body mass index was 27; 25 to 29.9 is overweight.)
Alex Baer: A Little Help for the Much-Partied Psyche
For anyone who's feeling the all-at-sea aftereffects of celebratory intemperance, and find their orbital re-entry into this new year a heat-shield-melting experience, we promise to go slowly. Apply the forehead ice. The soggy, greasy scudding along of a serious bout of intestinal crapulence today is instantly understood.
Everyone who wishes those darn butterflies would quit making all that rustling and flapping-around racket outside have our pity, not scorn. We'll simply wrap our feet in couch cushions -- like enormous Bullwinkle slippers -- and promise to not increase your agony with tuba practice or making you read in all caps.
How Colombian drug traffickers used HSBC to launder money
When several Colombian men were indicted in January 2010 on money-laundering charges, the case in Brooklyn federal court drew little attention.
It looked like a bust of another nexus of drug traffickers and money launderers, with mainly small-time operatives paying the price for their crimes.
One of the men was Julio Chaparro, a 48-year-old father of four who owned three factories that made children's clothing in Colombia.
Pakistan: Gunmen kill 5 female teachers, 2 aid workers possibly in retaliation for polio work
Gunmen on motorcycles sprayed a van carrying employees from a community center with bullets Tuesday, killing five female teachers and two aid workers, but sparing a child they took out of the vehicle before opening fire.
The director of the group that the seven worked for says he suspects it may have been the latest in a series of attacks targeting anti-polio efforts in Pakistan. Some militants oppose the vaccination campaigns, accusing health workers of acting as spies for the U.S. and alleging the vaccine is intended to make Muslim children sterile.
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