The United States, as it turns out, has a lot of unburned natural gas trapped as tiny bubbles in our shale bedrock. Until about a decade ago, much of this trapped underground gas was considered unrecoverable. But that all changed with the rollout of a drilling technique (pioneered by Halliburton) called hydrofracturing, or fracking.
Fracking bores horizontally through the bedrock, blasts it with explosives, and forces into the cracks, under enormous pressure, millions of gallons of water laced with a proprietary mix of poisonous chemicals that further fracture the rock. These boreholes provide the channel out of which the gas flows.
Here’s how hydraulic fracturing introduces cancer risks into communities from the start and into perpetuity:
Breast Cancer Action: Why Fracking Must Be Banned
Alex Baer: For Best Success, You Must Succeed - Part 2
Money, success -- it all gets tumbled and jumbled around together, mixed together and stirred ' round and 'round. It's little wonder we've lost track of everything that might rightly be beneath any banner called Success. We usually restrict Success to dance a jig on the rusty insignia of a battered money clip.
Maybe this is a Big Step Up for the Species. Hard to tell. We used to invoke Success only on the heads of dead animals we were dragging back to the hearth in the cave.
Soldiers win $85m compensation from Iraq war contractor
A jury has ordered an $85m (£53m) compensation payout by the American military contractor Kellogg Brown and Root – which helped build Guantánamo Bay and has tendered to run key police services in Britain – after finding it guilty of negligence for illnesses suffered by a dozen soldiers who guarded an oilfield water plant during the Iraq war.
After a three-week trial the jury deliberated for two days before reaching a decision against KBR, which used to be part of Halliburton corporation. KBR was ordered to pay $6.2m to each of the soldiers in punitive damages and $850,000 in non-economic damages.
IRS not enforcing rules on churches and politics
For the past three years, the Internal Revenue Service hasn't been investigating complaints of partisan political activity by churches, leaving religious groups who make direct or thinly veiled endorsements of political candidates unchallenged.
The IRS monitors religious and other nonprofits on everything from salaries to spending, and that oversight continues. However, Russell Renwicks, a manager in the IRS Mid-Atlantic region, recently said the agency had suspended audits of churches suspected of breaching federal restrictions on political activity. A 2009 federal court ruling required the IRS to clarify which high-ranking official could authorize audits over the tax code's political rules. The IRS has yet to do so.
Alex Baer: For Best Success, You Must Succeed - Part 1
To be successful, be successful.
Hmmm. That one almost demands a Homeresque "D'oh!" be parked at the end to spike its inscrutable truth. On second thought, the only thing here that's obvious is that this opening thought's going to take a few more tries to fully flesh out.
Here's Sir Arthur Helps, from 1868: "Nothing succeeds like success." Getting warmer.
All right, with apologies, let's start again. This time, we'll go a few laps 'round the ol' philosophical cul-de-sac. After all, if you're going to contemplate the broader Moneygoround, then gathering one's thoughts aboard a conceptual merry-go-round may prove useful.
Top Romney advisor crusaded to outlaw homosexuality and abortion in Africa
In the conservative political world, Jay Sekulow is hailed as an avowed crusader for religious liberty and the super-attorney behind the American Center for Law and Justice, a group Time magazine called a "powerful counterweight to the liberal American Civil Liberties Union."
Unlike many conservatives, Sekulow, a Fox News legal analyst, has long backed Mitt Romney, whom he calls his friend. Sekulow advised Romney's 2008 presidential campaign, and has reprised that role during the 2012 election. He and his group have also joined forces with anti-gay crusaders in Africa to criminalize homosexuality.
CIA rushed to save diplomats as Libya attack was underway
The CIA rushed security operatives to an American diplomatic compound in Libya within 25 minutes of its coming under attack and played a more central role in the effort to fend off a night-long siege than has been acknowledged publicly, U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday.
The agency mobilized the evacuation effort, took control of an unarmed U.S. military drone to map possible escape routes, dispatched an emergency security team from Tripoli, the capital, and chartered aircraft that ultimately carried surviving American personnel to safety, U.S. officials said.
America's nuclear safety under scrutiny after Oyster Creek's Sandy alert
We know the bad news about superstorm Sandy: the Jersey shore was devastated and many towns remain waterlogged. New York suffered a direct hit, with the city's mass transit system flooded and part-paralyzed for days to come.
But there is good news, too, and that is all that it failed to do. Sandy did not kill hundreds – as Hurricane Katrina did in New Orleans in 2005 – thanks, in part, to timely evacuations and rescue efforts. And luckily, it did not trigger an even greater disaster at one of the region's nuclear power plants. But it could have.
Alex Baer: Presidential Blowout Sale - Everything Must Go!
That's right, value seekers -- and there's a seeker born every minute -- we're having our quadrennial Presidential Liquidation Sale days early, by popular demand... (and by our own insistence that we get all these odds and ends out of here, and out from under foot, before someone in this overstuffed warehouse accidentally gets hurt or maimed.)
We might have lost our lease! (Although Aunt Tilly says it might be in the junk drawer.) We've definitely lost our minds! (You kidding me? This campaign has gone on long enough to drive anyone completely bats.) But, we haven't yet lost our nerve! (That's right, if you don't come see us today, we can't make any money!)
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