Anyone in a gas-drilling state has seen or heard the ads talking about how fracking creates jobs and those jobs are keeping “real” Americans’ communities alive. These ads often have a purported member of the community (extra points if it’s a grandmother or a hardworking dad) talking about how grateful they are to the fracking companies for saving their town.
The subtext, of course, is that people opposed to fracking are at best indifferent to the survival of these communities, at worst utterly opposed to it because of snobbery or hatred for people brave enough to do manual labor.


Israeli officials have taken the highly controversial step of creating the first university in a settlement in the West Bank. A higher education council for the occupied territory decided in favour of the upgrade for the college in Ariel, after it was recommended by Israel's education minister.
For the first time in generations, marijuana is legally growing in New Jersey.In a sign that the Garden State's budding medical marijuana program is finally moving forward, the first crop has been growing hydroponically for about a month in a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in an undisclosed location, officials said.
A compilation of independent scientific studies and reports related to the health impacts of hydrofracking was presented to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo today by a representative of a delegation of medical doctors and scientists.
The Boy Scouts of America has said it will continue to deny membership to gay people because doing so "is in the best interest of Scouting." Its announcement followed a two-year internal study which was prompted by heated debate over the policy of excluding gay Scouts and Scout leaders.
An explosive transcript of one of Tony Blair's final conversations with George Bush before the invasion of Iraq may be suppressed by the coalition government, Whitehall sources have confirmed.





























