A coalition of 276 environmental and consumer organizations including Americans Against Fracking, 350.org, Berks Gas Truth, Center for Biological Diversity, CREDO Action, Democracy for America, Environmental Action, Daily Kos, Food & Water Watch, MoveOn, Progressive Democrats of America, The Post Carbon Institute and United For Action delivered to President Obama and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) nearly 650,000 public comments asking the federal government to ban hydraulic fracturing—fracking—on public lands.
This development amplifies the message sent by the 7,800 people who called the White House yesterday, urging President Obama to protect communities and their resources from the negative effects of fracking. The deadline for submitting public comments to the federal government regarding drilling and fracking on federal lands is today, Aug. 23.




The German magazine Der Spiegel says the U.S. National Security Agency secretly monitored the U.N.'s internal video conferencing system by decrypting it last year.
On August 8, the day before the annual memorial service for victims of the bombings at Hiroshima, Seaman, then deputy director-general for information in the now-defunct Ministry of Public Diplomacy, posted a message on Facebook: “I am sick of the Japanese, ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Peace’ groups the world over holding their annual self-righteous commemorations for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the consequence of Japanese aggression. You reap what you sow."
Not long ago, the domestic supply of natural gas was so limited that facilities were constructed in U.S. ports to import natural gas. However, fracking changed the supply situation. Now, the United States produces more natural gas than it can use. As a result, prices have plummeted to approximately $4 per thousand cubic feet.
On July 22, one day after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pro-nuclear Liberal Democratic Party won control of Japan’s upper house of Parliament, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) revealed that contaminated groundwater from its Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was leaking into the Pacific Ocean.
The U.S. government's efforts to determine which highly classified materials leaker Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency have been frustrated by Snowden's sophisticated efforts to cover his digital trail by deleting or bypassing electronic logs, government officials told The Associated Press. Such logs would have showed what information Snowden viewed or downloaded.
Fifty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. offered a transcendent vision of racial harmony for America's future with his "I Have a Dream" speech, tens of thousands gathered where he spoke Saturday to hear leaders tell them that while much has been attained, much remains unfinished.





























