Regional News

Steve Duran’s Robinson Township farm has been in his family for three generations, and he hopes to pass the property on to his daughter. But unless natural gas drilling take place on his property, Duran doubts that will be possible. Duran and nearly 40 other natural gas leaseholders in Robinson Township met this week to discuss the benefits of gas drilling and their frustration that the industry has stalled in Robinson, even though it’s a prime location for the prized “wet gas” that extraction companies want.

Rachel Gogos remembers a time, near the beginning of her years running a home business with two daughters now 7 and 5, "when I had lined up a phone call with a fairly new client and the kids were involved in doing something fun. Then the fun ended, and they began looking for me.

This project, a joint initiative of the Pulitzer Center and Calkins Media, looks at some of the different dimensions – political, economic, and environmental – of shale gas in Poland, Pennsylvania, and beyond.

The Shale Reporter is a Calkins Media website.

“If Martin Luther King was alive, he would be in Barack Obama’s behind  because of his use of drones to kill; his having run a campaign and never once even mentioning poverty; and his taking care of the business sector before rebuilding America’s ghettos, barrios, infrastructure and putting people to work.”   This statement by Rick Adams, Co-convener, W. Pa Black Political Assembly, was one of the pivotal points of discussion at the “Cost of War” forum, hosted by the Black Voices for Peace.

While teachers may have scolded your bad grammar in school, it could make for a stronger password. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have built a password cracker that takes into account grammar and parts of speech to steal a password.

This month, President Barack Obama said it again. In his speech on new gun control measures, Mr. Obama repeated the catchphrase of mental health advocates: "We acknowledge that someone with a mental illness is far more likely to be a victim of violent crime than the perpetrator." Yet that statement seems to clash with the stories that people repeatedly face on nightly newscasts and front pages.

Rock Run is a crystal clear stream that runs down through Loyalsock State Forest. It drains a part of the Old Loggers Path, one of the state’s best hiking trails. There is drilling to the North, and to the South. But until recently, it looked like trail and the stream would be spared from development in the Marcellus shale.

For Ralph Kisberg, that changed last summer.