Feds propose that those who frack on public lands disclose chemicals after drilling

The federal government proposed Friday that oil and natural gas companies will have to disclose the hydraulic fracturing chemicals they use on public lands, reports John Broder of The New York Times: "In a significant concession to the oil industry, companies will have to reveal the composition of fluids only after they have completed drilling — a sharp change from the government’s original proposal, which would have required disclosure of the chemicals 30 days before a well could be started."

Broder reports industry lobbyists and several major oil and gas companies have been meeting at the White House since the original regulation was proposed in February "to address industry concerns about overlapping state regulations and the cost of compliance." The Interior Department wanted to address landowners' concerns about groundwater pollution, Broder reports. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the revised rule was part of the federal government's overall energy strategy.

The rule would affect drilling operations on the 700 million acres of public land maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, and 56 million acres of Native American lands. The agency estimates that 90 percent of the 3,400 wells drilled each year on public and Indian lands are drilled using fracking. The rule also broadens the definition of waters to be protected during drilling from fresh waters to usable waters. (Read more)

First responders may soon be connected to others across the nation via broadband network

A bill that will build a nationwide public safety broadband network to link together first responders passed in February, and could fundamentally change the way emergency responders react to emergency situations, especially in rural areas where cell phone service is spotty. C.V. Moore of the (Beckley, W.Va.) Register-Herald reports bill author U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said the capabilities the network will make possible are "jaw-dropping." (Register-Herald photo by F. Brian Ferguson)

The bill provides $7 billion for construction and deployment of the network, and "authorizes the auction of a block of wireless broadband spectrum to pay for it," Moore reports. It would create an entity within the Department of Commerce called First Responder Network Authority, or FirstNet, that would oversee the program. Rockefeller said the program will likely cost $11 to $12 billion before it's completely implemented.

Rockefeller met with constituents at the Ghent Volunteer Fire Department to answer questions about the bill, and those from rural counties said poor cell phone service in those areas needs to be addressed. The bill is designed to spur cell service in rural places. "Telecommunications companies can co-locate transmitters on the new towers that will be built under the program and use the fiber that will be laid, saving them money. They can also rent some of the bandwidth during non-emergency times," Moore reports. (Read more)

Editor and reporter who brought down corrupt rural sheriff to be featured on '60 Minutes'

Samantha Swindler and Adam Sulfridge, former managing editor and current reporter at the Times-Tribune in Corbin, Ky., whose stories about corrupt sheriff Lawrence Hodge led to his conviction and imprisonment, will be featured Sunday on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes." Swindler's work won her the 2010 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.


"The way Sulfridge and Swindler got to Hodge was a painstaking investigation into all the arrests he had made," a press release about the episode says. "They uncovered a pattern of cases involving guns and drugs in which suspicious deals were cut and sentences drastically reduced; the defendants’ lawyer in nearly all the cases was a friend of the sheriff’s. In most of the cases, Hodge was taking cash and or drugs from the criminals in exchange for the deals. The result was an explosive series of stories and eventually, Hodge’s arrest."

TransCanada reapplies for Keystone pipeline permit

Canadian energy company TransCanada reapplied today for a permit to finish building its Keystone XL pipeline after it faced opposition from ranchers, environmentalists and others who wanted the route changed to avoid the Oglala Aquifer and the ecologically sensitive Sandhills region of Nebraska. The application would cover the section of the pipeline from the U.S.-Canadian border in Montana to Steele City, Neb.

The company has not yet selected an alternate route through Nebraska, but has said it will once the pipeline reaches the state, reports Darren Goode of Politico. Federal environmental reviews have found the pipeline would have minimal impact, but concern over impacts has pushed approval of an executive permit to at least 2013. (Read more)

Horse slaughterhouses being urged as funds to inspect them again made available

Public pressure helped to hasten the end of horse slaughter in the United States in 2006 when Congress cut off funding to inspect facilities that do the work. Without proper inspection and oversight, horse meat could not be shipped to overseas markets where it might be consumed. But such a ban has been tough on the horses that are being shipped to Canada and Mexico, reports The Wall Street Journal. It has also been disastrous for some horses whose owners, facing a bad economy, have left them abandoned and starving, to fend for themselves.

Congress re-authorized funds last year for slaughterhouse inspections. Some U.S. companies are again applying for permits to revive the industry in New Mexico, Missouri and California. Rick De Los Santos, spokesman for 0Valley Meat Co. in Roswell, N.M., says the proposed facility could supply as many as 50 jobs and could be open by the end of the summer. The pushback from animal rights activists and horse lovers -- even by New Mexico's own governor -- has been strong.

Reporter: Analysis of industrial vs. organic farm productivity is 'apples and oranges' comparison

The journal Nature recently offered analysis of the productivity of 66 farm yields, comparing industrial versus organic methods. Since then, there's been much discussion about its two main findings: Organic farming yields were 25 percent lower on average than those that employed industrial methods, but only for grain crops like wheat, not in crops like fruits and vegetables.

The fallout from the study was centered on whether the organic work and additional acreage was worth the loss of efficiency. The study was headlined and reported in the media through a lens that made "industrial agricultural look hyper-efficient and organic look like a laggard," writes Tom Philpott of Mother Jones. (Photo by Pete Zaria, Illinois grain elevator)

Philpott analyzed stories about the study in The New York Times and Time Magazine. The Times made a case for "a hybrid path in agriculture" incorporating both industrial-style production and organic practices when they made sense, Philpott reports. Time's headline wondered: "Why Organic Agriculture May Not Be So Sustainable." Such reporting doesn't take into account anything but gross output per acre, argues Philpott. There was no consideration of, "ecological trouble like the plight of honeybees and other pollinators in a sea of pesticide-laced crops or resources consumed, like synthetic nitrogen-laced fertilized, which is made of natural gas."

By focusing on yield, "the authors presume that maximizing production should be the chief goal for policymakers," writes Philpott. But from a global perspective, the emphasis now is on "what we grow, where we grow it and who grows it."

Friday is deadline to seek Carmage Walls prize for editorials and commentary on local issues

Friday, May 4 is the deadline to to submit entries for the 2012 Carmage Walls Commentary Prize sponsored by the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. Cash prizes of $1,000 will be awarded in two circulation categories – over and under 50,000. Second-place winners will receive $500.

The awards recognize outstanding commentary on local issues and are designed to encourage thoughtful, courageous and constructive editorial page leadership on issues relevant to a newspaper’s primary readership. The prize was named for B. Carmage Walls, whose over seven decades primarily owned community newspapers and advocated strong, courageous and positive editorial leadership. The awards will be presented during the News Industry Summit in Naples, Fla., Sept. 30 through Oct. 2. For an entry form, click here.

University of New Hampshire's development plan could take land from agriculture school

The University of New Hampshire began as an agricultural school, but its proposed updated master plan would "all but eliminate the school's founding programs" by inviting development of land used by the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture, reports Andrea Bulfinch of Foster's Daily Democrat. At an open forum two weeks ago, the development prospects "drew the most contention and confusion" from staff, students and the community. (Photo by EJ Hersom, Daily Democrat)

The most significant change would take the school's agricultural land for development or some other type of use. The site in question is close to dairy farms, and students and faculty maintain a silo and produce hay there. Equine program staffer Sarah Hamilton said the site is "imperative" to the continuation of the school's agricultural programs, especially since recent state budget cuts took $80,000 from the agricultural sciences program.

Paul Chamberlain, vice president for campus development and energy resources (standing on chair in photo), says the 35 acres have development potential, but assured students, faculty and staff that the equine and dairy centers wouldn't be closed as part of the plan. But Hamilton said the development would add so much to the agriculture facilities' costs that they wouldn't be able to maintain them. Chamberlain said new ways of providing higher education needed to be considered for creating new revenue streams. (Read more)

Computer model disputes presumption that impermeable rock layers will keep fracking fluids away from water

Chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells could migrate toward drinking-water supplies more quickly than previously thought, according to a study funded by two upstate New York organizations opposed to drilling and fracking in the Marcellus Shale region. Using computer modeling, the study found that natural faults and fractures in the ground, exacerbated by fracking, could allow chemicals to reach the surface in a few years.

Scientists have presumed some layers of rock were impermeable and would keep fracking chemicals trapped almost far below the surface. This view has been a "cornerstone of the industry's argument that fracking poses minimal threats to the environment," reports Abraham Lustgarten of ProPublica. The study's lead author, Tom Myers, said that view was false. "The Marcellus Shale is being fracked into a very high permeability. Fluids could move from most any injection process," he said.

The study was published in the journal Ground Water. It did not use sampling or case histories to assess contamination risks. It relied on a computer model to determine how fluids would move through the rock over time. The models predict that fracking will "dramatically speed up the movement of chemicals injected into the ground." It showed that fluids traveled distances in 100 years that would naturally take thousands of years. (Read more)

Burning of waste gas increased last year

Burning of waste gas has increased globally after years of decline because of the natural-gas boom, Henning Gloystein and Alessandra Prentice of Reuters report. Global gas flaring rose 4.5 percent last year, the first increase since 2008, according to preliminary World Bank data. The increase is mostly due to drilling in North Dakota, which has made the U.S. one of the top 10 gas-flaring countries. The full report is to be released later this month. (Read more)

Small airports suffer more than larger airports in wake of recession, mergers, fuel price hikes

Major airlines accelerated cutbacks over the last three years because of the recession, rising fuel prices and company mergers. This led many to stop flights to smaller airports that serve many rural areas, making flight times to and from small cities longer, reports Jad Mouawad of The New York Times. The move has forced at least three regional airports into bankruptcy since 2010.

The country's top 25 airports lost 4 percent of domestic nonstop capacity from 2006 to 2011. The smallest airports lost 19 percent. Atmosphere Research Group President Jeffrey Breen said this has forced most airports to lose nonstop flights, "but the smaller airports are really the ones that have taken it on the chin the most." As a result, travelers face more complicated trips that often involve connections at hub airports, Mouawad reports.

Small airports also saw an increase in fares. The average price increase was 6 percent, but some small airports saw 16 to 18 percent increases, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics data. The three most expensive airports to fly from are now Cincinnati, Huntsville, Ala. and Memphis, where the most expensive average ticket price was $488 in the third quarter. (Read more)

USDA vows tougher stand on food-borne illnesses

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced guidance this week to strengthen the food industry's ability to trace contaminated products through the supply chain, Michael Fielding of Meatingplace reports. The agency also announced it will no longer wait for confirmation of food-borne illnesses before investigating, saying it wants to take a preventative approach instead of a reactive one.

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service will routinely test food yields to control outbreaks. If testing reveals a "presumptive positive," the agency will begin investigation immediately, before the food supply gets to the public. FSIS official Dan Engeljohn estimated the agency collects about 15,000 samples of ground beef, with a confirmed positive rate of less than 1 percent. (Read more)

Obama's rural prospects dimmed by child-labor flap and broader economic issues

"One remarkable aspect of the 2008 Obama campaign was its success in carrying rural counties in battleground states such as Colorado and Iowa, the same counties which Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had lost four years earlier," Tom Curry of MSNBC writes. "Whether Obama’s field organizers can repeat their 2008 success with rural voters this year depends on both symbolism and substance."

Curry notes that independent political analyst Charlie Cook said last week on MSNBC that in “states with a large small-town, rural populations ... the president's had a really, really hard time.” The most recent reason, he says, is the rules on child farm labor that the Labor Department withdrew after many objections. He notes that liberal Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota said, “While they may have been well-intentioned, these rules would have had a negative impact on our state’s ag community.”

Farmers constitute a small minority of rural voters, but broader economic issues may also hurt Obama's rural vote. "The average unemployment rate in smaller counties – those with less than the average size labor force – is 8.7 percent, compared to the national average of 8.2 percent," Curry writes, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data. He also looks at Iowa and Colorado as examples of states Obama carried by holding down the usually strong Republican margin in rural areas. (Read more)

Senators ask postal service to delay post-office closings until House votes on postal reform bill

Thousands of post offices across the country, most in rural areas, still face closure in two weeks if the U.S. House doesn't complete work on its version of the Senate's post office bill, reports Ron Nixon of The New York Times. Nixon reports House lawmakers don't seem in a hurry to proceed on the bill which would overhaul the U.S. Postal Service despite the May 15 deadline.

Senators who co-sponsored the bill called on House leaders to bring the bill to the floor for a vote in a letter, which read: "We fear that the resulting degradation of mail service will further drive away postal customers, only hastening the loss of postal revenue, the accelerating contraction of mail processing and mail-related industry, and further loss of associated jobs."

The senators also sent a letter to the postmaster general asking the USPS to delay closings until legislation is complete. The USPS didn't respond. Nixon notes that the key House version of the bill differs greatly from the Senate version, offering little protection for rural post offices and Saturday delivery. (Read more)

New mothers who bear drug-dependent babies in Ala. go to jail; women's advocates say it's wrong

Since Alabama passed a law in 2006 making it a crime for mothers to chemically endanger their babies, about 60 expectant mothers have been prosecuted, Ada Calhoun reports in The New York Times Magazine. The law was originally enacted to protect children from meth labs, but with the increase in addiction among pregnant women in the state's rural areas came more convictions of mothers. In other states, Calhoun reports criminal convictions of new mothers is rare because, in most states, such cases are considered a matter for child-protection agencies.

Some women's rights groups, civil libertarians and gynecologists say the law goes too far when new mothers are convicted and sent to jail. They contend that such cases set a bad precedent, making pregnant women "a special class of people that should be treated differently from every other citizen," said Emma Ketteringham, director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. In one case, Amanda Kimbrough was convicted and sentenced to 10 years to life in prison after her newborn son died because he was born addicted to drugs.

Ketteringham says the law was never meant to apply to pregnant women because it mentions nothing about pregnancy. One state legislator has filed a friend-of-the-court brief, agreed, saying the law wasn't intended for use against pregnant women, but the Alabama legislature has rejected amendments to expand the law's definition of "child" to explicitly mean "fetus." Calhoun reports that soon after the law was passed state prosecutors began extending it to include language against mothers whose babies are born addicted. (Read more)

ER doctors prescribed more painkillers than in previous decade, especially to dental patients

A National Institute of Health study has quantified the frequency of prescriptions for narcotics in emergency rooms for the first time. Painkillers were prescribed three out of four visits to the ER from 1997 to 2007.  That was a rise of 26 percent over the 10-year period. Comparatively, a prescription for antibiotics was prescribed in one of every two visits.The report was published in the journal Medical Care.

Catherine Saint Louis of The New York Times reports that doctors can usually tell when someone is simply trying to get a fix, but other times, "it's difficult to make an objective assessment. Emergency doctors, said Yale School of Medicine's Gail D'Onofrio, "err on the side of treating pain." Many ER doctors acknowledge that they write a lot of prescriptions for painkillers, but say they feel they face a conundrum because some patients are genuinely in pain.

Program on Opiod Risk Management Director Nathaniel Katz said time pressures and heavy patient loads leave doctors with few choices. Especially when patients with dental issues come to the hospital ER. Katz said medical doctors lack tools, including dental X-ray machines, to effectively look for dental problems. They also aren't trained to perform many dental procedures, including dental block, or local anesthetic injections that offer pain relief for six to 16 hours. (Read more)

Editorial writer says Labor Department shouldn't have backed down on child farm labor

"The Obama administration made a terrible mistake last week by dropping proposed rules designed to protect young children ... hired as farm hands," writs Susan Hogan of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She contends that "caving" to big agriculture and Republicans puts children's lives at risk because farming remains one of the most dangerous jobs for adults, and even more so for children.

Hogan said the Labor Department was "on the right track" last year when it proposed 15 new rules to keep young workers safe. "Many of the suggested safety measures were practical, such as seat belts for tractors and rollover bars on farm vehicles in which children often are hurt," she wrote, adding that the agency was right to ban children from jobs including handling pesticides, working in manure pits or grain bins, and that several studies backed them up.

Some of the rules "overreached and needed to be abandoned," she added. "But to abandon the entire safety reform effort because of public outcry from special-interest groups put political gain above children's well-being, and that should never be the case," and lawmakers "who denounced the changes as an attack on family farms are also guilty of jeopardizing child workers." (Read more)

Personal income in rural counties rose more than U.S. average from 2009 to 2010, federal data show

Personal income in rural counties increased by 3.5 percent from 2009 to 2010, more than the 2.8 percent increase in the nation as a whole, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Total per capita income in rural counties is now 80 percent of the national average.

The Daily Yonder map (below) shows income gains in rural counties. Dark green counties saw income increases of more than 5 percent, light green saw "above average" gains of 2.8 to 5 percent, light red areas show gains of less than 2.8 percent and red areas indicate a per capita income loss. More than 1,300 rural counties saw increases.

Bill Bishop of the Yonder reports only 7.4 percent of rural counties had a decline in personal income over the same period. Per capita rural income is still behind average incomes in exurban and rural counties, but the gains in 2010 slightly narrowed the gap, he writes. (Read more)

Food and beverage industries win political fights about obesity, even in White House, apparently

Food and beverage industries are winning the battle against obesity, to the detriment of millions of overweight children, many of whom live in rural areas, report Duff Wilson and Janet Roberts of the Reuters news service. The industries have "never lost a significant political battle in the United States despite mounting scientific evidence of the role of unhealthy food and children's marketing in obesity," they write.

Lobbying records analyzed by Reuters reveal that the industries more than doubled their lobbying efforts over the past three years. The reporters found that the White House backed off some anti-obesity steps in the face of industry lobbying though Michelle Obama, in video above, has led a campaign to fight the epidemic.

The industry lobbying dominated policymaking and "defeated government proposals aimed at changing the nation's diet," Wilson and Roberts found. They report that the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the top lobby for healthier food, spent about $70,000 last year; that's about what the food and beverage industry spends on lobbying every 13 hours.

"The political battles over what children eat and drink are crucial to the nation's health, experts say, because the tripling in childhood obesity in the last three decades foretells diabetes, heart disease and other illness in decades to come," Wilson and Roberts write. (Read more)

Dollar General, a mainly rural chain, starts selling fresh produce and refrigerated goods

Dollar General Inc., which has discount stores dotting the rural landscape and is one of Wal-Mart's biggest competitors, is branching out and selling groceries, Ann Zimmerman of The Wall Street Journal reports. The company is stocking fresh produce and refrigerated products in midsize "market stores" to draw shoppers more frequently, increasing how much they spend with Dollar General.

The market stores haven't been as profitable as the company's traditional stores, but it says the gap is narrowing, Zimmerman reports. She writes that competition among mid-size stores is heating up; Wal-Mart and Target have versions of mid-size stores, and drugstores have sold food and refrigerated items for years.

Dollar General's CEO said the move is a step in becomming "the new general store," where "harried, frugal shoppers can get the most essential things they need at a discount without traipsing through airplane-hangar-sized supercenters," Zimmerman reports. The company plans to open about 40 market stores, many in "food deserts," where residents lack easy access to fresh food. (Read more)