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Fracking is the most important American industrial enterprise of the 21st century. Today, fracking accounts for more than 40%, and that percentage is going steadily upward, as the US replaces one country after another on the list of the world's biggest oil and gas producers. The oil imports from OPEC countries have shrunk by half. Of all the national environmental groups, the Sierra Club probably has the mildest official position: that further fracking in the US must stop until its overall impact on the environment has been studied more carefully. More typical is Greenpeace's April 2012 joint statement on fracking that makes a fracking well seem not entirely different from a nuclear-waste dump. As Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their book, The Bottomless Well, energy is the fuel of growth and of life itself. The environmentalists' target is greater than the future prosperity of America's least fortunate -- it's their survival. Adapted from the source document.

On Feb 2, 2015, a Hellfire missile struck an automobile traveling along a rutted road in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. It killed six men inside -- four Pakistanis and two Afghans, Abdul Rauf and his brother-in-law. A former top Taliban commander and recruiter, Rauf was, according to Afghan intelligence, making a switch of allegiances from the Taliban to ISIS, for whom he had become acting head in Northwest Afghanistan. One of Barack Obama's first acts as president was the signing of an executive order on Jan 22, 2009, mandating that Gitmo close within a year and declaring that its prompt shuttering was consistent with the national-security and foreign-policy interests of the US and the interests of justice. The vehicle for halting Obama's plans was the 2011 Defense Department authorization bill. It included a ban on using any money to move the remaining 174 Gitmo prisoners to the US for any reason. Adapted from the source document.