UN Recognizes Palestine

Thank you Butty u poppet

We did !

Do you mean 'fracking', Greatnan - the extraction of hydrocarbons from shale? There's been a big to-do about it in Lancashire where it's believed that the explosions caused a small earthquake.

Yes, sorry for the typo - they are not corrected by Spellcheck!

I thought they said "cracking" on the today programme!

It seems to be 'cracking' from oil bearing shale rock.

right down near the bottom

I know NOTHING about it though.

I looked up both cracking and fracking and they are both processes used to reach oil.

(as usual)

Anyway, they said it could make the US independent oil-wise within 10 - 20 years.

Maybe fracking is short for f***ing cracking...

Fracking has the potential to create life changing gains for a lot of countries. However the potential dangers are there in black and white.

In America there are reports of damage to health and water supplies etc. It has already been attributed in this country to the earth quakes around the Blackpool/Morecombe area.

We are such a small country compared to America and other countries it will have to be proven to be a safe process to be given the green light.

It has the potential to alter the status quo re oil and the dominance of the East as the suppliers, as so many countries are viable as producers.

Mr Netanyahu has now given the go-ahead for 3,000 more settlement homes in the occupied West Bank and in East Jerusalem. The ones in the West Bank will more or less cut off the north from the south of the territory. He is also speeding up the planning process for more. What planning process you may ask? Understandably, Mr Abbas doesn't want to restart peace and two-state negotiations until there is a stop to new settlements. Stalemate – with Israel holding all the cards (mixed games metaphor).

I think cracking is what they do to the rock after they have fracked for it.

(I'm not joking)

Mr Netanyahu's latest wheeze is to withhold tax revenues from Palestine. Of course he is not doing this out of malice but because there is a debt to the company that supplies electricity. The fact that public servants, such as teachers and doctors, cannot then be paid is just unfortunate.

Greatnan I think the US love affair with the Middle East includes petrodollars as much as oil. If Saudi withdrew its money from America, the country would go belly up overnight in spite of all its financial support from China.

There was commercial shale oil extraction in West Lothian between 1859 and the end of WW II. Anyone familiar with that part of Scotland would have recognised the old red 'bings' (spoil heaps) of which use was made in the construction of the approach roads for the Forth Road Bridge in the early 1960s.