Anti-Fracking Group Criticizes Energy Nominee for Not Disclosing Industry Ties

A group that specializes in opposing fracking for natural gas released a report on Wednesday that criticizes the president’s choice to be energy secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, for failing to disclose in an energy study that he led his ties to the natural gas industry.

According to the report, prepared by the Public Accountability Initiative, Mr. Moniz “took a lucrative position on the board of ICF International, a consulting firm with significant oil and gas ties, just prior to the release of the report,” which the group described as having “an extremely industry-friendly message.” ICF, the study noted, sells a gas market analysis tool and consults with gas industry trade groups. Mr. Moniz has received $306,000 from ICF since 2011, the group said.

The report that Mr. Moniz led at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative called “The Future of Natural Gas” was released in its final form in June 2011, but an “interim report” had appeared a year earlier. Mr. Moniz joined the board of ICF International three days before the final report was released, according to the Public Accountability Initiative.

The initiative also took issue with some of the M.I.T. report’s conclusions and was critical of its assessment that the environmental issues posed by fracking were “challenging but manageable.’’

In a response to questions posed by the group, and included as an appendix to the report, a spokeswoman for the program Mr. Moniz heads, Victoria Ekstrom, said, “The notion that these findings are developed based on anything other than the unbiased research of M.I.T. researchers is false.”

She said that the natural gas report, along with parallel reports on coal, nuclear power and the electric grid, were “prepared by the faculty and researchers at M.I.T., and received input from an advisory committee that was drawn from energy experts - including representatives from environmental organizations and relevant industry.”

And, she pointed out, the study said that “a concerted coordinated effort by industry and government, both state and federal, should be organized so as to minimize the environmental impacts of shale gas development.’’

In a statement, the White House said that President Obama favors natural gas as part of his “all of the above” strategy, and that Mr. Moniz’s “work at M.I.T. demonstrates his ability to work collaboratively with a wide spectrum of stakeholders on a broad range of energy issues.”

The Energy Department sponsored the early research work that today allows massive production of gas from shale, with a technique called hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking. Most of that work was done shortly before Mr. Moniz first came to the department, as under secretary of energy during President Clinton’s second term. But the federal agencies with the most direct role over fracking now are the Department of the Interior, which controls drilling on publicly held land, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which sets regulations on hazardous materials use on both public and private land.

The series of reports from the M.I.T. Energy Initiative have been exhaustive; the natural gas report took three years to produce and ran 178 pages, including appendices. But they have not always been right; the 2003 study on nuclear power, for example, underestimated the price of building a new reactor by at least half.

The Energy Initiative itself has major ties to energy companies. It recently announced that ENI, the Italian oil company, had renewed its participation as a founding member and would contribute at a level that “significantly exceeds the founding member support level of five million dollars per year.’’ Other corporate founding members are BP, Shell and Saudi Aramco. Other sponsors include Chevron and several utilities, including the parent company of Southern California Edison, Entergy, Duke Energy and Électricité de France, all nuclear reactor operators.

The announcement of Mr. Moniz’s nomination won praise from many mainstream environmental organizations, but some, especially those focused on fracking, reacted unfavorably.

Senate Passes Bill to Finance Government and Soften Spending Cuts

The Senate on Wednesday passed legislation to keep the government financed through the end of the fiscal year â€" and to take some of the sting out of across-the-board spending cuts coursing through the government.

The bill, which passed 73 to 26, sticks to the hard cap of $984 billion for programs within Congress’s annual discretion, meaning efforts to shore up some programs hit hard by the automatic cuts â€" known as sequestration â€" would come out of another program’s budget. But the final Senate bill did ease the hit on a lucky few programs.

For instance, an amendment adopted Wednesday transferred $55 million to federal meat and poultry inspectors from other agriculture programs to make sure food plants can stay in operation. Without inspectors, meat plants must shut down, and the food lobby had come down hard on the Obama administration to keep the inspection program fully financed, something Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had said was beyond his control. In the end, Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas, one of the Democrats’ most endangered incumbents in 2014, won passage of the provision.

Another amendment shifted money to hard-hit tuition assistance programs for military service members, a push championed by Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina, another swing-state Democrat up for re-election. Still another transferred money from National Science Foundation political science grants to cancer research at the National Institutes of Health.

But Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, failed to win passage of his proposal to take $6 million from the National Heritage Partnership Program, which runs a wine-tasting train in Ohio, a Celtic celebration in Wheeling, W.V., and a Salem Witch Hunt program in Massachusetts, and use it to force President Obama to keep White House tours operating. The White House opposed it, and Democrats fell in line. Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, could not even get a vote on his effort to keep rural air traffic control towers financed under the sequester.

White House officials stressed that for all the patching, the worst of the sequester is still coming. The Head Start program, an education program for young low-income children that is facing more than $400 million in budget cuts got only about $34 million back, barely enough to help the 70,000 children expected to lose slots.

The Education Department’s main programs for underprivileged students and special education will get nothing back from the new spending plan, which is expected to pass the House and reach the president’s desk by the end of the week.

But the bill does keep the government financed, and it passed a week before the existing stopgap spending measure is set to expire â€" a break from the brinkmanship that has marked budget legislation since 2011.

Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, declared the Senate had “done something pretty terrific.”

Key Democrat Chides President and Senators on Pace of Immigration Bill

As the Senate Judiciary Committee held its second hearing this week on overhauling the nation’s immigration laws, the committee’s chairman issued a frustrated plea for speeding up the overall pace of producing actual legislation.

A group of eight senators, four Democrats and four Republicans, has been working in private on producing a bipartisan bill, and their goal was to present something by the end of this month. But now, the group is on pace to release their legislation after the upcoming two-week Easter recess in Congress, sometime during the second week of April.

Part of the calculation is political â€" the senators didn’t want to unveil their legislation just to see Congress break for two weeks, creating a situation where members would likely return to their home states and face potentially hostile constituents upset about the immigration proposal.

But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the committee chairman, is not pleased, chiding President Obama and the bipartisan Senate group in a news release.

“For months I have urged the president to send his proposal for comprehensive immigration reform to the Senate,” Mr. Leahy said. “I understand he has delayed releasing it at the request of a few senators who are engaged in secret, closed-door discussions on their own proposal and who committed to completing it by the beginning of March. That deadline and others have come and gone.”

Mr. Leahy went on to express disappointment that his committee will have no immigration overhaul to consider this month.

“Without legislative language, there is nothing for the Judiciary Committee to consider this week at our mark up,” he said. “The upcoming recess period would have allowed all members of the committee and the American people to review the legislation. Now that process and our work will be delayed at least a month.”

Mr. Leahy added: “Because we do not yet have legislative language to debate, the Senate Judiciary Committee will not be able to report a comprehensive immigration bill by the end of April, which was my goal.”

In addition to the Senate group, a bipartisan group in the House is also working on producing immigration legislation, which they are expected to release shortly. Similarly, Mr. Obama has said he has his own immigration plan, which he is prepared to introduce if Congress does not act quickly enough.

Tip of the Week: Making an iTunes Wish List

The iTunes Store has millions of songs, videos and other digital goods that make it easy to run up the credit-card bill. If you find items you want to buy â€" but need to pace your spending â€" you can use the Wish List feature to set them aside for purchasing later. To use the Wish List when you are logged in and browsing the iTunes Store, click the triangle next to the price listed for a song, album, video, book or other content for sale, and choose “Add to Wish List” from the menu that appears.

To see the items you’ve previously added to your Wish List, go to the iTunes Store home page by clicking the little house icon at the top of the Store window. On the left side of the iTunes Store home page, click the “My Wish List” link. The wish list page displays all your saved items. The top of the page also lists the total number of items on the wish list and a button to buy everything on the list with one click â€" which can be useful for those with slow Internet connections who want save their bandwidth for browsing and download all purchases at the end of the shopping session.

Who Has The Fastest LTE Service

RootMetrics From top, LTE coverage maps from RootMetrics for Sprint, AT&T and Verizon. AT&T’s network was the fastest by a clear margin.

Which cellular carrier’s LTE data service is the fastest

Since LTE is a technical standard, you might expect them all to be pretty equal. But to paraphrase George Orwell, some LTE networks are more equal than others. And all of those fancy features on your smartphone are meaningless if they are on a balky network.

RootMetrics, a company that tests mobile network performance, did a survey in 77 cities, taking more than 725,000 samples to see how well various carriers perform.

The short answer is that AT&T had the fastest LTE network by a clear margin. The second-fastest was Verizon, followed by Sprint.

Before looking more closely at the results, keep in mind that these are averages from far-flung cities. That means you should take the results with a boulder-size grain of salt. The national average does not matter if there is no tower near you. Always check with co-workers, friends and neighbors to see how good their reception is before you buy.

An important tip is to ask people to install the RootMetrics or Ookla apps for Android or iOS for a test. These apps measure how fast a network is transmitting data to a phone. That will give you an idea of network speed where you are, and also give you a relative idea of what the megabits per second (Mbps) figures mean.

In the RootMetrics test, AT&T was in 47 of the 77 tested markets. It averaged download speeds of 18.6 Mbps, and uploads of 9 Mbps. It also had the second fastest non-LTE network, with downloads of 4.3 Mbps and uploads of 1.1 Mbps.

Verizon was in all 77 tested markets, and has the largest LTE network. Its average download speed was 14.3 Mbps, and upload speed was 8.5 Mbps. Its non-LTE average download speed was 0.9 Mbps, and the average upload speed was 0.7 Mbps.

Sprint had LTE in five of the 77 markets. Its download speed averaged 10.3 Mbps, and uploads averaged 4.4 Mbps. It’s non-LTE average speeds were 1.6 Mbps for downloads, and 0.7 Mbps for uploads.

T-Mobile gets an asterisk. Although it has no LTE service in the 77 cities tested, it offers a comparatively speedy sort of non-LTE service called HSPA+42. It averaged download speeds of 7.3 Mbps, and uploads of 1.5 Mbps. So even though it was slow by LTE standards, it is the fastest of the non-LTE services. If you are not in an LTE network area, this might be your fastest service.

A Sophisticated Instagram Alternative

Maybe Instagram’s privacy blunder took the bloom off the rose, but that’s no reason to stop sharing photos through social media as Instagram alternatives continue to emerge.

Take Tadaa, an app with some serious photo editing features that can also share your images through your social networks or keep them privately on your phone.

Tadaa has so many features that it can be a little daunting, but the basic features are easy to grasp.

As with most photo apps, you can apply any of 20 or more filters to alter photos that you take or import. I say, “or more” because the app gives away new filters on a limited time basis â€" you have a week or two to grab them when they become available.

It also lets you make manual adjustments to photos. You can do minor adjustments like brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness to primp up the look.

It has some pretty sophisticated features, like a tilt shift effect, which lets you make part of your picture focused and part of it blurry. Other apps have tilt shift too, but this one you can orient in any direction, customize the width of the focused and blurry areas, and degree of blur.

It also has a paint brush tool, so that you can designate exact areas of your photo to apply effects. Pretty sophisticated for an app.

Once you set it up, you can share with Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr with a single click. You can also send your finished work as an e-mail. It can automatically share with other Tadaa users, just the way Instagram shares with its users.

If you prefer though, you can set it to keep all your shots private on the phone. That is not the default though, so make sure you go to the settings menu before you start shooting.

One feature that really sets it apart â€" with a single click you can import all of your Instagram photos into Tadaa. It doesn’t erase your Instagram shots in the process, though. You’d have to do that manually.

It’s A Bag, It’s A Desk, It’s Got Geek Appeal

Considering its purpose - a bag that coverts to a standing desk for the iPad - shouldn’t the Strotter Platforma look much, much dorkier

The Platforma is an all-purpose black leather carrying case nearly 12 by 9 by 3 inches, about the size of a big city phone book. The company said the leather is treated for water resistance so the dye won’t transfer to clothing.

Lined with red nylon, it has two internal pockets, including one sized for the iPad. It has two compartments under the flap, two diagonal zipper compartments on the flap, and a magazine pocket on the back.

The case is more diminutive than a messenger bag. So be prepared to take abuse for carrying a man purse, or murse, if you use it.

Of course, people may say even worse things when they see you using the Platforma in its intended fashion. With a click of a strap, you can slide the bag around in front of you, turn it parallel to the ground, rest it against your stomach and use it as a tabletop.

You won’t have to worry about your iPad sliding off. The Platforma comes with a polycarbonate iPad cover with magnets that cling to the bag. You can turn the bag upside down and the tablet will hang on.

I was warned not to try to use the bag without watching the explanatory video first. While the video was helpful, I don’t think the bag is really that complicated.

The Platforma lists for $170, but there is also a much less elaborate version called the Across, which is available in leather for $100 or synthetic leather for $55.

There are other designs for bags that become desks, although few seem quite as elegant as the Platforma. Whether you think it’s geeky or not, I can see the Platforma gaining a certain cachet with the audience you tend to see at trade gatherings like the Consumer Electronics Show. With polished chrome hardware, the bag is really pretty good looking. For a murse.

Supreme Court Plans Same-Day Release of Oral Argument Recordings in Marriage Cases

WASHINGTON â€" The Supreme Court announced on Tuesday that it would release same-day audio recordings of oral arguments in two same-sex marriage cases scheduled to be heard next week.

The last time the court allowed same-day access to such recordings was a year ago, when it heard three days of arguments over the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law. The court’s general practice in recent years has been to release audio recordings of arguments at the end of the week.

The court said the recording of the hourlong argument in the first case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144, would be available on its Web site by 1 p.m. on March 26. That case is a challenge to Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage.

The recording of the argument in United States v. Windsor, No. 12-307, will last almost two hours and will be available by 2 p.m. on March 27, the court said. The case is a challenge of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

The court’s statement did not address television coverage, which almost certainly means it will not be permitted.

Besides the health care arguments, the court has released same-day audio recordings 21 times, starting with two in the case that came to be known as Bush v. Gore and ending with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Until recently, recordings in other cases were not released until the end of the term.

In September 2010, the court announced that the same-day release of recordings would be discontinued and that recordings of the week’s arguments would be released on Fridays. The court ordinarily hears arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

The new system took the court out of the business of making judgments about which arguments are newsworthy, a practice that raised First Amendment concerns. The significance of the arguments over the health care law and same-sex marriage apparently overcame those concerns.

Before Obama Trip, Polls Find Sympathy With Israel, and Doubts on Peace

New polls released just ahead of President Obama’s trip to Israel this week find that Americans continue to sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians. But few want the United States to take a leading role in resolving the conflict there, and most do not anticipate that the trip will do much to ease regional tensions.

In an ABC News/Washington Post poll, 55 percent of the public said their sympathies were more with Israel, while just 9 percent said they were more with the Palestinian Authority. The rest said they sided with neither or both, or were undecided. A Pew Research Center poll found similar results, with Americans far more likely to sympathize with Israel in the dispute than with the Palestinians, 49 percent to 12 percent.

Sympathies with Israel peak among Republicans, evangelical white Protestants and older Americans.

More Americans in the ABC/Post poll also said that the Obama administration had put too little pressure on the Palestinian Authority than too much. They were closely divided on whether the administration had pressured Israel too much or too little. About 4 in 10 Americans said that the Obama administration had put the right amount of pressure on each side.

And a Gallup poll conducted last month found that Americans were much more likely to say the United States should put more pressure on the Palestinians to make necessary compromises to resolve the conflict (48 percent said so), rather than on the Israelis (25 percent said so).

At the same time, though, a wide majority of Americans in the ABC/Post poll - about 7 in 10 - wanted to leave resolution of the conflict to the Israelis and Palestinians themselves, while just a quarter said the United States should take the leading role in trying to arrange a peace settlement. Fewer than half of Americans (44 percent) in the Gallup poll said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a critical threat to vital United States interests, substantially fewer than the roughly 8 in 10 who said so about the development of nuclear weapons by Iran or by North Korea, or about international terrorism.

All told, the public does not think much will come of the president’s trip. In a new McClatchy-Marist poll, two-thirds of voters said the president’s visit would not make a difference in easing tensions in the region. And Americans remain pessimistic as to whether Israel and the Arab nations will ever be able to settle their difference and live in peace - in a new CNN/ORC International poll, two-thirds thought not.

Each national poll was conducted by telephone, including landlines and cellphones. The ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted March 7-10 among 1,001 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The Pew poll was conducted March 13-17 among 1,501 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The Gallup poll was conducted Feb. 7-10 among 1,015 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The McClatchy-Marist poll was conducted March 4-7 among 1,068 registered voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The CNN/ORC International poll was conducted March 15-17 among 1,021 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Before Obama Trip, Polls Find Sympathy With Israel, and Doubts on Peace

New polls released just ahead of President Obama’s trip to Israel this week find that Americans continue to sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians. But few want the United States to take a leading role in resolving the conflict there, and most do not anticipate that the trip will do much to ease regional tensions.

In an ABC News/Washington Post poll, 55 percent of the public said their sympathies were more with Israel, while just 9 percent said they were more with the Palestinian Authority. The rest said they sided with neither or both, or were undecided. A Pew Research Center poll found similar results, with Americans far more likely to sympathize with Israel in the dispute than with the Palestinians, 49 percent to 12 percent.

Sympathies with Israel peak among Republicans, evangelical white Protestants and older Americans.

More Americans in the ABC/Post poll also said that the Obama administration had put too little pressure on the Palestinian Authority than too much. They were closely divided on whether the administration had pressured Israel too much or too little. About 4 in 10 Americans said that the Obama administration had put the right amount of pressure on each side.

And a Gallup poll conducted last month found that Americans were much more likely to say the United States should put more pressure on the Palestinians to make necessary compromises to resolve the conflict (48 percent said so), rather than on the Israelis (25 percent said so).

At the same time, though, a wide majority of Americans in the ABC/Post poll - about 7 in 10 - wanted to leave resolution of the conflict to the Israelis and Palestinians themselves, while just a quarter said the United States should take the leading role in trying to arrange a peace settlement. Fewer than half of Americans (44 percent) in the Gallup poll said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a critical threat to vital United States interests, substantially fewer than the roughly 8 in 10 who said so about the development of nuclear weapons by Iran or by North Korea, or about international terrorism.

All told, the public does not think much will come of the president’s trip. In a new McClatchy-Marist poll, two-thirds of voters said the president’s visit would not make a difference in easing tensions in the region. And Americans remain pessimistic as to whether Israel and the Arab nations will ever be able to settle their difference and live in peace - in a new CNN/ORC International poll, two-thirds thought not.

Each national poll was conducted by telephone, including landlines and cellphones. The ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted March 7-10 among 1,001 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The Pew poll was conducted March 13-17 among 1,501 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The Gallup poll was conducted Feb. 7-10 among 1,015 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. The McClatchy-Marist poll was conducted March 4-7 among 1,068 registered voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The CNN/ORC International poll was conducted March 15-17 among 1,021 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.