
"The truth is, I entered into a conspiracy with these three defendants to commit a crime,'' Lally, a 50-year-old former salesman and vice president of Cognos, told jurors in US District Court in Boston.



The absence of baseline data was one of the most serious criticisms leveled at a group of Duke researchers last week when they published the first peer-reviewed study linking drilling to methane contamination in water supplies.
That study - which found that methane concentrations in drinking water increased dramatically with proximity to gas wells - contained "no baseline information whatsoever," wrote Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the industry group Energy in Depth, in a statement debunking the study.
Now it turns out that some of that data does exist. It just wasn't available to the Duke researchers, or to the public.