From the LEHIGH VALLEY MORNING CALL: Five of Pennsylvania’s largest natural gas drilling interests spent a staggering $1.3 million to lobby state government from January through March as lawmakers and the Corbett administration worked to approve a new impact fee on the industry.

From the HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS: Missing financial audits, complicated transactions and intertwining finances create a labyrinth of money that stretches decades into Harrisburg’s history. At best estimates, based upon reviews of independent reports and audited financial statements, the amount of debt owed by the city and its affiliated entities — with interest — stands somewhere north of $1.5 billion.

From NEWSMAX: …On Nov. 22, 1963, the day of the assassination, he was ordered to stop all CIA tracking efforts and redirect his antennas away from Miami and direct them toward Texas… Cuban intelligence officers “exhorted Oswald” and “encouraged his feral militance,” he writes, “but it was his (Oswald’s) plan and his rifle, not theirs.”

In recent weeks the Watchdog visited Tunisia and had the edifying and emotionally wrenching experience of visiting a military cemetery containing 2200 American soldiers who fell during the 1942 African Campaign at the outset of World War II.

DRUG WAR CHRONICLE: A Rasmussen poll of likely voters released Tuesday found support for legalizing and regulating marijuana at 56% nationwide, a significant increase over a March Rasmussen poll and in line with other recent polls that show legalizing gaining majority support and trending upward.

The battle for the hearts and minds of Hungarians took a bizarre turn last week when, in apparent retaliation for the despoliation of a wooden statue erected to Admiral Miklós Horthy who served as head of state between 1919 and 1944, unknown assailants hung pigs’ feet on the bronze statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving the lives of some 100,000 Hungarian Jews in the final years of the Second World War.

From the HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS: Former Harrisburg receiver David Unkovic told Commonwealth Court Judge Bonnie Brigance Leadbetter this morning that his ability to develop a fiscal recovery plan for the cash-strapped city was compromised by a Dauphin County judge’s earlier decision.

From the HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS: The man Gov. Tom Corbett has tapped to lead Harrisburg’s financial recovery efforts, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William B. Lynch, was part of an aborted land deal that wound up costing the state roughly $437,000 in 1999, a state audit shows.

“…We reverse and remand with instructions to allow the amended complaint and enter a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the eavesdropping statute as applied to audio recording of the kind alleged here.

From the FINANCIAL TIMES: The shale gas boom in the US has led to a big drop in its carbon emissions, as power generators switch from coal to cheap gas. According to the International Energy Agency, US energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, fell by 450m tonnes over the past five years…

I have come to the interesting conclusion that no one — the public, the state, no Harrisburg city or state official — knows how much debt Steve Reed ran up in his tenure as mayor of Harrisburg. What we should be doing is telling our readers just what the bottom line debt is — and no one seems to know.

From the PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-Review: …The state’s prison population climbed from 7,000 to 51,645 since 1980, in part because of mandatory-minimum sentences, longer prison terms and incarceration of less violent offenders, said Katrina Currie, a policy analyst for the Commonwealth Foundation…