Life's a gas for Dubya's pals

Good to see the New York Times returning to its tradition of investigative journalism with this piece from Edmund L. Andrews about how companies extracting natural gas from publicly-owned land and waters in the US paid less into federal coffers last year than in 2001, despite prices almost doubling over that period. If royalty payments had matched prices, the US government would have raked some $700 million extra in 2005.