With speculation flying about what the state's next move on hydraulic fracturing will be, the spotlight is on New York's Southern Tier, where the richest Marcellus Shale gas deposits lie.

WSKG's Matt Richmond has a terrific radio documentary out today about Deposit, a place on the border of Delaware and Broome Counties where the drillers are likely to be headed soon. On the website of Innovation Trail, a magazine that covers the economy and technology in upstate New York, readers can listen to an excerpt and read the transcript of the piece.

Richmond's story doesn't dwell on all the Albany insider baseball going on about when the state will act on hydrofracking, and what the plan will look like. Instead, he talks to ordinary people in Deposit, and what gas drilling means to them:

Above: Photo by Flickr user Ann Douglas. Published under Creative Commons license.

If you're registered to a political party in New York State, you may be eligible to vote in a primary election on Thursday, September 13. Most towns in the Catskills region have either a Republican or a Democratic primary. (Check our handy cheat sheet below to see if your party has a primary race in your town.)

Earlier this year, new New York State Senate and Assembly districts were drawn. This will be the first election to use the new primary districts, and voters in some towns will be seeing an unfamiliar incumbent on the ballot: a politician who is already in office, but who has never before represented that town as part of his or her district.

Photo by First Sergeant Perry Soule of the Ulster County Sheriff's Office.

As if anyone in America could forget: Today is the eleventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

In Ulster County, police and first responders held ceremonies in Kingston and Ulster to honor and remember the victims of 9/11. In the photo above, Ulster County sheriff's deputies, New York State troopers, and firefighters from several local companies gather on the bank of the Hudson River in the town of Ulster.

For more photos and video from 9/11 ceremonies held today in Kingston and Ulster, see the Ulster County Sheriff's Office Facebook page.

Above: Detail from a map showing over a dozen alternate routes proposed by the Constitution Pipeline Company. Full map embedded below. Source: Constitution Pipeline website.

The company behind the Constitution Pipeline, which has held several public meetings to discuss the pipeline's proposed route and answer community questions, is holding two more meetings this week.

The meeting times and places:

Wednesday, September 12
6:30 to 8:30 pm
Best Western Cobleskill
121 Burgin Dr., Cobleskill, NY

Thursday September 13
6:30 to 8:30 pm
Holiday Inn Oneonta
5206 State Highway 23, Oneonta, NY

The Constitution Pipeline is a planned 121-mile natural gas pipeline that will bring gas from Susquehanna County in northern Pennsylvania to the Iroquois and Tennessee pipelines in Schoharie County.