Eastern/Southeast Queens News

With the Senate session winding down in Albany, and about a thousand bills left to debate, the hydrofracking moratorium bill may not even hit the floor for a vote. Most Queens lawmakers oppose allowing the drilling process in New York State without conclusive scientific evidence that it can be done safely, without contaminating groundwater.

The drilling process known as hydrofracking is used to obtain natural gas from rock formations, such as the Marcellus Shale, which stretches from New York’s Southern Tier to West Virginia. Fracking involves injecting millions of gallons of water along with a slurry of sand and about 600 chemicals into a narrow horizontal pipe at high pressure to induce “mini-earthquakes,” which release the natural gas.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio minces no words when asked why he is running for mayor and why he feels he is the best choice for the Democratic nomination.

“I am fundamentally dissatisfied with things in the city,” he said last week at a meeting with the editorial board of the Queens Chronicle.

The Real Dads Network kicked off its sixth annual celebration of Fathers Week with a Fathers and Children Picnic, held at Roy Wilkins Park in Jamaica on June 1.

Members of the Laurelton and Springfield Gardens Lions clubs recently donated $500 to the Queens Library Foundation to go toward the purchase of new books and other materials for the Laurelton Library.

In town to speak to graduates at Hostos Community College in the Bronx, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made a pit stop in Queens to visit with students and business leaders at Aviation High School and talk about the rising focus on career and technical education.

Noting that CTE schools are of special interest to his boss, President Obama, Duncan said he wanted to learn more about how they are working in the city. Aviation is the third such school he’s visited in New York City, and the first in Queens.

They came from across the borough on Tuesday afternoon to show their patriotism and win a chance to sing at the upcoming US Open Tennis Tournament at the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

The United States Tennis Association, the national governing body for tennis in this country and the primary promoter of the sport at every level, held its seventh annual US Open casting call for children hoping to perform at the 2013 event.

The New York City Fire Department offers free CPR instruction courses to groups of between six and 40 through the FDNY Mobile CPR Training Unit.

Personnel from the FDNY’s EMS Division are available to teach compression-only CPR, as well as the use of automatic external defibrillators, both of which can help save a victim of a heart attack or cardiac arrest.

• Breaking

A 33-year-old NYPD officer with a reported history of domestic violence shot and killed his wife as she ran from their St. Albans home on June 5 before killing himself.

Police are calling the incident a murder-suicide.