"One of three Democratic senators who supports blocking U.S. EPA's ability to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants draws one of the highest amounts of campaign contributions from electric utilities."
"Environmentalists filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service on Monday accusing the service of illegally allowing farmers to grow genetically modified crops in a national wildlife refuge."
"The state House passes a bill allowing the use of eminent domain to take protected land from the federal government. Utah wants to develop a stretch outside Arches National Park and other areas."
"Food-borne illnesses, such as E. coli and salmonella, cost the United States $152 billion annually in health care and other losses, according to a report released Wednesday by a food safety group."
EPA added Brooklyn's long-polluted Gowanus Canal to the Superfund National Priority List -- along with nine other sites. The designation means that EPA will oversee the cleanup. New York City Mayor Bloomberg had been pushing for a city-run cleanup.
"The federal government will maximize enrollment in the land-idling Conservation Reserve, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a policy that would reduce U.S. cropland by 1.5 percent if successful."
"Sylvatic plague -- a close cousin of the dreaded disease that killed one-third of all European residents in the six years between 1347 and 1353 -- persists in rodents in the American West even when the disease does not erupt into epidemic form, new research demonstrates."
"More than a year after President George W. Bush created a vast marine national monument near the Northern Marianas Islands, the federal government has yet to make good on promised investments in the islands."
"Federal law forces companies to provide detailed information to U.S. EPA about the toxicity of the chemicals they use. But there is a catch. The same law -- the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA -- prohibits the agency from sharing that information with the public or even with state and local authorities. States are demanding that the law be changed."
"Hopes for a nuclear revival, fanned by fears of global warming and a changing political climate in Washington, are running into new obstacles over a key element -- money. A new approach for easing the cost of new multibillion-dollar reactors, which can take years to complete, has provoked a backlash from big-business customers unwilling to go along."
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