Public

"The House adjourned at 9:24 p.m. [Monday] after debating several more amendments to the 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations Act, and is expected to hold votes on these on Tuesday in the process of wrapping up the bill." The Tuesday votes are likely to illuminate the stark differences between Republicans and Democrats on energy and environmental policies, but House-passed riders may have dim hopes in the Senate.

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is taking an inventory of more than 30,000 coastal shipwrecks — some of them casualties of the 1942 Battle of the Atlantic — and identifying those that pose the most significant threat."

Lake Ontario, the farthest downsream of the Great Lakes, suffers from water quality problems.

"The La Nina weather anomaly blamed for one of the worst droughts in the southern United States could revive this autumn, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center forecast on Thursday."

"Small fish living in a region of the Pacific Ocean where floating trash collects in a huge, slowly swirling bowl eat as much as 24,000 tons of plastic waste each year, scientists have found."

"The lives of half a million children in the Horn of Africa are at risk, international aid agencies said on Friday, as the worst drought in decades forces thousands of people to flee their homes each day."

"Bayer CropScience has agreed to pay $750 million to settle claims by U.S. rice farmers that the company's genetically modified rice has contaminated their crops."

"The 1,300-acre, man-made [Gaillard Island off Alabama's Gulf coast] is hosting more than 50,000 birds this summer as nesting pairs gather to raise babies. That number would be considered high in any year, but it's a particularly surprising sight a year after oil from the BP spill fouled surrounding waters."

"A Japanese nuclear power plant has come under fire for trying to sway the outcome of a public forum on atomic safety, dealing a fresh blow to the industry's credibility four months after the world's biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl."

The DuPont company, which has touted its own safety and environmental record, turned down in 1988 a construction option for its Belle, WV, plant that could have protected workers and the community from deadly phosgene gas. One worker died in a series of three phosgene releases there in 2010.