National (U.S.)

After a study by Stanford researchers, published September 4, concluded that organic foods had negligible health benefits, controversy occurred. Now critics, mostly from the environmental health and organic food communities, are challenging the study's methods, its accuracy and completeness, its framing questions, potential conflict of interest stemming from funding support, and the competence of the news media in reporting it.

"Environmentalists sued the Obama administration on Wednesday seeking federal safeguards for seals that rely on vanishing Arctic sea ice and accusing the government of dragging its feet in listing the marine mammals under the Endangered Species Act."

"People of color eat a lot of locally-caught fish for economic and cultural reasons. And yet they are the least likely to be warned because state efforts fail to reach minority and low-income populations."

Oil and gas drilling can usually protect groundwater when enough effort is taken to install well casings and cement them properly. But even those safeguards may fail in karst formations, as the Bureau of Land Management's experience in New Mexico shows.

Land contamination may be as important as the direct radiation dose to humans in setting safety standards for nuclear plants, the disaster at Japan's Fukushima site suggests.

"Two Pacific Northwest conservation organizations are seeking permission from a federal court in Washington to fight a lawsuit that aims to limit the use of science to help manage U.S. national forests."

"AUBURN, Ala. -- Scientific testing has confirmed a link between oil from the massive BP spill and tar found on Alabama beaches after Hurricane Isaac."

"Canadian mining giant Teck Resources Ltd. has admitted in a U.S. court that effluent from its smelter in southeast British Columbia has polluted the Columbia River in Washington for more than a century."

"A U.S. farmer group on Tuesday dropped its opposition to efforts by Dow AgroSciences to roll out a new biotech crop system in exchange for some concessions by Dow, including help investigating any accidental crop damage."

"Nearly two years before peace activists broke into a U.S. nuclear weapons facility in late July, government investigators warned in classified reports of lax security at the complex where the nation's largest concentration of weapons-grade uranium is stored."