"ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska's Cook Inlet beluga whales were correctly listed as endangered, a federal judge ruled Monday, rejecting a state lawsuit that claimed the listing will hurt economic development."
"Most of the world, including the medical community, agrees that asbestos is desperately dangerous. The World Health Organization reports that more than 100,000 people die every year from lung cancer and other respiratory diseases due to asbestos exposure. And many more will die, because 125 million people are exposed to asbestos in their workplaces today and every day.
New Jersey was once the poster child of hazardous waste sites. After four decades of promises, legislation, and considerable cleanup action, it is still littered with sites where cleanup has failed.
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, struggling with an ambitious agenda on clean air regulations, said it will delay proposing the country's first-ever greenhouse gas limits on oil refineries."
"The Obama administration controls the tie-breaking vote on a plan to begin drilling for natural gas in the Northeast, shining a spotlight on its efforts to find a middle ground on the use of hydraulic fracturing to tap deep shale rock formations for energy.
Thirty years after companies stopped dumping dangerous wastes into the Mahoning River, near Youngstown, Ohio, it is still too polluted for fishing or recreation. Most of the companies are long since gone out of business, but nobody has taken action to clean the river up.
As the public's demand for practical information on climate change grows, Congressional Republicans have killed a no-cost measure that would help the public get that information.
"The nonnative amphibians pose a threat, but efforts to ban them pit environmentalists against Asian Americans, who relish them."
"Up to three million people in Afghanistan are facing hunger, malnutrition and disease after a severe drought wiped out their crops and extreme winter weather risks cutting off their access to vital food aid, a group of aid agencies warned Friday."
"Namie, JAPAN — Eight months ago, people left this place in haste. Families raced from their homes without closing the front doors. They left half-finished wine bottles on their kitchen tables and sneakers in their foyers. They jumped in their cars without taking pets and left cows hitched to milking stanchions.
Now the land stands empty, frozen in time, virtually untouched since the March 11 disaster that created a wasteland in the 12-mile circle of farmland that surrounds the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
