Wildfire season has begun. Some of the areas going up in flames include the increasingly developed zone known as the wildland-urban interface, where fire risks are most apparent to people. One of the steps being taken to help reduce the hazard is fuel reduction work that thins out or removes dense tree stands, making them less prone to wildfire, or at least easier to control when they do burn.
Call for Applications! Based at USC's Annenberg School of Journalism, The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships offer professional journalists this opportunity to apply for an all-expenses-paid mini fellowship with $2,000-$10,000 reporting grant. Grantees spend the week of July 24 - 29, 2011 in Los Angeles. Students are ineligible. Apply by May 2, 2011.
"The oil and gas industry has nearly 7,200 permits to drill on public lands that it has yet to use, according to Bureau of Land Management data obtained by Greenwire."
"WASHINGTON — With gasoline prices rising, oil supplies from the Middle East pinched by political upheaval and growing calls in Congress for expanded domestic oil and gas production, President Obama on Wednesday will set a goal of a one-third reduction in oil imports over the next decade, aides said Tuesday."
"Erin Brockovich, a U.S. consumer health advocate whose life story was the basis for an Academy Award-winning film, urged senators Tuesday to pass a law to document disease clusters in the United States."
"Hundreds of police raided illicit markets to crack down on the lucrative trade in wild animals and rare flowers, arresting 15 traffickers across Mexico this weekend in one of the biggest swoops of its kind."
"A conservative research group in Michigan has issued a far-reaching public records request to the labor studies departments at three public universities in the state, seeking any e-mails involving the Wisconsin labor turmoil." Among the professors under assault by the secretive conservatives is William Cronon, one of the foremost environmental historians in the United States.
"Giving new meaning to toasted wheat, a team of agricultural researchers has spent the past three years and almost a million dollars installing electric heaters over wheat fields in the desert of Maricopa, Ariz."
"It’s the kind of accountability journalism that makes readers raise an eyebrow, if it doesn’t raise their blood pressure first. General Electric Co., reported the New York Times last week, earned $14.2 billion in worldwide profits last year, including $5.1 billion in the United States — and paid exactly zero dollars in federal taxes."
TEPCO and the Japanese government's constant assurances that the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima is under control have started to unravel. Releases of radioactive material continue. Mounting radiation at the site threatens to curtail efforts to prevent more radiation releases.
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