National (U.S.)

"One of the most widely prescribed drugs in the United States may have an extra benefit: protecting people from air pollution."

"It was a brisk February morning, and the governors of Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina were seated around a ring of tables draped with pleated beige fabric in the ornate Nest Room of Washington, D.C.’s Willard InterContinental Hotel. Sitting across the tables was Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, whom the governors had invited so they could make their case for expanding offshore energy production. It was a long-awaited meeting for the governors, and they’d armed themselves with specific 'asks' — that Jewell’s department open access to oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic, for instance, and improve 'regulatory certainty' for energy companies operating rigs off the coasts."

"Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s ascent to the top of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee is likely to reignite the decades-old debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)."

"The Obama administration’s decision to put off issuing quotas for the use of renewable fuels this year sets up fights in Congress and the courts over a program that’s been bitterly contested for nearly a decade."

"No one talks much about toxic Superfund sites anymore. But 49 million Americans live close to one."

"A Department of Energy investigation into the contentious firing of a Hanford nuclear waste site official met initial resistance from some of the government's biggest contractors."

"Giant cages float off the shores of Hawaii, housing hundreds of thousands of yellowtail snapper in the deep waters of the Pacific."

"TOLEDO, Ohio — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to come out with new guidelines that will give cities and water treatment plants a blueprint for dealing with the type of algae-borne toxin that contaminated the drinking water in Ohio’s fourth-largest city, a federal official said Wednesday."

"Challenging elitism, racism, and obesity with a grocery store may sound crazy. Here’s what happened when Whole Foods tried to do it in Detroit."

The White House is threatening to veto three bills changing how EPA uses science in its regulatory decisions. The House has already passed two of them.