National (U.S.)

"CUCAPÁ EL MAYOR, Mexico — Germán Muñoz looked out at the river before him and talked about the days when dolphins swam here, 60 miles from the sea."

"The fire that destroyed part of Chevron's Richmond refinery happened because weak state regulations allowed the company to monitor rather than simply fix potential problems, federal investigators said Monday."

"Synthetic chemicals added to consumer products to meet federal and state flammability standards are showing up in waterways, wildlife and even human breast milk."

The 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting went to InsideClimate News, a 5-year-old web-only nonprofit, for its book-length feature series on the 2010 Enbridge tar-sands oil spill that fouled miles of Michigan's Kalamazoo River. InsideClimate has been one of the most aggressive media outlets covering the current spill in Mayflower, Arkansas. ExxonMobil recently threatened one of InsideClimate's reporters with arrest for trying to find a federal government press office handling the spill.

"NOAA has issued a report on a small part of the recent brutal droughts that have hit the United States over the past few years. The report — 'An Interpretation of the Origins of the 2012 Central Great Plains Drought' — is needlessly confusing, scientifically problematic, and already leading to misleading headlines."

"MAYFLOWER, Arkansas -- Warren Andrews had just finished putting up balloons for his stepdaughter's 18th birthday party at their suburban home in Mayflower, Arkansas, when his wife came inside and said something was wrong."

"President Obama's top energy adviser repeatedly huddled with oil and gas lobbyists in the months before the administration changed new hydraulic fracturing rules to the industry's liking, records show."

While honey bee die-offs often called "colony collapse disorder" have been increasing for several years, so has scientific evidence that a widely used class of pesticides called neonicotinoids could well be an important contributing cause. In 2011, EPA said it would review its approval on one such pesticide. Now it says it expects to finish in five years.

"You might have been wondering whether the Obama administration was going to impose the first-ever greenhouse gas limits on new power plants, since the deadline is April 13."

"Decades ago, when a U.S. EPA administrator was on the brink of retirement, employees wheeled a giant cardboard box into his office. Inside: an employee known for his tendency to disparage the agency's decisions in the press."