"President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency administrator has made good on something she calls a top priority: Testing chemicals used widely in the U.S. that have never been assessed for the risks they might pose to human health or the environment."
"The presidential commission examining the causes of the BP oil spill Wednesday laid blame for the disaster on corporate mismanagement, inadequate government regulation and ultimately a lack of political will to ensure proper oversight of the oil industry as it pushed drilling rigs into ever deeper waters."
"House Republicans wasted no time Thursday in trying to block the Obama administration from acting to stem global warming." Whether they have the votes to succeed is uncertain.
"Bacteria ate nearly all the potentially climate-warming methane that spewed from BP's broken wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico last year, scientists reported on Thursday."
"U.S. EPA senior policy analyst Hugh Kaufman, a kind of living legend in the world of federal whistleblowers, ... believes the [House] Oversight panel's chairman [Darrel Issa, R-CA] is turning a committee that is supposed to serve as Congress' watchdog into a panel for partisan witch hunts."
"The errors and misjudgments that led to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil drilling rig last spring weren't the result just of blunders by BP and its contractors, but reflect industry-wide problems that require new regulations and standards, a presidential commission has concluded."
"U.S. customs officials said on Wednesday they had found a beetle considered one of the world's most dangerous agricultural pests in a shipment of rice arriving at Los Angeles International Airport."
"Every few years the defenses of the nation’s nuclear plants are tested. What’s scary is how often they fail."
"Federal mine safety regulators reached an 11th-hour settlement Wednesday with Massey Energy that ends what the Obama administration had touted as a landmark suit to shut down an underground coal mine that government inspectors said posed a continuing hazard to workers."
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