National (U.S.)

"For environmentalists, the BP oil spill may be disproving the maxim that great tragedies produce great change."

"The presidential commission appointed to study the causes of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill and to recommend improvements for offshore drilling has navigated tight spots as it prepares to begin work this week."

"A tiny insect is literally sucking the life out of hemlock trees in the Eastern United States. The hemlock wooly adelgid was first spotted in Virginia in the 1950s. Since then it's hit roughly half the hemlocks from Georgia to Massachusetts."

"They may not be the 500-pound 'Frankenfish' that some researchers were talking about 10 years ago, but a Massachusetts company says it's on the verge of receiving federal approval to market a quick-growing Atlantic salmon that's been genetically modified with help from a Pacific Chinook salmon."

"Last March, President Obama promised he'd have a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to the federal government on hand by July 29. A full year later, federal agencies still have not received any new directives and some government scientists say that conditions have not improved noticeably since Obama took power."

"The amount of plutonium buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported, a new analysis indicates, suggesting that a cleanup to protect future generations will be far more challenging than planners had assumed."

"BP crews made progress Sunday in their attempt to place a new sealing device atop the blown-out well shooting oil into the Gulf of Mexico, company Vice President Kent Wells said."
 

"The incandescent light bulb’s days are numbered. Under federal law, the 100-watt bulbs are supposed to be taken off the shelf next year, followed later by the more common 40- and 60-watt models. But guess who’s still using them? The Department of Energy."

"The Monsanto Company agreed to pay the Environmental Protection Agency a $2.5 million penalty for selling mislabeled bags of genetically engineered seed."

"With a weeklong window of favorable weather opening in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration is pressing BP to move quickly on two operations that could double the amount of oil  captured from the gushing well."