"U.S. lawmakers criticized environmental officials at a hearing on Wednesday for not acting sooner when they saw a report that drinking water in Flint, Michigan was polluted with dangerously high levels of lead."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's openness has been a major issue throughout the crisis of contaminated drinking water in Flint, which has caused lead poisoning of some children. One aspect of the openness issue is the ability of agency employees to speak with journalists; another is unfulfilled FOIA requests.
"An industrial chemical is showing up in trout from the Great Lakes. It’s called perfluoro-1-butane sulfonamide, or FBSA."
"This morning, the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform committee will hold the first Congressional hearing in Washington on the Flint water crisis."
"Only 3 percent of the juveniles of an endangered salmon species survived the drought along the Sacramento River in 2015 despite extraordinary efforts by federal and state officials to save them, federal officials said Monday."
"Over the past 35 years, the population of right whales in the North Atlantic Ocean has not expanded nearly as much as scientific understanding of the endangered species."
"The FBI is now investigating the contamination of Flint’s drinking water, a man-made public health catastrophe, which has left an unknown number of Flint children and other residents poisoned by lead and resulted in state and federal emergency declarations."
"Could the current strong El Niño help soak the National Football League's 50th Super Bowl next Sunday?"
"Is this where North Pacific humpback whales practice their songs?"
"Two years after thousands of gallons of a coal-cleaning agent leaked into the drinking water supply of 300,000 West Virginians, the sentencings of six officials at a chemical distributor this month will bring to a close criminal cases in the spill."
