"Listeria in cantaloupes. Salmonella in peanuts. E. coli in spinach. Hepatitis A in green onions. In the past decade a rash of tainted food has resulted in thousands of hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths. It has also prompted the most sweeping reform of U.S. food safety laws in more than 70 years."
"A city administrator looks out at the Gulf of Mexico from this Southeast Texas town, wondering what vicious hurricanes it may spawn. In the Panhandle, a farmer tries new techniques to keep soil from turning to dust. In West Texas, ranchers watch prairie grass die. Others grow algae as water becomes too salty for other crops. And statewide, reservoirs dry up. Want to see what happens when the impacts of climate change are felt? Well, just look at Texas, some scientists say."
"Leaky pipes are the 'super low-hanging fruit' of climate change."
"About 120 tons of contaminated water has leaked from an underground storage tank at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant and may have mixed with underground water, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said April 6."
"Newly found court documents from long ago are raising fresh questions about the safety of nuclear reactors made by General Electric."
Reports from the spill of tar sands oil from an ExxonMobil pipeline at Mayflower, Arkansas, indicate that reporters are being kept from doing their jobs. They are kept far away from the oil, threatened with arrest, and told things that aren't true. It looks like Exxon — not federal clean-up agencies — is running the press operation. The result may be skewed or scant coverage — possibly a boon for an Obama administration facing a tough choice on the Keystone XL pipeline. More on media access at The Daily Glob.
"InsideClimate News reporter Lisa Song was threatened with arrest on Wednesday after she entered the command center for the cleanup operation in Mayflower, Ark., where a major oil pipeline spill occurred on Friday."
"A 'rank' odor that has spread across parts of greater New Orleans may be linked to a leak from the 192,500-barrel-per-day Chalmette refinery, the U.S. Coast Guard investigating the smell said on Thursday."
"The Home Depot chain agreed to pay $8 million for selling tens of thousands of gallons of paint, varnishes, sealants and other liquid building materials that violated regional air quality rules, the South Coast Air Quality Management District announced Thursday, April 4."
