"More than 191,000 gallons of toxic chemicals may have been released from the Stolthaven New Orleans petroleum and chemical storage and transfer terminal in Braithwaite during Hurricane Isaac, according to a company report filed Tuesday with the U.S. Coast Guard National Response Center. That's just one day after the Louisiana Department of Environmental Qualty assured the public that monitoring at the facility detected no offsite contamination."

"The GAO says the Department of Homeland Security has not established the need or effectiveness of a multibillion-dollar upgrade to the BioWatch system."

Eleven years after the 9/11 terrorism attack, Department of Homeland Security officials explained to a House Energy subcommittee why their program to harden security at U.S. chemical plants still hasn't been implemented.

"CHICAGO -- For two decades, one of the most commonly used type of rail tanker has been allowed to haul hazardous liquids from coast to coast even though transportation officials were aware of a dangerous design flaw that almost guarantees the car will tear open in an accident, potentially spilling cargo that could catch fire, explode or contaminate the environment."

"Nearly two years before peace activists broke into a U.S. nuclear weapons facility in late July, government investigators warned in classified reports of lax security at the complex where the nation's largest concentration of weapons-grade uranium is stored."

"AUBURN, Ala. -- Scientific testing has confirmed a link between oil from the massive BP spill and tar found on Alabama beaches after Hurricane Isaac."

Land contamination may be as important as the direct radiation dose to humans in setting safety standards for nuclear plants, the disaster at Japan's Fukushima site suggests.

"For years they were alone as their strength was sapped and their bank accounts drained by the cancers they caught at Ground Zero. Now, finally, New York’s 9/11 heroes have gotten some backup."

"Wildfires burning across the northern Rockies threatened hundreds of homes on Monday in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, while firefighters in Washington state scrambled to battle scores of blazes sparked by weekend lightning storms across the eastern Cascades."

"ANCHORAGE -- More than four years after Royal Dutch Shell paid $2.8 billion to the federal government for petroleum leases in the Chukchi Sea, a company vessel on Sunday morning sent a drill bit into the ocean floor, beginning preliminary work on an exploratory well 70 miles off the northwest coast of Alaska."

"A rugged stretch of coastline known as Japan's Nuclear Alley is dotted with 14 nuclear reactors and now there are warnings that several of these ageing nuclear plants sit near, or on, active faultlines."

"California regulators have not been conducting the intensive workplace-safety inspections of Chevron's Richmond plant and the state's 14 other oil refineries that federal standards call for, a Chronicle investigation shows."

"The U.S. Justice Department is ramping up its rhetoric against BP PLC for the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, describing in new court papers examples of what it calls 'gross negligence and willful misconduct.'"

"The province of Quebec is responsible for 75 percent of the maple syrup produced in the ENTIRE WORLD. So it’s no surprise that they keep a strategic maple syrup reserve -- hot weather ruins the volume and taste of the syrup crop, and pancake fiends can get ugly, so it pays to have backup. Which is all very good planning, until more than a quarter of the syrup nest egg disappears."

"CHARLOTTE, N.C. — President Obama consoled victims of Hurricane Isaac along the Gulf Coast on Monday and said officials from all levels of government will do everything they can to assess the damage from the storm and figure out how to help.