"The glassy stares of the dead, the garbage piling up in the streets, the frightened, angry mobs smashing their way into drugstores and attacking food lines. The images in the thriller Contagion may be delivered with Hollywood flair, but they also have a ring of truth to those on the medical front lines.

"'There's a long tradition of people who don't like a particular message turning to attack the person delivering the message,' former Vice President Al Gore just said on NPR's Talk of the Nation."

"Central Basin Water District pays for positive stories by a firm that Google considers a news site. Officials call it innovation, but open government advocates fear it blurs the line between news and publicity."

"The White House is under pressure from two democratic senators to release a list of chemicals the Environmental Protection Agency says could endanger human health or the environment. This so-called chemicals of concern list would include eight phthalates, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and bisphenol A."

"The chemical industry has attempted to block release of EPA’s proposed list over the past year.

"Five years after the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore returns to the world stage with an updated slide show. Can his message be any more successful this time around?"

After the 9/11 attacks, government and industry warned that chemical plants were a prime terrorist target that could kill thousands of Americans. They moved quickly to make it harder for the public to know how large a threat the plants posed to nearby communities. But a decade later, the nation has yet to adopt a comprehensive anti-terrorism program for chemical plants.

"The editor of the journal Remote Sensing resigned [Friday], saying in an editorial that his journal never should have published a controversial paper in July that challenged the reliability of climate models used to forecast global warming. The paper, by Roy Spencer and William Braswell of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, proposed that climate researchers have likely made a fundamental error by overestimating the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse-gas pollution."

"Texas governor Rick Perry tried to sideline a state commissioner who opposed expanding the scope of a nuclear-waste landfill owned by one of the governor's biggest political donors, Reuters has learned."

"Pennsylvania is one of only four states with regulations in place requiring drillers to disclose on a well-by-well basis the additives and chemicals used in fracturing fluid injected deep underground into oil and natural gas wells. But the state is the only one not to post the data on the Internet."

"In an email to Climate Progress, green jobs champion Van Jones explains how The New York Times misrepresented his quotes and his views."

"What landed in the Tyee's inbox was entirely in keeping with the government's handling of a contentious proposal by a natural gas company to divert large quantities of water out of Williston Reservoir. When word leaked that the government had approved the diversion scheme, a rather strange statement was issued that began by noting that the provincial Cabinet minister in charge was unavailable."

Ben Parfitt reports for The Tyee August 22, 2011.

"At long last, mainstream media begins to pay attention to the flat denial of basic climate science being pushed by right-wing Republican presidential candidates."

"The Environmental Protection Agency is emerging as a favorite target of the Republican presidential candidates, who portray it as the very symbol of a heavy-handed regulatory agenda imposed by the Obama administration that they say is strangling the economy."

NASA is arguing that it doesn't have to come up with any changes in its scientific integrity policy -- including rules limiting how its scientists can talk to reporters. Most federal agencies are under White House orders to come up with new policies, although not all of them have made their draft policies public. Some of the policies for achieving the Obama administration's pledge of scientific openness are still secret.

"The federal Conservative party has sent a threatening email to the widow of an asbestos victim in the latest chapter of Canada's debate over the hazardous mineral."