"A former staffer at a state government agency responsible for regulating hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has warned that allowing the controversial gas drilling method in New York would lead to contamination of the state's aquifers and would poison its drinking water.

"Federal regulators are considering retesting water supplies at a small town in Pennsylvania that residents say have been contaminated by natural gas drilling.

Just a month after declaring water in Dimock safe, officials from the Environmental Protection Agency are taking another look after new evidence suggested that drinking water could be polluted worse than originally thought.

"The toxic cocktail that is the Gowanus Canal took a century to mix. Now plans for the federal government to transform it in 10 years from an environmental blight into a healthy urban waterway are taking shape amid optimism from neighbors and frustration from City Hall."

"A licensing panel at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has turned down the state’s effort to block renewal of the operating license of a reactor because of the Fukushima Daichi accident in Japan."

Matthew Wald reports for the New York Times November 29, 2011.

"A highly toxic industrial chemical has been spreading under a Garfield neighborhood for almost three decades, slowly seeping into homes and threatening the health of thousands."

"The Obama administration controls the tie-breaking vote on a plan to begin drilling for natural gas in the Northeast, shining a spotlight on its efforts to find a middle ground on the use of hydraulic fracturing to tap deep shale rock formations for energy.

New Jersey was once the poster child of hazardous waste sites. After four decades of promises, legislation, and considerable cleanup action, it is still littered with sites where cleanup has failed.

Thirty years after companies stopped dumping dangerous wastes into the Mahoning River, near Youngstown, Ohio, it is still too polluted for fishing or recreation. Most of the companies are long since gone out of business, but nobody has taken action to clean the river up.

"A new lobbying group has formed in Albany, N.Y., to argue on behalf of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas at the state level, in what may signal the start of open support from labor unions for the controversial drilling practice."

"Long-awaited revisions to the Delaware River Basin Commission's proposed rules that would govern natural-gas development in the watershed were released Tuesday."

"Cold, tired and frustrated, residents of more than 1.6 million homes in the Northeast remained without power on Tuesday and some were told it could take 10 more days to restore electricity after the rare and deadly October snowstorm."

"NEWARK — The first steps in a Superfund cleanup of massive dioxin deposits in the Passaic River were unveiled by officials today."

"One of the darkest Halloweens ever loomed for about 3 million households left without power on Sunday by a rare October snowstorm in the Northeast that bedeviled transportation and killed at least eight people."

"New York’s environmental study of the possible risks of high-volume hydraulic fracturing, a technique for natural gas drilling, addresses everything from the possible impact on job creation and the character of communities to damage to roads and wildlife. But a group of doctors, medical associations and environmental groups say there is one glaring omission: the possible effects on public health."

"The day the Twin Towers crumbled, more than 25,000 kids inhaled toxic substances. Ten years later, many of them are suffering from health problems that still haven't gone away."