"The Interior Department released its new scientific integrity policy last week, but scientists and advocacy groups are miffed at what they view as an incomplete and disingenuous set of rules."
An Arizona Republican operative is recruiting drifters, street people, and the homeless to run as Green Party candidates to dilute the Democrat vote. The Green Party is trying to get them removed from the ballot.
"Bedbugs used to be solely a residential problem, but they are showing up in commercial settings, and not just in places with beds like hotels, nursing homes and apartment complexes. Increasingly, pest control companies report finding bedbugs in office buildings, movie theaters, clothing stores, food plants, factories and even airplanes. For the affected businesses, the expense can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the companies that deal with the scourge, it is a bonanza, with business doubling and tripling."
"BP wants the federal government to meet its demand for continued access to oil and gas leases in the United States. If the oil giant can't keep drilling here, its promise to compensate victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster might go unfulfilled—or so the company claims."
"In May, the company pledged $500 million for critical oil spill science. Then politics and parochialism got in the way."
"Oxygen levels fell significantly in deep-sea areas of the Gulf of Mexico contaminated by oil plumes from the BP spill. But although researchers found a 20% decline in dissolved oxygen, the drop was not steep enough to create biological 'dead zones' that some scientists feared might form in the wake of the BP disaster." Those were the findings of a government study.
"New oil and gas drilling is probably the most visible activity people associate with threats to groundwater in Texas. But it's not usually the source of known contamination, according to state records. Instead, old or abandoned oil and gas wells, petroleum storage facilities and even existing water wells are most frequently identified as problems."
"He'd just met her, but Evan Beedle wanted Rosina Philippe to know how his life changed after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, how pieces of his identity slipped away, one label at a time. Husband. Father. Fisherman."
In a classic two-sided story, the New York Times reports scientific uncertainty about whether the ubiquitous plastic chemical BPA hurts humans or not. It does not explore another key question: should the burden of proof be on companies to prove chemicals they widely expose people to are safe? -- or on environmental health scientists to prove them unsafe?
"Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Friday he cannot predict whether Royal Dutch Shell, which has invested $3.5 billion in an offshore Arctic oil-development program, will be allowed to drill the five wells it plans next year in Alaska's Chukchi and Beaufort Seas."
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