National (U.S.)

"The Southern Environmental Law Center, a Virginia-based nonprofit legal advocacy group, has released its 2012 list of the Top 10 endangered places in the Southeast, environmentally speaking. While the list changes from year to year, certain places like the Chesapeake Bay remain a top concern — and issues like pollution from coal-fired power plants and the protection of public lands and old-growth forests are recurring themes. While the list only considers six states, the issues raised by each site resonate nationally, and even globally."

"Republican lawmakers will try to force the Obama administration to approve the Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline by attaching it to a highway bill that Congress will consider next month, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday."

President Barack Obama earlier this month denied TransCanada's application for the oil sands pipeline, citing lack of time to review an alternative route within a 60-day window for action set by Congress.

"NEW ORLEANS -- On the day the Deepwater Horizon sank, BP officials warned in an internal memo that if the well was not protected by the blow-out preventer at the drill site, crude oil could burst into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 3.4 million gallons a day, an amount a million gallons higher than what the government later believed spilled daily from the site."

"With the specter of past deadly poisonings, the food industry steps up its quest for clean salad greens, testing various industrial washes and other methods like ultrasound."

"U.S. law enforcement agencies are exposing people to radiation in more settings and in increasing doses to screen for explosives, weapons and drugs. In addition to the controversial airport body scanners [2], which are now deployed for routine screening, various X-ray devices have proliferated at the border, in prisons and on the streets of New York. Not only have the machines become more widespread, but some of them expose people to higher doses of radiation. And agencies have pushed the boundaries of acceptable use by X-raying people covertly, according to government documents and interviews."

"Hoping to combat the growing problem of childhood obesity, the Obama administration on Wednesday announced its long-awaited changes to government-subsidized school meals, a final round of rules that adds more fruits and green vegetables to breakfasts and lunches and reduces the amount of salt and fat."

"Assisted by technological innovation and years of subsidies, the cost of wind and solar power has fallen sharply — so much so that the two industries say that they can sometimes deliver cleaner electricity at prices competitive with power made from fossil fuels. At the same time, wind and solar companies are telling Congress that they cannot be truly competitive and keep creating jobs without a few more years of government support."

"A new image of the Earth has been popping up all over the Internet, dazzling us with its high-def imagery of land masses, oceans and rippled clouds."

"The Obama administration [Thursday] proposed a new forest planning rule that will guide the management of 155 forests, 20 grasslands and one prairie in the National Forest System."

"Throughout North Dakota, little yellow flowers dot thousands of miles of roadsides. These canola plants, found along most major trucking routes, look harmless. But they are fueling a controversy: They prove that large numbers of genetically modified plants have escaped from farm fields and are now growing wild. About 80 percent of canola growing along roadsides in North Dakota contains genes that have been modified to make the plants resistant to common weed-killers."