"New citations against Chemical Waste Management prompt Kettleman City activists, who believe the dump has sickened children, to protest its proposal to grow."

"HINKLEY -- Underwater home mortgages plague the High Desert at an approximate rate of 60 percent, according to real estate website Zillow.com. But in Hinkley, residents say the entire town is dealing with mortgages above their current assessed values."

"BEIJING -- Some of the world’s best known fashion retailers are selling clothing contaminated with hazardous chemicals that break down to form hormone-disrupting or cancer-causing chemicals when released into the environment, finds a report issued [Tuesday] by Greenpeace International in Beijing."

"ST. LOUIS -- A doctoral dissertation that renewed public interest in the military-sponsored chemical spraying of impoverished areas of St. Louis in the 1950s and ’60s has spawned a lawsuit."

"Pennsylvania's environmental protection chief is defending his agency's controversial system for testing water wells near Marcellus Shale operations by saying other states work the same way. But regulators in those states say that's not true."

"Cancer-causing chemicals linger around homes and in gardens over a 9-square-mile area more than three months after a catastrophic fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, according to an environmental justice group."

"WINDSOR, Ontario -- For more than three decades, workers, most of them women, have complained of dreadful conditions in many of this city’s plastic automotive parts factories: Pungent fumes and dust that caused nosebleeds, headaches, nausea and dizziness. Blobs of smelly, smoldering plastic dumped directly onto the floor. 'It was like hell,' says one woman who still works in the industry."

"As Northeast states take measure of the destruction brought by Hurricane Sandy, there's a new concern. New York and New Jersey have dozens of Superfund sites close to the shore. Some of these toxic zones were flooded by Sandy's storm surge. There are worries in Newark that toxic chemicals may have been swept into some people's home."

"Among air experts, it's an open secret: federal and state officials grossly undercount a crucial type of air pollution, often by an order of magnitude and particularly in areas like Houston with its major concentrations of petrochemical plants."

"Salty bromide concentrations in the Monongahela River, which had risen in 2009 and 2010 due, at least in part, to discharges of Marcellus Shale gas drilling wastewater by sewage treatment plants, returned to normal levels in 2011 and this year, according to a Carnegie Mellon University river monitoring study."