"The Environmental Protection Agency updated water quality guidelines for the nation's beaches Monday, moving in response to charges that the federal government has not done enough to protect bathers from polluted water."

"Republicans stopped Sen. Jon Tester's (D-Mont.) Sportsmen's Act dead in its tracks Monday evening."

"For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup. The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company’s new drug, performed best. ... What only careful readers of the article would have gleaned is the extent of the financial connections between the drugmaker and the research."

"The Department of Energy has reduced the 586 square miles of Hanford requiring environmental cleanup to 161 square miles. In three more years, the land requiring cleanup could be little more than the 75 square miles at Hanford's center as DOE works to complete cleanup outlined in its 2015 Vision, an ambitious plan for work to be completed by the end of 2015."

"The Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank skeptical of climate change science, has joined with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council to write model legislation aimed at reversing state renewable energy mandates across the country."

"Maps show coastal and low-lying areas that would be permanently flooded, without engineered protection, in three levels of higher seas. Percentages are the portion of dry, habitable land within the city limits of places listed that would be permanently submerged. "

Baden Copeland, Josh Keller and Bill Marsh produced the set of interactive maps for the New York Times November 24, 2012. [26]

SEE ALSO:

"SACO, Maine -- In the aftermath of the historic floods caused by Superstorm Sandy, some city leaders have begun to argue for the construction of sea walls capable of shielding the U.S. coastline from ever more intense storms."

"Organic growers and food safety advocates on Tuesday condemned an advisory report to the Agriculture Department claiming its recommendations would be costly for farmers who want to protect their conventional crops from being contaminated by genetically modified (GMO), also known as genetically engineered (GE), varieties."

"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."

"Water agencies in Southern California, Arizona and Nevada will buy nearly 100,000 acre-feet of water from Mexico's share of the Colorado River for nearly $10 million."