"CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Local citizens on Wednesday threatened to sue FirstEnergy Corp. over a huge coal-ash impoundment along the West Virginia-Pennsylvania border, alleging the operation is polluting area streams, tainting groundwater, and violating federal waste disposal requirements."

"Hundreds of Baltimore-area families have volunteered for a government study to spray their suburban yards with pesticide, which researchers hope can protect them from Lyme disease but that environmentalists warn is unsafe."

"In 2009 and 2010, the Delaware River near Wilmington got a little-noticed early taste of the waste left behind by the controversial natural gas drilling method called fracking. Some 1.4 million gallons of partially treated wastewater collected from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, wells outside the Delaware River basin were further processed and flushed into Delaware waters through the commercial side of DuPont Co.’s big wastewater plant in Deepwater, N.J., near the foot of the Delaware Memorial Bridge."

Maryland is set to ban the arsenic-containing drug Roxarsone in chicken feed. Maryland is a major chicken producer, and that puts it ahead of most other states as well as the federal government. It is all the more remarkable, given that 'Big Chicken' is a major force in Maryland politics.

"At his family farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Lee Richardson raises thousands of chickens from fuzzy hatchlings to the juicy broilers stacked at grocery stores far and wide. Like a lot of farmwork, this seems simple, but it's not.

"A new law in Pennsylvania has doctors nervous."

"PITTSBURGH  -- In a lawsuit over gas industry secrecy, doctors, scientists, researchers and advocates filed court documents supporting two newspapers seeking access to information that could shed light on the health impacts of gas development, including the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing or fracking. ...

"The Sierra Club will try to use a 40-year-old legal settlement to scuttle plans by Dominion Resources Inc to convert a liquefied natural gas terminal in Maryland into a major export hub."

"The Chesapeake Bay Foundation and other environmental groups have urged a Pennsylvania federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the federal government's plan for reducing pollution fouling the estuary."