"Sears Holdings, the parent company of Sears and Kmart, along with two other jewelry retailers last week signed on to the No Dirty Gold campaign's Golden Rules for responsible sourcing of precious metals."

"California officials on Tuesday issued the nation's first blueprint for a broad-based cap-and-trade plan, an innovative and controversial effort to use market forces to control global warming."

"A push to scrap a Minnesota law barring new nuclear power plants gained a pair of influential supporters Tuesday, adding intensity to a debate before a state Legislature that has narrowly resisted the change."

"Pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and polychlorinated biphenyls are among the contaminants hitching an airborne ride to the United States and other parts of the Western Hemisphere on dust storms blowing out of West Africa. That's according to new research presented at the just-completed annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry."

"The percentage of Americans who believe global warming is happening has dipped from 80 to 72 percent in the past year, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, even as a majority still support a national cap on greenhouse gas emissions."

"Rising sea levels due to global warming in the next few decades could put trillions of dollars in U.S. assets at risk, according to a report released Tuesday."

"A team of climate scientists, seeking to remind the negotiators who will hammer out a new climate treaty of what is at stake, has produced  The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a summary of the latest peer-reviewed science on the anticipated impacts of human-driven global warming."

"The Environmental Protection Agency issued a final rule Monday aimed at reducing pollution from construction sites, saying that it will significantly improve the quality of water nationwide."

"Concerns about toxics discharged from an unlined coal ash waste dump in suburban Washington, DC have prompted four environmental groups to give formal notice that they intend to sue Mirant MD Ash Management, LLC and Mirant Mid-Atlantic, LLC Corporation of Atlanta, Georgia for Clean Water Act violations in Maryland."

"Elevated levels of two plastic-softening chemicals in pregnant women's urine are linked to less-masculine play behavior by their sons several years later, according to a study published last week in the International Journal of Andrology."