"Food-borne illnesses, such as E. coli and salmonella, cost the United States $152 billion annually in health care and other losses, according to a report released Wednesday by a food safety group."

EPA added Brooklyn's long-polluted Gowanus Canal to the Superfund National Priority List -- along with nine other sites. The designation means that EPA will oversee the cleanup. New York City Mayor Bloomberg had been pushing for a city-run cleanup.

"The U.S. arm of chemical giant LyondellBasell is in negotiations to settle its environmental cleanup liabilities — which include the Kalamazoo River Superfund site — with the U.S. government, according to a company spokesman."

"Drought-stricken farmers and cities across California were granted a measure of relief on Friday when federal and state officials said they expected to supply significantly more water this year than last."

"The federal government will maximize enrollment in the land-idling Conservation Reserve, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a policy that would reduce U.S. cropland by 1.5 percent if successful."
 

"Sylvatic plague -- a close cousin of the dreaded disease that killed one-third of all European residents in the six years between 1347 and 1353 -- persists in rodents in the American West even when the disease does not erupt into epidemic form, new research demonstrates."

"More than a year after President George W. Bush created a vast marine national monument near the Northern Marianas Islands, the federal government has yet to make good on promised investments in the islands."

"Federal law forces companies to provide detailed information to U.S. EPA about the toxicity of the chemicals they use. But there is a catch. The same law -- the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA -- prohibits the agency from sharing that information with the public or even with state and local authorities. States are demanding that the law be changed."

"In the early 1980s, the cancer deaths of four little girls — whose bodies were so tiny they could fit in shoe boxes — forced Hazel Johnson to shift the focus of an organization she'd recently founded."

"Hopes for a nuclear revival, fanned by fears of global warming and a changing political climate in Washington, are running into new obstacles over a key element -- money. A new approach for easing the cost of new multibillion-dollar reactors, which can take years to complete, has provoked a backlash from big-business customers unwilling to go along."