"In marketing campaigns featuring heavy-metal theme songs, rapping parents, secret agents in cat masks, pyrotechnics and even Godzilla, minivan makers are trying to recast the much-ridiculed mom-mobile as something that parents can be proud -- or at least unashamed -- of driving."

"Gov. Andrew Cuomo is receiving plaudits from environmental groups for nominating Joseph Martens as the new commissioner of New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation."

"State environmental officials approved new coal-ash landfill in southeast Baltimore Tuesday, saying "state-of-the-art" pollution controls there should allay nearby residents' fears that the power plant waste will blow into their neighborhoods and leak into the Patapsco River."

"The environmental movement lost a leader Monday night with the death of Judy Bonds, executive director of Coal River Mountain Watch. Bonds, 58, had battled cancer for several months, but to the end was a leading voice in the movement to end mountaintop removal coal mining."

"Federal [officials] Monday issued seven safety recommendations — six of them labeled urgent — stemming from the explosion of a natural gas pipeline that killed eight people and destroyed 37 homes in the Bay Area community of San Bruno last September."

"With President Obama slated to sign historic food-safety legislation into law Tuesday, the coalition of food industry, public interest and consumer groups that used a public health message to win its passage is now making an argument for its funding."

"Four previously abundant species of bumblebee are close to disappearing in the United States, researchers reported Monday in a study confirming that the agriculturally important bees are being affected worldwide."

"A coalition of environmental and farmworker groups said in a lawsuit announced Monday that state pesticide regulators improperly cut off public comment on a controversial agricultural fumigant in order to secure its passage before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's term ended."