"A seven-foot-tall Latin cross in the middle of both the Mojave Desert and a Supreme Court case on the separation of church and state has been stolen, federal officials said Tuesday."

"Restoration of the Chesapeake Bay entered a new phase [Tuesday] as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, its co-plaintiffs, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency settled their lawsuit with a binding agreement that will require pollution to be reduced across the nation's largest estuary."

"The Obama administration on Tuesday proposed breaking up the agency responsible for both policing the oil industry and acting as its partner in drilling activities, seeking to end a decades-old relationship between industry and government that has proved highly profitable -- and some say too cozy -- for both."

At a Senate hearing, executives of the oil-industry firms involved in the Gulf spill all agreed that the disaster was somebody else's fault.

"Powerful puffs of natural gas, called kicks, are a normal occurrence in many deep-ocean drilling operations. But one intense kick of natural gas caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to be shut down because of the fear of an explosion just weeks before a similar release succeeded in destroying and sinking the platform and sent millions of gallons of oil on a collision course with Louisiana and the rest of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico."

"A U.S. Senate compromise bill aimed at battling global warming would cut emissions of greenhouse gases 17 percent by 2020, according to a summary given to senators and obtained by Reuters on Tuesday."

"Lawsuits attacking U.S. EPA's first greenhouse gas standard are expected to start rolling in after the Obama administration's suite of new automobile standards was published Friday in the Federal Register."

"Federal regulators are expanding their investigation into children's jewelry that contains the toxic metal cadmium, promising that a recall announced Monday of 'Best Friends' charm bracelets will not be the last."

"Far too many of the world's plants and animals -- and the wild places that support them -- are at risk of collapse, a U.N. report finds, despite a global goal set in 2002 for major improvement by this year."