"Hurricane Alex blasted into the record books on Thursday as the first Atlantic hurricane to form during the month of January in more than three-quarters of a century, U.S. weather forecasters said."
"Yosemite National Park officials, looking to avoid a costly trademark fight with DNC Parks & Resorts at Yosemite, announced Thursday that they would change the names of iconic lodges in the park. The Ahwahnee Hotel, for instance, would be known going forward as the Majestic Yosemite Hotel."
"With tens of thousands of sick nuclear-weapons workers thwarted in their bids to win compensation from the U.S. government, Congress is under growing pressure to investigate what went wrong with a $12 billion federal program aimed at helping them."
"The utility whose leaking natural gas well has driven thousands of Los Angeles residents from their homes acknowledged that it understated the number of times airborne levels of the cancer-causing chemical benzene have spiked during the crisis."
"The Obama administration will announce on Friday a halt to new coal mining leases on public lands as it considers an overhaul of the program that could lead to increased costs for energy companies and a slowdown in extraction, according to an administration official."
"The World Health Organization declared on Thursday the end to the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record, which killed and sickened tens of thousands of people in West Africa, even as it cautioned that more flare-ups of the disease were likely."
"Much has been made of the rapid rise of renewable energy in the US, but the policy workhorse behind it does not get nearly enough attention or credit."
"Global emissions of mercury from manmade sources fell 30 percent from 1990 to 2010, in part from decreasing use of coal, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported on Wednesday."
"Global warming is likely to disrupt a natural cycle of ice ages and contribute to delaying the onset of the next big freeze until about 100,000 years from now, scientists said on Wednesday."
"The Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog has found no evidence of bias in the agency’s efforts to block a proposed gold mine from being built near Alaska’s Bristol Bay."
