"Work is set to resume at the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric site after the Newfoundland and Labrador government reached a deal with indigenous leaders that will add more delays to the controversial megaproject."
"Nearly nine months after Zika was declared a global health emergency, the virus has infected at least 650,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including tens of thousands of expectant mothers. But to the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil. Instead, Zika has left a puzzling and distinctly uneven pattern of damage across the Americas."
"Fewer polluters were criminally prosecuted based on referrals from the Environmental Protection Agency this year than in any year in the past two decades, including during the George W. Bush administration."
"As actor Mark Ruffalo arrived to support their cause, protesters camping in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline braced Tuesday for action by a growing police and military force to the north after the pipeline company issued a foreboding statement saying trespassers will be prosecuted and 'removed from the land.'"
"Donald Trump’s close financial ties to Energy Transfer Partners, operators of the controversial Dakota Access oil pipeline, have been laid bare, with the presidential candidate invested in the company and receiving more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from its chief executive."
"Worldwide populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have plunged by almost 60 percent since 1970 as human activities overwhelm the environment, the WWF conservation group said on Thursday."
"In a loss for ExxonMobil, the New York State Supreme Court has ordered the oil giant and its accounting firm to produce documents subpoenaed in a highly charged investigation of whether the company concealed from investors and the public what it knew about climate change as long as four decades ago."
Another database upgrade that will help environmental journalists is available from the group Southeast Coal Ash. This database site covers Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
U.S. EPA's refinement of ECHO's search engine for drinking water violations should make it possible for journalists to ask much more sophisticated and complex questions — but the usual caveats apply.
The vast coal seams below federally owned lands in the West are a resource owned by the American people as a whole — and when rights to mine them are sold to coal companies, it is supposed to be on terms that are in the public interest. So you'd think public scrutiny via open information would be a given. The Interior Department says not, recently denying a FOIA request for this information. Image: © Clipart.com.
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