"Federal officials Wednesday warned people not to come in contact with the water or eat any fish or shellfish from Newark Bay and the lower Passaic and Hackensack rivers because contamination levels remain dangerously high after Hurricane Sandy crippled a key sewage treatment plant."
"Among air experts, it's an open secret: federal and state officials grossly undercount a crucial type of air pollution, often by an order of magnitude and particularly in areas like Houston with its major concentrations of petrochemical plants."
"LAKE WYLIE, N.C. -- For more than a year, one Charlotte environmental group has warned of what could happen if coal ash ponds leak into local lakes. Now, they say, it’s happening."
"A collapse in upcoming global climate negotiations in Doha could lead to a 'wild west' approach to reducing carbon emissions, an Australian environmental think tank says."
"Research to be released Thursday shows that West Coast refineries continued to produce gasoline even though Americans were told they were temporarily shut down, leading to price spikes in May and October, McClatchy Newspapers reports."
"BP and the U.S. government portrayed in public a united front as a runaway well spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. But they privately sought to withhold potentially critical information from each other, possibly slowing efforts to solve the crisis, according to new testimony."
"WASHINGTON -- Terrorists could black out large segments of the United States for weeks or months by attacking the power grid and damaging hard-to-replace components that are crucial to making it work, the National Academy of Sciences said in a report released Wednesday."
"Barack Obama claimed climate change as a personal mission of his second term on Wednesday, offering for the first time to take charge of the effort to find a bipartisan solution to the existential crisis."
Various news organizations are reporting that Thursday may see announcement of a plea deal between BP and the Justice Department in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill. They say BP will plead guilty to criminal misconduct and pay a record criminal fine.
Whistleblowers are key sources for investigative journalists. The bill, approved by unanimous consent in the House and Senate, was hailed by watchdog groups Government Accountability Project and Project on Government Oversight, who had fought for its passage.
