"U.S. EPA senior policy analyst Hugh Kaufman, a kind of living legend in the world of federal whistleblowers, ... believes the [House] Oversight panel's chairman [Darrel Issa, R-CA] is turning a committee that is supposed to serve as Congress' watchdog into a panel for partisan witch hunts."
"The errors and misjudgments that led to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil drilling rig last spring weren't the result just of blunders by BP and its contractors, but reflect industry-wide problems that require new regulations and standards, a presidential commission has concluded."
"U.S. customs officials said on Wednesday they had found a beetle considered one of the world's most dangerous agricultural pests in a shipment of rice arriving at Los Angeles International Airport."
"Every few years the defenses of the nation’s nuclear plants are tested. What’s scary is how often they fail."
"Federal mine safety regulators reached an 11th-hour settlement Wednesday with Massey Energy that ends what the Obama administration had touted as a landmark suit to shut down an underground coal mine that government inspectors said posed a continuing hazard to workers."
"Federal regulators on Wednesday outlined rules for the tobacco industry that for the first time require disclosure of any changes to their products, and that detail how to seek permission to market new products under the sweeping tobacco control law signed by President Obama in June 2009."
"Citing alleged health effects from electromagnetic waves, a county in the North San Francisco Bay Area has criminalized the installation of "smart" electric meters."
"A Texas commission Tuesday set in motion the importation of low-level radioactive-waste from 36 other states, a move long sought by the nuclear-energy industry and long opposed by environmentalists."
"After spiking upward in response to Copenhagen talks and the 'climategate' uproar, media coverage of climate change plummeted to levels last seen in 2005, according to DailyClimate.org's archives and other media databases."
The Obama administration's efforts to toughen mine safety enforcement, following the Upper Big Branch disaster in April that killed 29, are encountering the same old evade-and-delay resistance from the mining industry. Those are the tactics that appear to have led to the disaster in the first place.
