National (U.S.)

"A coalition of environmental groups is suing federal agencies in an effort to change the location of corridors to transmit energy across Western lands."

The bark beetles devastating millions of acres of western pine forests are actually a native insect whose destruction -- like that of wildfire -- is part of a natural cycle of forest regeneration.

An environmental advocacy group has charged that EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, when she headed New Jersey's environmental agency, sought to block publication of a study on the health effects of toxic chemical PFOA on grounds that it had not been sufficiently peer-reviewed. She later relented.

During the Bush administration and earlier, the Pentagon waged a war to keep EPA from regulating perchlorate, a rocket fuel that has widely contaminated drinking water, by fudging the science about its health effects. Now the defense industry is pushing the same case to the Obama Office of Management and Budget.

President Obama's nominee for the top Justice Department environmental enforcement job, Ignacia Moreno, has come under fire from EPA staff attorneys for her previous work defending GE -- a major polluter prosecuted by EPA. Backers say Moreno was tough on polluters in a previous stint at Justice.

"The White House is trying to make Americans' food safer after recent recalls of popular products like peanut butter and cookie dough."

"Democrats in the Senate on Tuesday began a drive to advance climate change legislation, a top Obama administration priority, amid warnings that a bill recently passed by the House of Representatives to reduce carbon emissions would have to be changed."