Public

"CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- As the trial begins in a major toxic pollution lawsuit against Monsanto Co., jurors won't be allowed to tackle a key issue: Should the company pay to clean up dioxin it allegedly spewed across the city of Nitro?

Experts won't testify about the need for property remediation. Lawyers won't argue about the issue. Jurors won't be asked to force Monsanto to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars such a project could cost.

Judges O.C. Spaulding and Derek Swope issued rulings in July and November that threw out that part of the case."

"Those who don’t believe that the ridges of mountains should be blasted away to extract coal in Tennessee have taken to prayer in the 40 days leading to this year’s opening of the state legislature."

"High levels of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere mean the next ice age is unlikely to begin for at least 1,500 years, an article in the journal Nature Geoscience said on Monday."

"SEOUL -- Bringing a diplomatic end to an unwieldy high seas drama, three Australian anti-whaling protesters detained after boarding a Japanese vessel in the Indian Ocean will be released to Australian authorities, the government in Canberra announced Tuesday."

"MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s social development secretary says an estimated 600,000 households suffered property damage or crop losses due to an unusual combination of floods, drought and freezing weather in 2011. Heriberto Felix Guerra says the drought has been so bad that about 2.6 million people in about 1,650 villages and towns in northern Mexico do not even have drinking water."

"The U.S. should declare a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in populated areas until the health effects are better understood, doctors said at a conference on the drilling process."

Ongoing controversy over Pennsylvania's oversight (or lack thereof) of fracking for gas in the Marcellus Shale has brought a lot of readers to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's "Pipeline" reporting portal. The Post-Gazette offers interactive maps of drilling data from the Department of Environmental Protection. One big problem: "DEP's production data ... says there are 495 more wells producing gas, or ready to produce gas, than DEP has recorded as ever being drilled, and 182 of those wells don't even show up on the state's Marcellus Shale permit list."