"Federal agencies turned in progress reports to the White House this week on their scientific integrity policies, but officials are saying little about how far along agencies have come in protecting scientists' work from political meddling."
If you spend a lot of time researching things on the Internet as part of your reporting, the online Data Science Toolkit, which is especially handy with geographic data, and a book by Pete Warden could make parts of your job a lot easier.
Denial of news media access to Gulf beaches has been an issue since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. There's tussling over access to (and interpretation of) scientific information on possible impacts of the spill on the Gulf ecosystem. And The Guardian obtained >30,000 pages of BP in-house memos FOIA'd by Greenpeace, which suggest BP was working hard to influence the results of the research it was paying for.
"The head of the Met Office [the United Kingdom's national weather service] has revealed that he has received death threats from climate change sceptics."
"U.S. EPA's long-awaited study of formaldehyde's toxicity got panned today by a National Academy of Sciences' panel that sharply disagreed with the agency's conclusions and declared the effort in need of 'substantial revision.'"
"A gene that causes a wide range of bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics has been found in the water supply in Delhi, with worrying implications for the rest of the globe."
"A shutdown would cut short a key NASA field campaign to survey Arctic land and sea ice, and a larger project it is part of. The measure now funding federal operations expires on April 8."
The draft policy, released recently by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), barely addresses media access. It leaves this to the purview of the Commerce Department Public Communications Policy — which has not changed since the last year of the Bush administration.
"Big earthquakes over the last 30 years have not triggered global chains of massive seismic activity, U.S. scientists reported on Monday. But major quakes do trigger other big ones close by and smaller ones far away, researchers said."
Advertisement 
