Public

"Federal wildlife investigators in California and other states say they have cracked an international smuggling ring that trafficked for years in sawed-off rhinoceros horns, which fetch stratospheric prices in Vietnam and China for their supposed cancer-curing powers."

Several federal agencies and an array of environmental groups and companies are at odds over how much selenium pollution should be allowed from an Idaho phosphate mine. It is the two-headed trout that may end up carrying the argument.

"Is food packaging compromising the effectiveness of your child's vaccines? A recent Harvard School of Public Health study suggesting that it might be has rocked parents and pediatricians nationwide."

"In a blow to the oil and gas industry, a judge has ruled small towns in New York have the authority to ban drilling -- including the controversial method known as fracking -- within their borders."

"There are an estimated 11,000 private and commercial injection and disposal wells in Oklahoma. Each year those wells are injected with billions of gallons of oil and gas wastewater. According to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission commercial disposal wells pumped at least 8.8 billion gallons of wastewater into the earth in the last two years. A spokesperson for the Corporation Commission said they have not tallied the amount of water injected through private wells." One of those operations may have ruined the well water of Rusty Russell.

"GOP scientists say their attempts to talk about climate dangers with their party's politicians and their aides have largely fallen on deaf ears."

"According to one of the documents that came out in last week's scandal, the Heartland Institute plans to pay a federal scientist for his contributions to an annual climate-denial report. The proposed 2012 budget for the institute is one of the more interesting things to come out of the Heartland documents that were passed around the internet, as it includes a $1,000-per-month payment to a Department of Interior employee."

Hundreds of coal-waste dams, scattered across Appalachia and often poorly regulated, could bring a new disaster like the one at Buffalo Creek in 1972 that killed 125 people and left 4,000 homeless.

"CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Forty years ago Sunday morning, a trio of coal-waste dams at a Pittston Coal operation on Buffalo Creek in Logan County collapsed. A wall of sludge, water, and debris stormed down the hollow from Saunders to Man.

"Scary antibiotic-resistant infections aren’t just lurking in the hospital anymore. They’re in gyms, at the beach, and increasingly, on the farm."