The Agriculture Department under President Obama has partly restored public access to the Agricultural Chemical Usage data by the National Agricultural Statistics Service. President Bush had cancelled the reports in 2008.
WONDER is a single portal for using a variety of databases related to public health that are maintained by CDC. Many are relevant to the environment beat, such as asthma and allergy prevalence, lung disease, cancer, agricultural safety, pesticides, occupational exposure, chemical hazards, waterborne disease, foodborne disease, and adverse vaccine events.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had gone through an open rulemaking process on the "Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) Articles Exemption Clarification Rule" but withdrew a final rule it had sent to President Obama's Office of Management and Budget for approval after OMB met privately with chemical, wood, and other industry lobbyists.
"U.S. EPA [Tuesday] issued a final rule on how gasoline stations must label fuel with up to 15 percent ethanol content (E15), marking a step toward legal sale of the fuel and drawing criticism from several groups that said the labels will not do enough to prevent consumers from misusing it."
"The operator of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant met with angry shareholders on Tuesday, offering profuse apologies as hecklers shouted abuse from a rowdy floor. But a motion that would have forced the company to abandon its nuclear program was defeated."
"[Colorado] State health officials are letting Cotter Corp. dump 90,000 gallons of radioactive sludge and solvents from its uranium mill into an impoundment pond the agency knows to be leaking."
When some Baltimore residents worried about lead in remodeling dust tried to get help from state, local, and federal agencies, all they got was the run-around. Their experience shows the system for protecting people from lead-based paint is badly broken.
A new report by a nonprofit conservation group concludes that "National park cultural resources are often ignored and consistently underfunded, many natural resources are being degraded, and throughout the (National) Park System, conservation efforts are failing to keep pace with the forces that threaten resources."
"The fire that surrounds the nuclear lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico has grown to at least 61,000 acres -- large enough that its smoke can be seen from space – and concerns are now growing over what's in that smoke."
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