Energy Secretary Chu faces a grilling on the Solyndra loan today from a hostile House committee.
"U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said it may take similar skills to navigate Washington politics as it does to make advances in physics research, a field in which he won a Nobel Prize in 1997.
A special joint investigation by National Public Radio, the Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News, the Investigative News Network, and others shows that hundreds of U.S. facilities have been violating their Clean Air Act permits for years without running into federal or state enforcement. In many cases, the pollution has made people sick, and sometimes local communities have taken up the job that federal and state agencies have failed at.
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"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Transportation [Wednesday]formally unveiled their joint proposal to set stronger fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions standards for model year 2017-2025 passenger cars and light trucks."
Attorneys for some 30 utilities suing Syngenta over atrazine pollution of their drinking water supplies charged the company directed employees to send copies of all correspondence on atrazine to corporate attorneys so that attorney-client privilege could be claimed.
Researchers at the nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future fed into their computers some 21,493 press releases issued by EPA between 1994 and 2009, confirming reporters' long-time suspicions.
The Central Intelligence Agency is spending untold millions to study the national security threats presented by climate change. Now the Pentagon's Defense Science Board (DSB) is urging that another, new office be created to do the same job, for more untold millions.
The White House rejected the House Energy Committee's subpoena for "all internal communications" related to federal loan guarantees for the now-bankrupt Solyndra solar panel company.
The regulatory proposal was part of a large package of revised FOIA regulations, which will go forward without it. The Justice Department did not rescind the 1987 Meese memo the proposal was based on; instead it identified ways in which agencies could be unresponsive and uninformative without actually lying.
There are 464 facilities on the list of Clean Air Act violators. The Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News and National Public Radio got the list using the FOIA and published a powerful feature package: "Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities." But they did not tell all the stories. They left some for you.
"A team of international researchers said food production would likely be "severely impaired" by the elevated levels of caesium found in soil samples across eastern Fukushima in the wake of meltdowns at the tsunami-hit plant."
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