National (U.S.)

"Council on Environmental Quality nominee Kathleen Hartnett White, one of the White House's most controversial staffing choices, may be stuck in the Senate."

"The Environmental Protection Agency’s operations will continue through next week even if government funding expires at midnight, Administrator Scott Pruitt informed agency employees in a message Friday."

"TransCanada announced Thursday it has strong commercial support for the Keystone XL pipeline and will move forward with the long-contested tar sands oil project. But the pipeline's opponents say significant hurdles remain that continue to cast doubt on its prospects."

"A top manager who supervises the Environmental Protection Agency program responsible for cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated properties and waterways told Congress on Thursday that the government needs to plan for the ongoing threat posed to Superfund sites from climate change."

"A tablespoon of soil contains billions of microscopic organisms. Life on Earth, especially the growing of food, depends on these microbes, but scientists don't even have names for most of them, much less a description."

"As a Friday deadline for a government shutdown approached, the Trump administration began setting plans in motion to halt scores of federal functions — even as it scrambled to keep hundreds of national parks and monuments open to the public to minimize anger over the disruption of services."

"While top-level science positions remain vacant, scientific advisory panels have been quietly diminished, disbanded or stacked with industry scientists."

"Would you want an industrial waste dump near your house? Probably not. But across the country, environmental hazards like waste dumps tend to be located near minority communities."

"Microbial activity in a Baltimore stream is unaffected by exposure to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin, evidence that sewage contamination of urban waterways may be fomenting pockets of antibiotic resistance, researchers reported last week in the journal Ecosphere."

"A former Heartland Institute director faced charges for violating a female subordinate’s restraining order. An official at the think tank came to his defense."