National (U.S.)

Did the White House Office of Management and Budget put public health at risk to make President Obama's reelection a safer bet? Working in deep secrecy for the past year, OMB blew off legal deadlines to hold up new Congressionally passed food safety rules that even the food industry supported. Now the Food and Drug Administratiion is seeking to dismiss a lawsuit by consumer advocates over the delay.

"Eric Cantor is rarely shy about his position on disaster relief aid. Even before Hurricane Irene made landfall last year, the House majority whip's office said extra spending on recovery efforts should be balanced by spending cuts elsewhere. But in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Cantor and many of his conservative colleagues have suddenly gone mostly silent on such disaster relief 'offsets' -- even though New York and New Jersey are collectively asking for a whopping $79 billion in federal aid."

"WESTLAKE, La. -- In an ambitious bet that the glut of cheap natural gas in the United States will last for many years, a South African energy company announced on Monday that it would build America’s first commercial plant to convert natural gas to diesel and other liquid fuels."

"For years, the controversy over natural gas drilling has focused on the water and air quality problems linked to hydraulic fracturing, the process where chemicals are blasted deep underground to release tightly bound natural gas deposits."

"Scientists have designed an energy-efficient light of plastic packed with nanomaterials that glow. The shatterproof FIPEL technology can be molded into almost any shape, but still needs to prove it's commercially viable."

"NEW YORK -- During Hurricane Sandy, Gov. Andrew Cuomo witnessed firsthand the storm whip a surge of water into the Battery Tunnel. Now New York's governor is walking into the eye of a man-made disaster: the fiscal cliff."

"The Interior Department [Friday] proposed Endangered Species Act protection for the lesser prairie chicken, a grayish-brown grouse whose native grasslands and prairie habitat in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas has declined by about 84 percent."

"The Supreme Court may use an L.A. case to decide for the first time who can be held responsible for storm water runoff pollution."

Cornfields -- which occupy a big fraction of U.S. farmland -- differ from normal ecosystems in that they are nearly sterile ecologically. Breeding and spraying aim to prevent anything from living but corn.

"We'll start in a cornfield — we'll call it an Iowa cornfield in late summer — on a beautiful day. The corn is high. The air is shimmering. There's just one thing missing — and it's a big thing...

...a very big thing, but I won't tell you what, not yet.

"MIAMI -- Hurricane season 2012, which officially ends Saturday, will go down in hstory as the year of Superstorm Sandy, which carved a path of death and devastation from the Caribbean to the Jersey Shore."

"Scientifically speaking, it also was notable for something it was not: intense. For the third consecutive season, the tropics churned out what not long ago would rank as an abnormally large number of storms - yet curiously only one of 19 managed to reach Category 3 strength.