Pollution

When water providers find pharmaceuticals in drinking water, they rarely tell the public.

After Congressional Democrats criticized them for suppressing a report on toxic substances in the Great Lakes, and after an independent investigative journalism group published excerpts, the Centers for Disease Control finally published it March 12, 2008.

EPA made public the latest year's data from the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) February 21, 2008, catching a few journalists by surprise, as usual.

Large feedlots would no longer have to report toxic emissions under a rule proposed Dec. 21, 2007, by EPA.

New Jersey filed a lawsuit Feb. 19, 2008, challenging the US-EPA's December 2007 rule that utilities could decide for themselves whether their air pollution increases are significant enough to require detailed record-keeping.

For more than seven months, the nation's top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states.