An Arizona Republican operative is recruiting drifters, street people, and the homeless to run as Green Party candidates to dilute the Democrat vote. The Green Party is trying to get them removed from the ballot.
"Bedbugs used to be solely a residential problem, but they are showing up in commercial settings, and not just in places with beds like hotels, nursing homes and apartment complexes. Increasingly, pest control companies report finding bedbugs in office buildings, movie theaters, clothing stores, food plants, factories and even airplanes. For the affected businesses, the expense can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the companies that deal with the scourge, it is a bonanza, with business doubling and tripling."
"BP wants the federal government to meet its demand for continued access to oil and gas leases in the United States. If the oil giant can't keep drilling here, its promise to compensate victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster might go unfulfilled—or so the company claims."
"In May, the company pledged $500 million for critical oil spill science. Then politics and parochialism got in the way."
"Oxygen levels fell significantly in deep-sea areas of the Gulf of Mexico contaminated by oil plumes from the BP spill. But although researchers found a 20% decline in dissolved oxygen, the drop was not steep enough to create biological 'dead zones' that some scientists feared might form in the wake of the BP disaster." Those were the findings of a government study.
"Iran is steadily stockpiling enriched uranium, even in the face of toughened international sanctions, according to a U.N. inspection report that raises new concerns about the ability to monitor parts of the Islamic nation's nuclear program that could be used to make a bomb."
"New oil and gas drilling is probably the most visible activity people associate with threats to groundwater in Texas. But it's not usually the source of known contamination, according to state records. Instead, old or abandoned oil and gas wells, petroleum storage facilities and even existing water wells are most frequently identified as problems."
"He'd just met her, but Evan Beedle wanted Rosina Philippe to know how his life changed after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, how pieces of his identity slipped away, one label at a time. Husband. Father. Fisherman."
"The United States ended its involvement in the Vietnam War 35 years ago, and established diplomatic relations with Hanoi 15 years ago. But a recent visit to Vietnam by members of the U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange and Dioxin saw the lingering effects of highly toxic chemicals used by U.S. forces to remove dense vegetation in a bid to flush out enemy combatants."
In a classic two-sided story, the New York Times reports scientific uncertainty about whether the ubiquitous plastic chemical BPA hurts humans or not. It does not explore another key question: should the burden of proof be on companies to prove chemicals they widely expose people to are safe? -- or on environmental health scientists to prove them unsafe?
