Public

"The Democratic party has restated its commitment to combat climate change and boost clean energy in the party platform it will approve on Tuesday at the 2012 party convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. But compared to its 2008 party platform, the 2012 version, called Moving America Forward, offers more restrained statements about the urgency of addressing climate change and shifts the party's energy strategy away from going "green" toward an "all-of-the-above" approach, a phrase also used in the Republican's 2012 platform."

"It's been seven years since a poisonous cloud spread across tiny Graniteville, S.C., after a deadly train wreck rocked the gritty textile community. And since that tragic morning in January 2005, a group of researchers has been tracking the lingering effects of chlorine on the public health."

"The Obama administration has cleared another hurdle for Shell to drill in Alaska’s Arctic waters – the second in as many days – changing the company’s air pollution limits so its drill ship can operate in the Chukchi Sea."

Crews from the DC-area Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission spend a lot of time checking the sewer pipes outside restaurants. The grease that builds up in the network of sewer pipes causes some 40 percent of sewer overflows in the U.S.

"Residents in almost all parts of the United States live on lands that contain minor to substantial concentrations of radionuclides of one type or another.1 These substances often make their way into tap water, leading to exposures by ingestion, inhalation, or dermal pathways during showering or other contact with the water.

Cases of the hantavirus disease that recently killed four in California occur regularly in many parts of the U.S.

"PORTLAND, Ore. — About 15 years ago, this environmentally conscious state with a fir tree on its license plates began pushing the idea of making renewable energy from the ocean waves that bob and swell on the Pacific horizon. But then one of the first test-buoy generators, launched with great fanfare, promptly sank. It was not a good start."

"Does an organic strawberry contain more vitamin C than a conventional one?"

"The numbers released quietly by the federal government this year were alarming. A ferocious germ resistant to many types of antibiotics had increased tenfold on chicken breasts, the most commonly eaten meat on the nation’s dinner tables. But instead of a learning from a broad national inquiry into a troubling trend, scientists said they were stymied by a lack of the most basic element of research: solid data."

"A 4,000-acre (1,620-hectare) wildfire in the Angeles National Forest in Southern California has forced the evacuation of some campsites as firefighters struggle to control the blaze, authorities said on Monday."