National (U.S.)

"The Obama administration has announced a new policy to handle the risks posed by legitimate biological research that could, in the wrong hands, threaten the public."

"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to decide by Saturday whether to continue allowing bisphenol-A (BPA) in food and beverage containers, Americans' main source of exposure to the chemical implicated in everything from asthma to diabetes."

"Federal health authorities have significantly raised their estimate of the prevalence of autism in children, concluding in a new study of 8-year-olds that 1 in 88 has some form of the disorder."

"A last minute entreaty by President Obama wasn’t enough to convince senators to strip the oil and gas industry of billions in tax incentives."

"The search for the killer of America's bees is a little bit like an Agatha Christie novel. Suspicion has turned toward one shady character and then another: declining habitat; parasites; diseases; pesticides.

Or did they all conspire in the recent mass murder of the country's bees?

"Tia Jackson’s family has lived on the same block of Halsey Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood for five generations. Kristen Rapp is a newcomer. Jackson is black. Rapp is white. In a part of town where the gentrification process has been grinding along painfully for years, the two might never have met if not for a sign on a fence on a vacant lot, left there by the members of a group called 596 Acres."

"As the Republican presidential race has shown, the conservatives who dominate the primaries are deeply skeptical of science — making Newt Gingrich, for one, regret he ever settled onto a couch with Nancy Pelosi to chat about global warming."

"With a Bible in one hand and a protest sign in the other, many religious activists are now moving in lockstep with the environmental movement in the fight against oil and gas drilling."

"ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Federal offshore drilling regulators on Wednesday approved Shell Oil's spill response plan for exploratory drilling in the Beaufort Sea, drawing strong criticism from environmental groups that claim oil companies cannot clean up oil in ice-choked waters."

"Beef Products Inc., the top producer of ammonia-treated beef product dubbed 'pink slime' by critics, said Monday that it had halted production at three of its four plants in three states for 60 days."

"Rich Jochum, corporate administrator for the South Dakota-based company, said the temporary closure could become "a permanent suspension."

"This is a direct reaction to all the misinformation about our lean beef," Jochum said.

The company shut down operations Monday at its plants in Amarillo, Texas; Finney County, Kansas; and Waterloo, Iowa.