"Cold, tired and frustrated, residents of more than 1.6 million homes in the Northeast remained without power on Tuesday and some were told it could take 10 more days to restore electricity after the rare and deadly October snowstorm."
Climate scientist Michael Mann wins bid to join emails lawsuit; BP and other Gulf oil spill CEOs won't testify before House committee; Republican House freshmen disappointed by Supercommittee's secrecy; Obama admin to issue disclosure rules for fracking on federal lands; WRI/Transparency Int'l panel on climate policy corruption, Nov. 3, 2011, in DC; proposed FOIA rule would let gov't deny existence of records; and bill to improve pipeline safety and increase access to info passes Senate.
Levees have huge environmental and human impacts, but are often neglected by news media until disaster strikes. The NLD should make reporting both routine and crisis stories a lot easier. The bad news is that after several years of work by the Corps, only a small fraction of all the levees in the US have been entered into the database.
"IRVINE, Calif. -- A non-radioactive ammonia leak at a Southern California nuclear plant prompted an emergency alert and precautionary evacuation of nearby workers before it was contained Tuesday, authorities said.
Workers stopped the leak by 5 p.m., about two hours after it was detected in a storage tank in the water purification system of Unit 3 at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, said Todd Adler, the plant's engineering manager.
"Freakish weather disasters – from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand – are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press."
"AUSTIN — The drought map created by University College London shows a number of worryingly dry areas around the globe, in places including East Africa, Canada, France and Britain.
But the largest area of catastrophic drought centers on Texas. It is an angry red swath on the map, signifying what has been the driest year in the state’s history. It has brought immense hardship to farmers and ranchers, and fed incessant wildfires, as well as an enormous dust storm that blew through the western Texas city of Lubbock in the past month.
"One of the darkest Halloweens ever loomed for about 3 million households left without power on Sunday by a rare October snowstorm in the Northeast that bedeviled transportation and killed at least eight people."
"KORIYAMA, Japan—Nearly eight months after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident scattered radioactive material over surrounding communities, Japan still is struggling to figure out how to clean up the mess, exacerbating fears about health risks and fanning mistrust of the government.
"The Army Corps of Engineers says it desperately needs about $1 billion to repair the damage from this year's catastrophic flooding in the Missouri and Mississippi basins."
Ten years after the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11, the nation has spent some $60 billion trying to put together a biodefense program. One reason Americans do not know the scale of the government's failure is the extreme secrecy with which the programs are conducted. Profits, politics, and the manipulation of public fears may be making the nation's vulnerability to the worst public health threats even worse.
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