Journalism & Media

"A 27-year-old U.S. program intended to warn the public of the presence of hazardous chemicals is flawed in many states due to scant oversight and lax reporting by plant owners, a Reuters examination finds."

"Developers of the proposed Pebble mine don't deserve special protections for buying insider documents about the financial workings of project opponents and then using the records to pursue a case against those opponents with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, a California appeals court panel ruled [July 30]."

"In the past several years, a number of polls have documented the huge gap between liberals and conservatives when it comes to their acceptance of the science of climate change. Naturally, then, researchers have increasingly turned their attention to trying to explain this dramatic divide over what is factually true. And it wasn't long before they homed in on the role of conservative media in particular -- thus, a number of studies show that watching Fox News increases your risk of holding incorrect beliefs about the science of climate change."

"State legislatures are pushing to stifle farm investigations, and some news associations are fighting back."

It is news that four former EPA administrators who served under Republican presidents wrote an op-ed published in the New York Times making "A Republican Case for Climate Change." Whether their persuasiveness will persuade may be in doubt -- but the fact that they tried may say a lot about the current US political situation.

"The non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Chris and Stephanie Hallowich from talking about the 2011 settlement of their high-profile Marcellus Shale damage case in Washington County, or saying anything about gas drilling and fracking, isn't unusual. It happens often in settling such cases. But the insistence that their two minor children, then ages 7 and 10, are also bound by the 'gag order' is."

"Two and a half years after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the operator of Japan's wrecked Fukushima plant faces a daunting array of unknowns."

"TOKYO — Foreign nuclear experts harshly criticized the operator of the devastated nuclear power plant at Fukushima on Friday for its delay in disclosing that highly contaminated groundwater has been leaking from the site into the ocean."