Water & Oceans

"The Obama administration on Monday announced a new national policy for strengthening the way the U.S. manages its oceans and coasts, and the Great Lakes."

"The Army Corps of Engineers wants to use ash cast off from coal-fired electrical generation to shore up dozens of miles of Mississippi River levees, drawing fire from environmentalists worried that heavy metals from the filler might make their way into the river."

"The waters in Puget Sound's main basin are acidifying as fast as those along the Washington Coast, where wild oysters have not reproduced since 2005."

"Interior Secretary Ken Salazar  issued revised rules on Monday for a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil  drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, replacing an earlier one that had been declared invalid by federal courts."

"U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on Wednesday declared the entire concrete-lined Los Angeles River channel 'traditional navigable waters,' a designation crucial to applying Clean Water Act protections throughout its 834-square-mile urban watershed."

"Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records  of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review."

"New Orleans, which managed to escape the oil from the BP spill for more than two months, can't hide any longer. For the first time since the accident, oil from the ruptured well is seeping into Lake Pontchartrain."