Public

The Government Accountability Office, testifying before a Congressional committee, urged the Food and Drug Administration to stiffen oversight of bottled water and give consumers more information about what they are drinking.

"Pollution from burning wood in stoves, fireplaces and elsewhere is the top cancer risk in Oregon's air, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analysis."

"After one of the longest sunspot droughts in modern times, solar activity picked up quickly over the weekend."

"A federal appeals court yesterday upheld nearly all U.S. EPA designations of areas where airborne soot concentrations exceed national standards, rejecting challenges from state and local governments and industry groups."

""The two key arguments that the oil and gas industry is using to fight federal regulation of the natural gas drilling process called hydraulic fracturing -- that the costs would cripple their business and that state regulations are already strong -- are challenged by the same data and reports the industry is using to bolster its position."

T. Boone Pickens postponed a plan to create the world's largest wind farm in Texas. The billionaire had spent $60 million advertising his plan to combat what he calls the United States' addiction to foreign oil.

"The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is working to regulate salt discharges that result from natural-gas drilling."

"Greenpeace activists were arrested Wednesday for scaling Mount Rushmore and hanging a banner next to the carved face of Abraham Lincoln urging President Barack Obama to get tough on climate change."

"Hydrofluorocarbons ... are ... many thousands of times more potent than CO2 as climate warming agents, and scientists say their spread could become as much as 50 percent of the global greenhouse gas problem by 2050. Yet the public is barely aware of the issue, and as the White House works to hammer out its policy, it seems to want to keep it that way."

"The world's leading industrial nations tentatively agreed Wednesday to try to prevent global temperatures from rising above a fixed level, after a more far-reaching proposal to slash production of greenhouse gases fizzled... ."