Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation's drinking water.
In many cases, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted these so-called aquifer exemptions in Western states now stricken by drought and increasingly desperate for water.
EPA records show that portions of at least 100 drinking water aquifers have been written off because exemptions have allowed them to be used as dumping grounds.
Poisoning the Well: How the Feds Let Industry Pollute the Nation’s Underground Water Supply
Alex Baer: Time Out for the Wild Side of Life
We're looking in on some of those ubiquitous, Year-End summaries, letting them out of their cages and urging them to stretch their legs -- to take wing a bit early this December. Call it a seasonal lark.
It's not that we're likely to forget these tales (we have memories like elephants). There's just a good supply of animal tales squirreled-away in our cache: Dogs and deer, whales and flies, ducks, cats, elephants, even a sort-of giraffe.
Drug overuse in cattle imperils human health
Two kids seriously injured in the Joplin, Mo., tornado in May 2011 showed up at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City suffering from antibiotic-resistant infections from dirt and debris blown into their wounds.
Physicians tried different drugs, but at first nothing seemed to work. Blame the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, according to the doctors familiar with their cases. “These kids had some really highly resistant bacteria that they clearly had not picked up in a hospital,” said Jason Newland, director of the Children Mercy’s antibiotic stewardship program.
Afghanistan Teenagers Detained By U.S. Military
The U.S. military has detained more than 200 Afghan teenagers who were captured in the war for about a year at a time at a military prison next to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, the United States has told the United Nations.
The U.S. State Department characterized the detainees held since 2008 as "enemy combatants" in a report sent every four years to the United Nations in Geneva updating U.S. compliance with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
NY mostly ignored reports warning of superstorm
More than three decades before Superstorm Sandy, a state law and a series of legislative reports began warning New York politicians to prepare for a storm of historic proportions, spelling out scenarios eerily similar to what actually happened: a towering storm surge; overwhelming flooding; swamped subway lines; widespread power outages. The Rockaway peninsula was deemed among the "most at risk."
But most of the warnings and a requirement in a 1978 law to create a regularly updated plan for the restoration of "vital services" after a storm went mostly unheeded, either because of tight budgets or the lack of political will to prepare for a hypothetical storm that may never hit.
Alex Baer: Now, Before You Settle In and Get Too Comfy...
You know how it is: It's Saturday, and, in your mind's eye, you're vacationing in the tropics, surfing via your motherboard, running fast along topical waves of interest in the vast internet ocean, hooked on something or other you find titanically interesting, when you strike the unexpected iceberg, snapping to a halt with a sickening lurch.
All you can manage to do is stare numbly and in shock at the screen, dead in the water, dumbstruck and adrift in your one-person lifeboat, and without so much as first aid kit, water, rations, or a flare gun. Or Dramamine.
Does Frac Sand Mining Rush In Wisconsin Threaten Public Health?
While flying back home to Wisconsin earlier this fall, Victoria Trinko had no trouble spotting her family farm from the sky. She simply looked for the frac sand mines that have begun to punctuate the rural Midwestern landscape.
From the ground, tending to her cows, Trinko said she is more likely to feel, smell or taste the presence of those mines and the trucks hauling its powdery sands toward an expanding array of natural gas drilling sites. The sand is an essential ingredient in the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process.
BP Oil Spill Flow Rate Vastly Understated For Weeks, Emails Show
Emails that attorneys representing a defendant in the BP oil spill case plan to introduce in February show for the first time that the oil company knew the massive scale of the 2010 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico weeks earlier than previously disclosed.
BP has long maintained that it provided full disclosure to the public and the federal government about its knowledge of the spill’s extent and did so promptly. The emails suggest otherwise.
U.S. undertakes review of border officers' use of force
Customs and Border Protection has launched what it calls a comprehensive review of its officers' use of force amid a sharp increase in fatal confrontations along the Southwest border. The initiative, which appears to be the most far-reaching of its kind in recent years, calls for an assessment of current tactics and the participation of an independent outside research center.
Mexican government officials, who have condemned the shootings, also will be provided briefings on closed investigations involving force, according to a memorandum prepared for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
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