A trade group, backed by oil and chemical giants, denied it was behind a campaign to block regulations of potentially toxic flame retardants. But an insider has finally come clean. By: David Heath, Center for Public Integrity; Source: The Daily Beast.The chemical industry’s powerful trade group, the American Chemistry Council, has long maintained that it had nothing

Source. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law on Tuesday a measure that blocks local ordinances against hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The move is in response to a fracking ban passed by voters in November in the town of Denton. “This law ensures that Texas avoids a patchwork quilt of regulations that differ from

By: Ari Phillips, Source: Think Progress. Duke Energy plead guilty to nine federal misdemeanors related to illegally discharging pollution from coal ash ponds in North Carolina on Thursday afternoon, and agreed to pay $102 million in fines and restitution. Federal prosecutors charged Duke with the nine violations of the Clean Water Act in February,asserting that

White officer followed African American Ernest Satterwhite, 68, home last year and ensuing shooting was caught on dashcam By: Associated Press in SC, Source: The Guardian. When a white police officer in South Carolina chased a black man nine miles by car, then shot him to death in his driveway last year, the shooting apparently

Source. Man-made activities like fracking have triggered a sharp increase in earthquakes since 2009 in the central and eastern U.S., according to a new report from the United States Geological Survey. “The increase has been linked to industrial operations that dispose of wastewater by injecting it into deep wells,” the USGS said. Scientists have identified

By: Binyamin Appelbaum, Source: The New York Times. WASHINGTON — As the players here remake the nation’s vast regulatory system, they have been grappling with a subject that is more the province of poets and philosophers than bureaucrats: what is the value of a human life? The answer determines how much spending the government should