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Senate Committee Moves to Force Public Disclosure of Drinking Water Contamination

The Senate Appropriations Committee passed a spending bill Thursday that includes report language requiring the Trump administration to release a key scientific study it buried. The study proposed safe levels for fluorinated, or PFAS, chemicals in drinking water at levels nearly six times lower than those the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends.

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Climate
Flooding in the haor of Bangladesh in 2010. Balaram Mahalder / CC BY-SA 3.0

Growing Number of Bangladeshis Flee Rising Waters

By Kieran Cooke

As another monsoon season begins, huge numbers of homeless Bangladeshis are once again bracing themselves against the onslaught of floods and the sight of large chunks of land being devoured by rising water levels.

Bangladesh, on the Bay of Bengal, is low-lying and crisscrossed by a web of rivers: two thirds of the country's land area is less than five meters (approximately 16 feet) above sea level. With 166 million people, it's one of the poorest and most densely populated countries on Earth—and one of the most threatened by climate change.

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Health
A post office closed for asbestos removal; the EPA's new chemical risk analysis policy will not consider the risks of asbestos already in the environment. 293.xx.xxx.xx / CC BY-SA 3.0

EPA to Ignore 68 Million Pounds of Chemical Emissions in Limited Risk Assessment

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will limit the criteria it uses to determine the health risks of 10 dangerous chemicals including asbestos, The New York Times reported Thursday.

A 2016 amendment to the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 required the EPA to evaluate hundreds of hazardous chemicals to decide if they should face more restrictions or be banned entirely. But documents released by the EPA last week suggest the EPA is kowtowing to the chemical lobby in the narrow criteria it is using the asses the safety of the first 10 chemicals, restricting its analysis to the risks posed by direct exposure to a chemical, and not the risks associated with exposure to contaminated air, soil and water.

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Health
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Consumer Product Safety Testing Overlooks Cancer Risk From Exposure to Multiple Chemicals

By Olga Naidenko

Mixtures of chemicals commonly found in consumer products are more likely to increase breast cancer risk than the same chemicals individually, according to a new analysis. But safety tests by government regulators don't routinely evaluate the combined effects of multiple chemical exposures.

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Health
Mark Doliner / CC BY-SA 2.0

110 Million Americans May Be Drinking PFAS-Contaminated Water

More than 1,500 drinking water systems across the country may be contaminated with the nonstick chemicals PFOA and PFOS, and similar fluorine-based chemicals, a new EWG analysis shows. This groundbreaking finding comes the same day the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is convening a summit to address PFAS chemicals—a class of toxic chemicals that includes PFOA and PFOS, and that are linked to cancer, thyroid disease, weakened immunity and other health problems.

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Food
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Opinion: The 2018 Farm Bill Battle Lines Have Been Drawn: Here’s What You Can Do

Last week, the Republican-drafted Farm Bill, called the Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018 (H.R. 2), failed spectacularly on the House floor when Republicans tried to leverage the farm bill to placate conservatives' agenda on immigration. Nevertheless, H.R. 2, which generally benefits large commodity producers while compromising long-term food security, provides a helpful view into where the policy battles are being fought on the road to passage.

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Health

Across U.S., Toxic Algal Blooms Threaten Lakes and Other Waterways

Across the U.S., a growing epidemic of toxic algal blooms is polluting lakes and other waterways, according to a new report by the Environmental Working Group.

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Politics
Scott Pruitt at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0

How Trump’s EPA Is Moving to Undo Fracking Wastewater Protections

By Sharon Kelly

Back in 2008, residents of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and surrounding areas received a notice in the mail advising them to drink bottled water instead of tap water—a move that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) internal memos at the time described as "one of the largest failures in U.S. history to supply clean drinking water to the public."

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Health
Removing paint with a paint stripper. Sym Roe / Creative Commons

EPA May Ban Deadly Paint Stripper Chemical

On Thursday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signaled it would move forward with a proposed ban of the highly toxic paint stripping chemical methylene chloride, which was initially proposed under President Obama.

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