TV News LIES

More than 100 million people living in 46 metro areas are breathing air that has gotten too full of soot on some days, and now those cities have to clean up their air, the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday.

The EPA added 15 cities to the sooty air list, mostly in states not usually thought of as pollution-prone, such as Alaska, Utah, Idaho and Wisconsin. That's probably because of the prevalence of wood stoves in western and northern regions, a top EPA official said. But environmentalists said the EPA was only doing half its job on soot-laden areas, letting some southern cities with long-term soot problems _ such as Houston _ off the hook.

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency routinely allows companies to keep new information about their chemicals secret, including compounds that have been shown to cause cancer and respiratory problems, the Journal Sentinel has found.

The newspaper examined more than 2,000 filings in the EPA's registry of dangerous chemicals for the past three years. In more than half the cases, the EPA agreed to keep the chemical name a secret. In hundreds of other cases, it allowed the company filing the report to keep its name and address confidential.

This is despite a federal law calling for public notice of any new information through the EPA's program monitoring chemicals that pose substantial risk. The whole idea of the program is to warn the public of newfound dangers.

The EPA's rules are supposed to allow confidentiality only "under very limited circumstances."

Conservation groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday to block the Bush administration's last-minute sale of oil-and-gas drilling leases in Utah near national parks and ancient rock art panels.

The Bureau of Land Management has scheduled an auction Friday to sell drilling leases covering more than 100,000 acres of wild land in eastern Utah.

The inspector general of the Interior Department has found that agency officials often interfered with scientific work in order to limit protections for species at risk of becoming extinct, reviving attention to years of disputes over the Bush administration’s science policies.

In a report delivered to Congress on Monday, the inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found serious flaws in the process that led to 15 decisions related to policies on endangered species. 

“The results of this investigation paint a picture of something akin to a secret society residing within the Interior Department that was colluding to undermine the protection of endangered wildlife and covering for one another’s misdeeds,” said the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia.

A disgraced Bush administration appointee known for twisting science and altering key endangered species decisions interfered with far more findings than earlier revealed, according to a federal probe released Monday.

The investigation, requested by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., showed that Julie MacDonald, former assistant secretary of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, manipulated decisions involving about a dozen additional species. In the Northwest, they included the northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet and bull trout.

"MacDonald's overreaching, and the actions of those who enabled and assisted her, have caused the unnecessary expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars to re-issue decisions and litigation costs to defend decisions" that turned out to be illegal, said the report from the Interior Department's inspector general.

TVNL Comment: Yet another example of the vile conduct of the Bush cabal. Lies, deception, and right direct harm to us and to our planet. These people are the most horrible lying bastards to ever control our government!

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The Interior Department yesterday finalized rules changing the way it administers the Endangered Species Act, enabling other government agencies to decide on their own whether a project would harm an imperiled species without an independent scientific review.

The agency received nearly 235,000 comments on the endangered species proposal, at least 208,000 of which were form letters decrying the rule.

"As the Bush administration fades off into the sunset, it continues to take brazen pot shots at everything in sight, including America's landmark conservation law, the Endangered Species Act," said House Resources Committee Chairman  Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.), who said he would introduce legislation seeking to overturn the rule next year. 

TVNL Comment: The Bush administration's legacy of death and destruction will continue to have a negative impact on this planet for a long, long time.

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