Kellogg Brown and Root and its former parent company Halliburton, which at one time was led by former vice president Dick Cheney, had a government contract to destroy waste at US bases and camps in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Five years ago the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency assured the nation that the technology credited with opening vast new natural gas supplies was safe. Now Congress has ordered the agency to take another look.

"The safety of the nation’s water supply should not have to rely on luck or the public relations talents of the oil and gas industry. Thanks in part to two New Yorkers — Representative Maurice Hinchey and Senator Charles Schumer — Congress last week approved a bill that asks the E.P.A. to conduct a new study on the risks of hydraulic fracturing. An agency study in 2004 whitewashed the industry and was dismissed by experts as superficial and politically motivated. This time Congress is demanding “a transparent, peer-reviewed process.”

AN outspoken Kiwi politician has proposed a new solution to the country's child abuse problem - pay the "appalling underclass" not to breed. Michael Laws - who stirred up controversy by calling the late Tongan King a "bloated brown slug'' - has again hit the headlines. "That there is a group within our society who give their children no hope nor opportunity from the moment that they are born," the regional mayor wrote on the New Zealand radio website where he broadcasts as a talkback DJ. "That these ‘parents’ are known to authorities ... and yet the authorities can only intervene after children have been harmed." Mr Laws goes on to write: "it would be far better for this appalling underclass to be offered financial inducements not to have children, given the toxic environment that they would provide for any child in their care."

The Obama Administration on Tuesday asked Congress for an overhaul of the law that regulates toxic chemicals.

A shipwreck apparently containing toxic waste is being investigated by authorities in Italy amid claims that it was deliberately sunk by the mafia. An informant from the Calabrian mafia said the ship was one of a number he blew up as part of an illegal operation to bypass laws on toxic waste disposal. The sunken vessel has been found 30km (18 miles) off the south-west of Italy. The informant said it contained "nuclear" material. Officials said it would be tested for radioactivity. Murky pictures taken by a robot camera show the vessel intact and alongside it are a number of yellow barrels. Labels on them say the contents are toxic. The informant said the mafia had muscled in on the lucrative business of radioactive waste disposal. But he said that instead of getting rid of the material safely, he blew up the vessel out at sea, off the Calabrian coast.

Three environmental groups have put the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on notice that they intend to sue the agency, alleging it has failed to regulate water pollution from the nation's electric utilities, including discharges into rivers and lakes from hundreds of coal-ash ponds. -- Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Integrity Project on Monday filed their notice of intent to sue the EPA - the first step in a federal lawsuit - alleging that EPA officials should have tightened their rules on power plant water pollution as far back as 1982. -- At issue are the heavy metals and other toxic pollutants found in effluent from ponds that store electric utilities' combustion wastes, such as ash, as well as scrubber sludge wastewater, and wastewater produced during the cleaning of cooling towers, said Jen Peterson, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project. - "Toxic discharges from power plants can threaten the health of local communities, contaminate ground and surface waters, and destroy aquatic life," said the Environmental Integrity Project executive director Eric Schaeffer, a former high-ranking EPA enforcement official. "EPA needs to stop kicking the can down the road and set a date for regulation." - He said the agency's data shows that coal plants discharge millions of pounds of toxic pollutants like arsenic, mercury, selenium and lead, each year. Yet existing federal rules, which have not been revised since 1982, set no national limits on metals discharges, which can get into local water supplies and contaminate waterways, he said.

FEMA's toxic trailers are just part of a larger problem involving poisoning of people in trailers and campers.

Toxic compounds have lingered and accumulated in the blood of east-metro residents who drank water tainted with 3M chemicals, a new state study shows. State health officials said it's unclear what the long-term health effects of those substances might be because studies have been limited and difficult to interpret. But the analysis of blood samples from 196 adults in Lake Elmo, Cottage Grove and Oakdale found that levels of three toxic compounds were above the national average -- twice the average for one chemical and four times for another. Still, health officials downplayed any need for concern at this point.Chemical levels in 196 adults are higher than national averages, but officials said their disease risk isn't greater.

The Supreme Court has upheld a federal government permit to dump waste from an Alaskan gold mine into a nearby lake, even though all its fish would be killed. By a 6-3 vote Monday, the justices say a federal appeals court wrongly blocked the permit on environmental grounds.

The Truth about Option ARMs, Pick-a-Pay Mortgages, and Alt-A Loans: Looking at Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JP Morgan. We are in the Eye of the $469 Billion Toxic Mortgage Hurricane and Silence is not Golden. Let me be abundantly clear. We still have a Pay Option ARM and Alt-A mortgage problem. This will hit in full force in 2010 and we are already seeing many mortgage holders having trouble with actual recasts brought on by negative amortization. Yet there is a crew of people saying that Alt-A mortgage products will not bring any trouble because of the low interest rate environment. Unfortunately the low rate misses the bigger issue. Low rates are helping but the problem that we will be seeing is the massive onslaught of recasts, not resets that will be occurring over the next few years. This is a big reason why we won’t see a housing bottom in California until 2011 at the earliest. Many of these loans were made to supposedly better qualified borrowers in mid to upper priced areas. These areas will begin to crack like an egg dropped on the floor late in 2009. The Notice of Default tsunami will guarantee this much.

Toxic waste from a bad oil experiment should have been processed in Europe. But that would have cost a half million euros. So it was illegally dumped in an African town. And thousands were sickened.

A million-dollar home smells like rotten eggs and the occupants are sick all the time with nose bleeds, sore throats, earaches, and upper respiratory infections. Constantly on antibiotics, their doctor tells them to get out of the house. This homeowner and others in FLorida and other states have filed claims stated Chinese drywall is making them sick.

“In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million US hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.” -- --Mike Davis, The Guardian, 4/27/09. -- -- Apparently these fetid manure/microbe industrial gulags have been efficiently breeding, evolving, mutating exotic viral strains that now easily jump species barriers, from bird, to swine, to man, and back again. The Pew Research Center cautioned just last year that, “the continual cycling of viruses .... in large herds or flocks (will) increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission.” The reportedly emerging “swine-flu” pandemic currently freaking-out the skittish American public may provide a teachable moment for passing reflection. Cheap and Inhumanely Produced Food Ultimately Comes at a Cost.

In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Alcolac pleaded guilty in 1989 to knowingly violating export laws by shipping a mustard-gas ingredient that ultimately went to Iran. 09 Apr 2009 Five survivors of the 1988 poison gas attacks of ethnic Kurds in Iraq have filed a class action lawsuit in Maryland claiming three American companies and the government of Iraq violated the Geneva Convention by using mustard and nerve gasses to kill tens of thousands of people. Filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, the lawsuit says the companies supplied the regime of former Iraqi dictator [CIA asset] Saddam Hussein with the chemical precursors and compounds needed to make the poison gases used in the six-month long "Operation Anfal."

"Flame-retardant chemicals that have been linked to reproductive and neurological problems in animals have seeped into coastal environments even in remote regions and have been found in high concentrations off populated areas such as Chicago and Southern California, a federal study revealed...High levels of the chemicals were found in sediment and shellfish samples in areas including the Pacific Northwest's Puget Sound; the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., coast; New York's Hudson-Raritan Estuary; Lake Michigan off Milwaukee, Chicago and Gary, Ind.; and off remote shores in Alaska. The highest concentrations were near industrial centers."

"In its most sweeping effort to determine whether toxic chemicals permeate the air schoolchildren breathe, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce plans today to monitor the air outside 62 schools in 22 states. Texas and Ohio have the most schools on the list, with seven each; Pennsylvania has six...[This study] comes in response to a USA TODAY investigation that used the government's own data to identify schools that appear to be in toxic hot spots...USA TODAY's investigation...used a government computer simulation that showed at least 435 schools where the air outside appeared to be more toxic than the air outside Meredith Hitchens Elementary, an Ohio school closed in 2005. At Hitchens, the Ohio EPA found levels of carcinogens 50 times above what the state considered acceptable."

Scoop! We intercepted a telephone call between Mr. Cremosano, well-known entrepreneur in Bellinzona and his employee, Mr. Guffanti

Paul Krugman has already eviscerated Geithner's toxic asset plan in the New York Times (see this, this and this). So have Yves Smith, Mish and many others. But very few are taking a step back and addressing a more basic question: what are the toxic assets that Geithner is throwing taxpayer money at? The answer is that the toxic assets include: Credit default swaps (CDS) Collateral debt obligations (CDOs) Mortgage backed securities In fact, these different classes of toxic assets are related. Some CDOs are bundles of subprime and other mortgages sold in "tranches" (when you use a fancy word which sounds French, people assume it must be good). The rating agencies like Moody's, S&P and Fitch's gave crazily high AAA ratings to many of the tranches on the assumption that real estate prices wouldn't fall nationwide. They did, and so the CDOs plummeted in value and became "toxic". Other CDOs - called "structured finance CDOs" - are bundles of mortgage-backed securities and other asset backed securities. Moreover, some CDOs - called "synthetic CDOs" - are bundles of CDS and other credit derivatives. Similarly, there were huge CDS bets made that the companies buying or selling CDOs would stay solvent. When those companies started becoming insolvent, the CDS became toxic. Can you see the relationship between all of the toxic assets?