I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Five days after a pipeline rupture in Marshall spilled around a million gallons of oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River, the company responsible has announced that the oil is around 12 percent contained.
Enbridge reported:
As of 12 p.m. EDT, 2,400 barrels of oil have been recovered and pumped into large tanks. An additional 10,000 barrels of oil have been isolated into a holding area and will be pumped into holding tanks. The oil is measured on an ongoing basis so that we can evaluate and confirm the amount of oil that was released in relation to the 19,500 barrels we believe has been released.
The size of the oil spill is disputed. One barrel is equal to 42 gallons, so according to the company estimate 819,000 gallons were released. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated the spill at more than a million gallons.
The spill has killed fish and polluted the air with benzene fumes. Area residents have been advised to avoid contact with the river and farmers have been warned against using river water for irrigation. The Calhoun County Health Dept. has recommended evacuation for some river residents.
The toxicity of the river environment has slowed efforts by state officials to assess damage caused by the spill.
A spill of about this size in Missouri in the 1980s took about a year to clean up, Jack Doyle, author of the National Wildlife Federation report Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution and Profit, told USA Today.
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