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.
Staff in the Dept. of Natural Resources and Environment are waiting to find out whether the Snyder administration will fill the retirement-related vacancies in the section in charge of oversight for environmental cleanup.
Ingham county is ready to pass a new law requiring businesses to disclose their stores of chemicals in order to help emergency responders know what materials they may have to deal with during a disaster, but they are exempting the contents of three pipelines that run through the county.
Michigan State University has been ordered to pay $27,000 in fines by the Department of Natural Resources and Environment. The MSU student newspaper, the State News, reports the fines stem from two incidents revolving around the university’s coal burning power plant.
It is unclear who will pick up the tab for cleaning up the properties that General Motors helped to pollute but did not own when it went into bankruptcy last year. An unusual $1.7 billion loan from the U.S. and Canadian governments will cover some of the costs of dealing with contamination on 120 properties [...]
With 66 Superfund sites, 281 facilities releasing toxic chemicals and 42,051 lbs. of toxic chemicals released each year, the Detroit-Warren-Livonia metro area was ranked the second most polluted city in the country by Forbes magazine, but some believe the methodology used by the magazine does not produce a realistic picture of environmental health hazards. Here’s [...]
The editorial board of the Flint Journal is asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to assume liability for the long term pollution risk at industrial sites that have become orphaned brownfields as a consequence of the GM bankruptcy reorganization. The Journal says EPA should make Buick City in Flint a “testbed for how it handles [...]
A Newaygo County judge has upheld the legality of regulations imposed by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality that require large farms called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) to obtain permits that limit the amount of pollutants they can release into surface waters in the state.
For the first time, scientists have put a dollar value on the property damage done by blue-green algae blooms that result from nutrient run-off into water ways. Jeff Alexander of the Muskegon Chronicle reports that scientists at the University of Kansas have determined that algae blooms triggered by phosphorus and nitrogen run-off do $4 billion [...]
In the wake of a recent report in Science, renewed attention may be focused on a major dead zone in one of the Great Lakes.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released a controversial Great Lakes health report after congressional investigations were begun to find out why the report was delayed for nine months. The report, some details of which leaked out last month, is titled “Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great [...]
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