The nation's oil and chemical plants are spewing a lot more pollution than they report to the Environmental Protection Agency — and the EPA knows it. But the federal agency has yet to adopt more accurate, higher-tech measuring methods that have been available for years. Significant changes will not ...

Federal regulators under President Barack Obama have sharply shifted course on long-standing policy toward pharmaceutical residues in the nation's drinking water, taking a critical first step toward regulating some of the contaminants while acknowledging they could threaten human health. A burst of significant announcements ...

Quotes from The Associated Press interview with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., on Wednesday, a few hours after he returned from Afghanistan, where he helped persuade President Hamid Karzai to accept a runoff election. On his meetings with Karzai: _ "This is a man who believed deeply that he ...

The head of the U.S. Senate Environment Committee said Wednesday that legislators will hold hearings to address toxic drinking water in the nation's schools following an Associated Press probe into the widespread problem. California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer called for the hearings to be held ...

The federal government pointed with pride to a sweeping national database that identifies pollution-stricken poor and minority neighborhoods to help officials better target billions of economic recovery dollars. But it's a tool that doesn't exist — yet. The elaborate system to assign "environmental justice" scores by Census tract ...

A proposal in the U.S. Senate would require a government study of pharmaceuticals and personal care products released by factories and other sources into waterways that often supply drinking water. "As a mom and a lawmaker, I assume our drinking water is clean and safe and ...

U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water — contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation. Hundreds of active pharmaceutical ingredients are used in a variety of manufacturing, including ...

Regulators in a handful of Appalachian states that let coal companies inject slurry into abandoned mines say they're confident the practice is safe, but an Associated Press survey shows they lack scientific data to answer citizens who believe aquifers, water wells and their ...

When researchers analyzed vials of treated wastewater taken from a plant where about 90 Indian drug factories dump their residues, they were shocked. Enough of a single, powerful antibiotic was being spewed into one stream each day to treat every person in a city of 90,000. And ...

Pollution experts pressed a congressional panel Thursday for a new national approach that monitors the country's waters more broadly for the presence and impact of hundreds of recently detected contaminants from pharmaceuticals to fire retardants. U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, chairwoman of the House ...