Health and Public Safety

April 22, 2014 - Giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention money for gun violence research is a "request to fund propaganda," a Georgia congressman says.

April 17, 2014 - A new study sheds light on how the color of your skin influences the quality of the air you breathe. And while the South ranks relatively high for environmental inequality, it turns out that it's among the regions with the least disparity between whites and nonwhites when it comes to lung-damaging air pollution exposure.

April 9, 2014 - American Rivers has released its annual list of the 10 most endangered U.S. rivers, and three are in the South -- the Haw in North Carolina, the South Fork Edisto in South Carolina, and the Middle Mississippi in Kentucky.

March 26, 2014 - Watchdog groups are raising concerns about calls to move coal ash from wet impoundments into dry landfills, warning of inevitable leakage from landfills that are typically located in low-income and minority communities. Instead, they propose storing the waste above ground in concrete vaults on power plant property.

March 21, 2014 - Legal and regulatory pressure is building against North Carolina-based Duke Energy over its chronic mismanagement of toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. Meanwhile, environmental watchdogs using a hidden camera busted a Kentucky utility illegally dumping coal ash wastewater into the Ohio River.

March 14, 2014 - Environmental groups have issued notice that they plan to sue a large North Carolina hog operation over illegal pollution. The company's president is a major political donor and the son of an influential former state lawmaker.

March 11, 2014 - Before its coal-fired units were shuttered in 2012, Duke Energy's Dan River plant burned coal from mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia. The reality that the arsenic-laden ash now contaminating a North Carolina river was once a forested mountain peak highlights the destructive lifecycle of coal.