Environment

Wal-Mart's plans to open its first New York City store at the southern tip of Staten Island have fallen through, company officials confirmed yesterday. Read More

GOVERNMENT officials and Greenpeace activists have discovered contamination of the waters on Rapu-Rapu Island as the test run for the resumption of the operations of Lafayette Philippines Inc. continues. Read More

An American gold-mining executive was preparing Friday to defend himself in court for the first time against charges his company dumped millions of tons of mercury and arsenic-laced waste into an Indonesian bay, sickening villagers. Read More

In the summer of 1997, Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, accepted what seemed a harmless offer to join a panel of eight other scientists investigating the safety of the common weed-killer atrazine. The panel had been commissioned by atrazine's inventor and primary manufacturer, the Swiss-based chemical giant then called Novartis and since renamed Syngenta. The company wanted to know if its product threatened "non-target" organisms, including fish, reptiles, and amphibians-creatures whose fate had remained largely unexplored through the half century in which atrazine had become the most heavily used herbicide in the United States as well as one of its most widespread environmental contaminants. Read More

For years, most industry groups have fought any effort to limit carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming, warning of dire consequences for the U.S. economy. But with growing public anxiety about climate change, major corporations are increasingly preparing for -- and, in some cases, lobbying for -- Congress to regulate emissions of heat-trapping gases. Read More

A former ad exec only now realizes "Beyond Petroleum" is just an oily smokescreen. Read More

Techint, the Argentine company that built the Camisea pipeline which carries natural gas from Peru's Amazon jungle region to a port on the country's Pacific coast, used unqualified welders, in a clear violation of international norms, according to a new report by E-Tech, a California-based non-profit engineering and environmental consultancy firm. Read More

Mining companies operating in Peru are seeing increasing millions in profits as a result of the surge in international prices for metals, but few are contributing what is needed to alleviate the poverty of the people living in mining areas. Read More

When claims were first published on the front pages of Indian newspapers this month that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo beverages were contaminated with pesticides, executives at the two companies were breezily confident that they could handle the issue. Three weeks later, though, they are still struggling to win back Indian consumers. One-quarter of India's component states have imposed partial bans on their products, and a complex legal battle to overturn those bans is only just beginning. Read More

Ottawa may have the reputation of a government town, but it's also home to Canada's military-industrial complex. Read More