Idaho on Friday became the first state in two years to pass a bill aimed at stopping filming at farms and dairy producers. The bill, which animal rights activists often refer to as an ‘ag gag” bill, was created in response to undercover animal rights activists exposing animal abuse at one of Idaho’s largest dairy operations 2012.

The bill was signed into law by Idaho Gov. C.L. Otter on Friday.

The measure passed Idaho’s Senate earlier in February to the applause of agricultural representatives who said it would help ensure farmers’ right to privacy. But animal rights groups say the measure will have a chilling effect on investigations that attempt to expose wrongdoing on Idaho’s farms.

‘Gov. Otter has decided to keep corrupt factory farming practices from the public. He’s created a safe haven for animal abuse,” said Matt Rice, the director of investigations at Mercy for Animals, the group that made the 2012 video that sparked Idaho’s ag-gag debate. ‘These are facilities that supply food to the entire country. No other industry has the kind of immunity.”

The legislation carries a sentence of up to a year in prison and a $5,000 fine for people who secretly enter and record agricultural […]

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In the tense days after a powerful earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan on March 11, 2011, staff at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission made a concerted effort to play down the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis to America’s aging nuclear plants, according to thousands of internal emails reviewed by NBC News.

The emails, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, show that the campaign to reassure the public about America’s nuclear industry came as the agency’s own experts were questioning U.S. safety standards and scrambling to determine whether new rules were needed to ensure that the meltdown occurring at the Japanese plant could not occur here.

At the end of that long first weekend of the crisis three years ago, NRC Public Affairs Director Eliot Brenner thanked his staff for sticking to the talking points that the team had been distributing to senior officials and the public.

“While we know more than these say,” Brenner wrote, “we’re sticking to this story for now.”

There are numerous examples in the emails of apparent misdirection or concealment in the initial weeks after the Japanese plant was devastated by a 9.0 earthquake and 50-foot tsunami that knocked out power and cooling […]

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A study released last week shows that public health in the communities surrounding California’s Diablo Canyon power plant in San Luis Obispo County declined dramatically after the plant was built. The findings also document the presence of Strontium-90 in baby teeth.

Is the baby tooth under your child’s pillow radioactive? It could be if you live relatively close to a nuclear power plant that has been operating normally and in accordance with federal regulations, according to a new study.

The study, released last week by the Santa Barbara-based think tank World Business Academy for its Safe Energy Project, found that public health indicators such as infant mortality rates and cancer incidence in surrounding areas rose dramatically after Pacific Gas and Electric’s (PG&E) two nuclear reactors at the Diablo Canyon power plant began operations in 1984 and 1985.

“This should be a concern for any nuclear reactor and its health risks, whether it’s been operating for a day or 30 or 40 years because these reactors create over 100 cancer-causing chemicals; much of it is stored as waste at the plant, but a portion of it is released into the environment and gets into human bodies through the food chain,” said Joseph Mangano, who […]

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North Carolina has moved forward with a decision to cut 13 percent of the agency responsible for protecting water resources even as one of the nation’s largest coal ash spills continued to devastate rivers in the state.

Last month, the Duke Energy plant in Eden discovered that gray coal ask sludge was leaking out of a storage pond into the Dan River.

Gov. Pat McCrory (R), a former executive at Duke Energy, has been criticized for his close ties to the company, and for receiving more than $1 million in campaign donations from the company and its employees.

The News & Observer reported last week that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) had eliminated 13 percent of the staff positions from the Division of Water Resources only weeks after the coal spill was discovered.

According to its website, the Division of Water Resources is tasked with protecting ‘North Carolina’s surface and ground water resources for the health and welfare of the citizens of North Carolina, and the economic well-being of the state.”

In an interview with WSOC, McCrory insisted that he was doing everything possible to safeguard the environment.

‘Our DENR under our administration has taken the most aggressive action in North Carolina history,” […]

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Koch Brothers likes to champion themselves as crusaders against the welfare state. But a new report shows that they took $88 million of your taxpayer dollars while demanding that governments stop wasting taxpayer dollars. In total, $110 billion goes out to corporate welfare projects from state and local authorities. This does not even include money coming from federal sources.

Entitled ‘Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent,” the report from the taxpayer watchdog group Good Jobs First shows that the world’s largest companies aren’t models of self-sufficiency and unbridled capitalism. To the contrary, they’re propped up by billions of dollars in welfare payments from state and local governments.

Such subsidies might be a bit more defensible if they were being doled out in a way that promoted upstart entrepreneurialism. But as the study also shows, a full ‘three-quarters of all the economic development dollars awarded and disclosed by state and local governments have gone to just 965 large corporations”-not to the small businesses and startups that politicians so often pretend to care about.

In dollar figures, that’s a whopping $110 billion going to big companies. Fortune 500 firms alone receive more than 16,000 […]

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