Did an environmental issue disappear because activist groups got a check?  It would seem so.  The Natural Resources Defenses Council and Santa Monica Baykeeper sued the city of Malibu in 2008 for 'groundwater' pollution.

The settlement they reached?  Malibu has to 'fix' 17 drains, easy enough to rationalize since water can pick up garbage as it falls due to that nature thing that happens  - but then they also have to donate $750,000 to the two groups that filed the lawsuit.  How is that helping the environment?  It isn't, but it keeps those environmental corporations in business so they can hire more lawyers to raise more money.

Unless he gets hit by a bus, Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee and be given the opportunity to lose in the election this fall.

Two decades after colleges got politicians to declare a college education a 'right' (fuzzy correlation/causation statistics showing a college education meant higher lifetime earnings made that part easy), schools that have put up lots of new buildings and had the culture turn on them due to bits of high-profile chicanery like charging $89,000 for a two-year program in "environmental journalism", are fighting back the same way government fights back when they overspend and the public doesn't want to pay more in taxes to cover it; they start trotting out high-profile sacrificial lambs.

Ron Breslow of Columbia University in New York has denied charges he plagiarized...himself.

Hey, science is tough.  You have to cite pretty thoroughly. There are lots of instances where entire papers have been sent back from peer review because authors did not cite the reviewers or their friends enough times. It's pretty competitive out there.