Pollution

Los Angeles County supervisors unanimously approved a plan Tuesday to relocate the few remaining residents of the blighted Ujima Village subsidized housing complex in Willowbrook within 90 days, but they turned down housing officials' appeal for eviction powers. Citing contamination concerns, county housing officials had urged supervisors to give them the authority to evict those reluctant to leave.

Academy Award winners Joel and Ethan Coen, known for their grimly comic portrayals of human nature, are poking fun at a new target: the coal industry. The filmmaking brothers have directed a TV spot for an environmental coalition that's trying to demolish the notion that there's anything clean about so-called clean coal.

The country's fourth-largest coal producer, Massey Energy Co., has agreed to pay a landmark $20-million fine to settle federal charges that it repeatedly dumped dangerous amounts of mine waste and sediment into creeks and rivers in three Appalachian states over a seven-year period.

With television cameras capturing the moment, Italy's agriculture minister on Thursday ceremoniously devoured pieces of white, chewy mozzarella cheese and proclaimed that there was no reason for alarm. But alarm is what is engulfing Italy's $500-million mozzarella industry after the cheese that is a beloved quintessential national product came under unsettling scrutiny.

Two Ecuadoreans who have waged a 14-year fight to bring a U.S. energy giant to account for what they allege is massive oil contamination in the Amazon are among the winners of an international environmental prize. Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and Luis Yanza each will receive $150,000 today from the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Prize for organizing half a dozen indigenous communities to pursue legal action against Texaco and then Chevron Corp. after the two companies merged in 2001.

Abel Garrido has just struck oil and he's not happy about it. Using a tree branch, the weathered farmer probed the edge of a pond that his cattle use for drinking water and soon turned up the smelly black sludge that he says has killed much of his livestock and sickened his family. "I've lost 30 cows," Garrido said. "I cut them open and their insides are black." Paying the medical bills to treat his three children for skin cancer has cost him his meager savings.

As the hour grows late, President Bush, like many chief executives before him, seems to hear the call of the wild. Honoring a tradition that dates at least to the Reagan administration, Bush is pushing through a bundle of controversial last-minute changes in federal rules -- many of them involving the environment, national parks and public lands in the West.

In the strongest language it has ever used, a United Nations panel says global warming is "very likely" caused by human activities and has become a runaway train that cannot be stopped. The warming of Earth and increases in sea levels "would continue for centuries ... even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized," according to a 20-page summary of the report that was leaked to wire services. The summary of the fourth report by the U.N.'

The Southern California lawyer who successfully prosecuted top Enron executives has been hired by the Navajo tribal government to seek a full cleanup of the old uranium mines contaminating the country's largest reservation. John C. Hueston, who gained fame for his questioning of Enron founder Kenneth L. Lay, contacted the tribe in November after reading articles in The Times about the poisoning of the Navajo homeland as the government mined uranium for use in nuclear weapons.

Concerned about the extent of pollution at the beachfront property, federal officials announced Wednesday that they have taken steps to add a shuttered Oxnard metal recycling plant and a massive waste pile on surrounding property to a list of Superfund sites. "We found that there were levels of metals and radioactive materials here that were posing a threat to human health and the environment," said Pete Guria, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency's regional emergency response section.