When Gov. Mitch Daniels told the Washington Post last month that he "will now stay open to the idea" of a 2012 presidential bid, Indiana's scourge became the nation's. Americans who worry that environmental exposures to industrial chemicals can lead to chronic illnesses and diseases like autism, asthma and cancer should be on alert:

Mitch Daniels is not your typical laughing-stock Hoosier politician, like Dan Quayle or Evan Bayh. He poses a serious threat to human health and the environment.

No news is good news, as the saying goes, but when it comes to the legal case of Hugh Farrell and Gina "Tiga" Wertz, no news is ambiguous.

Farrell and Wertz engaged in peaceful protests against the I-69 highway, and the State of Indiana has charged them with felony racketeering and several misdemeanors.

Wertz is charged with intimidation, a class A demeanor, two counts; conversion (unauthorized use of someone else's property), a class A misdemeanor, two counts; and corrupt business influence (racketeering), a class C felony. Her bond was set at $10,000.

This is the time of year when classroom responsibilities overwhelm my journalistic passions, and my writing tends to be more reflection than exposition. And let me tell you, nothing spurs reflexive contemplation like finding yourself in polar opposition to someone whose life work has profoundly influenced your own.

In my case, that someone is Dr. Philip J. Landrigan from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, whose research at the Children's Environmental Health Center there first caught my attention in the late 1990s when I was a senior environmental writer at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM). When I began exploring the links between toxic pollution and autism 17 months ago, a 2006 study Landrigan co-wrote titled "Developmental neurotoxicity of industrial chemicals" was the first link that Google produced when I searched for "autism and environment."

Nearly a year and a half later, I am persuaded that mercury and/or other chemicals in vaccines are among the industrial chemicals that caused the autism epidemic of the past two decades. I do not believe that vaccines caused the epidemic, but my work has convinced me that neurotoxins in them contributed to it. And in some children, they did cause autism. The question for them isn't whether, it's how, and it demands an answer.

CWA Local 4730 issued the following statement on Feb. 23 in response to IU President Michael McRobbie's State of the University.

Indiana University continues to ignore the needs of its support staff. While many departments have acted responsibly and creatively to avoid cutting staffing levels, it has only tempered the damage caused by having a workforce that is constantly overworked while being chronically underpaid.

The October 2009 Board of Trustees meeting provided ample evidence that IU is willing to continue to fund buildings and faculty hires but not provide for the financial needs of its current staff.

News Release
Citizens Action Coalition

Two leading Indiana citizen/environmental groups -- Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana and Concerned Citizens of Scott County -- filed as joint interveners in Liberty Green Renewables Indiana LLC's request to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) for declination of jurisdiction.

Liberty Green is requesting that the Commission decline to exercise any jurisdiction over the construction, ownership or operation of, or any other activity in connection with, the Scottsburg Renewable Energy Center -- stating in the petition to the IURC that "encouragement of this type of facility by its declining to exercise jurisdiction over Petitioner will be beneficial to the State of Indiana."

In the request, Liberty Green LLC claims that the Scottsburg Renewable Energy Center will specifically generate electricity from woody biomass, a renewable, environmentally benign and energy efficient resource.

News Release
Consumer Federation of America

A new report from the Consumer Federation of America by Dr. Mark Cooper, "Building on the Success of Energy Efficiency Programs to Ensure an Affordable Energy Future," shows that federal energy efficiency policies can leverage real and largely untapped potential to save consumer's money and create a cleaner, healthier environment with lower carbon emissions.

This report also concludes that incorporating energy efficiency programs in federal climate and energy legislation would substantially reduce the cost for consumers.

One of the nation's leading voices on children's environmental health has called for focused and expanded research into the cause-effect relation between industrial chemicals and autism.

"Long and tragic experience that began with studies of lead and methylmercury has documented that toxic chemicals can damage the developing human brain to produce a spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders," Dr. Philip Landrigan from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine wrote in a Jan. 16, 2010, article in the medical journal Current Opinion in Pediatrics.

Today's children, he noted, "are at risk of exposure to 3,000 synthetic chemicals produced in quantities of more than 1 million pounds per year, termed high-production-volume (HPV) chemicals. HPV chemicals are found in a wide array of consumer goods, cosmetics, medications, motor fuels and building materials."

Marty Pieratt's awareness of autism began when the 1988 movie Rain Man was being filmed in Cincinnati, a year or so before his son, Carter, was born. Pieratt worked as a reporter on local television, and his editors assigned him stories on autism, Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. In the movie, Hoffman plays an autistic savant, Cruise his long-lost brother.

"I can remember doing stories on autism," Pieratt said. "But little did I know that I'd personally be faced with the quintessential autism story."

Carter was born on "12-11-87," Marty says lyrically, and for the first three years of his life, "He was perfect, a mouthy little toddler." But soon after the family purchased a small farm in Walton on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River Valley about 20 miles from Cincinnati, Marty noticed his son had an unusual fascination with the grass after mowing. Carter also ran wind sprints, over and over again.

News Release
Allison for County Council

County Recorder Sam Allison has filed to run for Monroe County Council, Seat 4.

"I have had a great term as County Recorder, and I am so grateful to so many people for that," said Allison. "Now it is time for another challenge, the challenge of overseeing the finances of a County that has been adding nearly 1,500 new residents per year to its population. And we sure do have a lot of challenges, due to the bad decisions coming out of Indianapolis."

Decisions, Allison said, that threaten Monroe County's quality of life.

"We have a state government that is intent on slashing funds for our core public services. Education, parks, public safety, libraries -- these things have made Bloomington great. Now they are all on the chopping block. But even though teachers will get fired under the State's current proposal, it also appears that there are billions of dollars available for an I-69 that we absolutely do not need and an FSSA system that has absolutely failed. This is absurd. Downright absurd."

They're clean! They're green! Or so the industry PR boasts about biomass power plants. If anything, the opposite is true.

Biomass is any substance that isn't a fossil fuel and is arguably organic. Wood waste is one of the primary fuels that biomass incinerators burn. Wood waste includes industrial wood waste (like shipping pallets and sawdust), which is often contaminated with toxic chemicals and plastics that form dioxin, the most potent carcinogen ever studied, when burned.

Biomass power plants aren't built in white, middle-class neighborhoods but in urban neighborhoods populated with poor people of color. Other prime locations are poor, rural areas, such as Crawford County, in southwest Indiana.