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The FBI is reported to be looking into phone calls and theactions of four employees in its investigation into events surrounding the infamous “London Whale” trades that lost JP Morgan Chase upwards of $6 billion earlier this year. It has also been reported that the SEC is on the case.

As we celebrate the anniversary of the Clean Water Act, we should also focus on how to increase the number of waterways that are clean enough for fishing or swimming. As we wrote earlier this week, the CWA doesn’t cover nonpoint sources of pollution, which is caused by rain or snowmelt runoff that carries wastes into bodies of water.

The students assembled outside Borough of Manhattan Community College yesterday morning were indignant.

The Pew Research Center issued a deeply troubling study last year which found that black and hispanic households had suffered a much bigger decline in their net worth as a result of the Great Recession than white households. The net worth of hispanics went down by 66 percent between 2005 and 2009, blacks by 53 percent, and whites by just 16 percent.

This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the Clean Water Act (CWA). In 1972, Congress overhauled the Federal Water Pollution Act and provided the basic structure for regulating the discharge of pollutants from point sources. The CWA gave the EPA the authority to set effluent limits on an industry-wide basis and on a water-quality basis. It also required anyone who wanted to discharge pollutants to first obtain a permit, or else the discharge would be considered illegal.

As a politician who cut his teeth on the South Side of Chicago, Barack Obama was positioned to become the first urban president in decades, even since Teddy Roosevelt.

His stimulus plan promised billions of dollars for infrastructure projects, including public transportation and multi-family housing, which are particularly beneficial to cities. Obama even went as far as establishing an Office of Urban Affairs, and tapping former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion to lead it. 

So how have things turned out for cities over the past few years?

The 4th OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Power begins tomorrow in New Delhi, India and will bring together roughly 1,000 participants to talk about alternative metrics beyond GDP. The theme of this year’s conference is, “Measuring Well-Being for Development and Policy Making.” The conference will build on the Better Life Initiative, which looks at 11 metrics beyond GDP to measure well-being across countries.

A robust vice-presidential debate continued a noticeable trend in this election season: climate silence. As tracked by Climate Silence, a joint project of Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action, climate change has not been mentioned even once in either the Presidential or Vice-Presidential debates. By comparison, in 2008, both presidential candidates not only discussed climate change, but both promised mandatory caps on carbon pollution.