Environment

The environmental group Clear the Air asked the same research firm that the Bush administration used to analyze its plan to reduce coal plant emissions, the "Clear Skies Act," to compare Bush's plan to two other proposals before Congress. The resulting report found "Clear Skies" to be the weakest of the three.

Bush-Cheney campaign chair Marc Racicot announced "the formation of a natural resources coalition ... to counter environmental groups' grass-roots effort to turn out anti-Bush voters" in Oregon, a swing state. "We believe President Bush has a very strong environmental record," said Racicot.

"EPA decisions now have a consistent pattern: disregard for inconvenient facts, a tilt toward industry, and a penchant for secrecy," said longtime Environmental Protection Agency official Eric Schaeffer, who quit the agency in protest in 2002. He was responding to a new decision to exempt wood products plants from controls on emissions of formaldehyde, a chemical linked to cancer and leukemia.

In a rare "directed verdict" issued less than three days into the trial, the environmental group Greenpeace was found not guilty of the 19th century crime of "sailor mongering." A Miami federal judge found that activists who boarded a ship six miles from the Port of Miami-Dade did not break the 1872 law, which requires the ship be "about to arrive." The ship was carrying some 70 tons of mahogany from the Brazilian rain forest.