David Case reports on Rick Ness, an employee of the Colorado-based Newmont Mining Corporation who the Indonesian government has accused of dumping dangerous waste into a shallow bay in Sulawesi. "Since 2004," Case writes, Ness "has waged a full-time PR and legal campaign to clear his name, with Newmont backing him up at a burn rate of up to $1 million a month." When an infant's death was blamed on the pollution, Ness and Newmont employed "textbook crisis communication. Ness did media interviews and spoke before sympathetic audiences such as the American Chamber of Commerce. He mocked the [Indonesian] government's evidence as 'junk science.' He extolled studies that he said supported the company's argument -- one conducted by the Australian lab CSIRO (and funded by Newmont). ... Meanwhile, Newmont threw its full legal weight at the critics," including independent and government scientists. Ness was acquitted by a provincial court, but the case is now before Indonesia's Supreme Court.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allowed an ExxonMobil employee "to peer review the science behind the agency's proposal to deregulate incineration of some industrial by-products," reports Integrity in Science, a project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The peer review was overseen by an EPA contractor, Syracuse Research Corporation (SRC). The ExxonMobil employee, Thomas Parkerton, told SRC that his "current employer (and the chemical industry in general) would benefit from" the proposed rule, yet he was allowed to review it, in an apparent breach of EPA guidelines. The rule would allow more than 107,000 tons of hazardous waste burned annually in specially-designed incinerators to instead be disposed of in industrial boilers or municipal incinerators. Consumer and environmental groups decried the "undue agency tolerance of conflicts of interest in its rulemaking process," and urged the EPA to "re-review the science and, if necessary, rewrite the proposed rule."