Not sure who actually ingests “protein powder” and “dietary supplements,” but if you do, I’d check the label next time you buy and make sure it’s not made by any of these New Jersey outfits: Quality Formulation Laboratories, Inc., American Sports Nutrition Inc., and Sports Nutrition International LLC.

The Department of Justice just shut them down for, among other things, the live and dead rodents that Food and Drug Administration inspectors found on three separate trips to the factory. They also found gnaw holes on bags of supplements. Ewww!

The terms "carbon footprint" and "locavore" have just been added to the dictionary. Then again, so has "flash mob,” according to this story in The Huffington Post. Could this be just a "flash in the pan" or signs that “green” thinking is hitting the mainstream?

Federal healthcare wonks just unveiled a cool new site that lets you compare treatment at hospitals around the country, including eight in the District. A quick test drive reveals some pretty stark differences.

For instance, only 40 percent of patients received treatment to help prevent blood clots within a day of some surgeries at United Medical Center in Southeast, while 96 percent of the similarly bedridden were given their meds in a timely fashion at George Washington University Hospital, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Hospital Compare site.

Howard University Hospital, meanwhile, earned the dubious distinction of charging more for less patient satisfaction. Howard charged Medicaid more than twice as much as any of the other District hospitals in the ranking - an average of $19,201  - for treating heart attack victims. But only 47 percent of Howard patients surveyed said they would recommend going there.

A new study casts yet more doubt on the notion that biofuels are going to save the planet from global warming and us from paying high gas prices. The report just published by the Government Accountability Office, found much ballyhooed “next-generation” biofuels are likely to have the same kinds of pitfalls plaguing the last.

By now, the downsides of the oh-so-last-year corn-based fuels are well known; they use too much water, harmful chemicals and petroleum. This has led some biofuels boosters to place their bets on cellulose from such things as grasses, wood chips and even algae.

Cellulose, however, has never been grown on a commercial scale, as the GAO points out in its new study. That means relatively little is known about how much water, fertilizer and pesticides it will take to grow it in industrial quantities. There’s virtually no information on what impact that’ll have on soil and water quality either, not to mention how much water and energy it will take to turn harvests into biofuel. 

This is just the latest news – much of it bad – for the emergent and yet booming biofuels industry, which begs the question: Isn’t it time to give up this pipe dream? 

But that doesn’t seem likely anytime soon. The buzz around biofuels is propelling any number of hair brained schemes. Besides cases of out-and-out fraud, there are plenty of dubious projects underway. Investor excitement over fuels made from such crops as corn and palm oil have driven up the prices of tortillas in Mexico and led to food riots in other countries. Plans to log this country’s publicly owned forests to feed biofuel plants, meanwhile, seem to make little sense for many reasons. One biggie is that climate scientists say we need to keep the world's remaining forests upright if we are too stave off more global warming.

If we are going to burn it, why bother turning wood into cellulose anyway? Why not just cut down the trees for firewood? O.K., O.K., before some smarty pants chimes in with a reason why burning woody biomass is better than lighting up a plain, old fashioned log, let me just say my point is rhetorical: Why embrace dirty alternative fuel made from finite resources when there are cleaner, more renewable options out there?

Just in time for holiday cookouts, the Washington Post has a story about uproar over watering down the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s organic label.

It chronicles questions about the purity of the USDA Organic stamp that can be found on everything from t-shirts, cosmetics and pet food to the hamburgers and corn on the cob enjoyed at the typical All-American Independence Day bash. The Post story inquires: Has the country's preeminent organic label become tainted by the influences of factory farmers and food processing giants? Do products bearing the stamp no longer meet national standards? 

Pressing as those questions may be they are hardly the only controversies surrounding “healthy” and “green” claims used to sell products that have swept into our supermarkets and discount stores in the last couple of years.

TerraChoice, an environmental marketing firm, has published a review of 2,219 consumer product claims. It found that 98 percent of the items had false or misleading advertisements on their labels. 

Read More "This Independence Day: Is Your Organic Hamburger Up to Snuff?" »

Gay, bisexual, lesbian, and transgender activists and civil liberties groups are rejoicing over the Department of Justice’s decision not to appeal a nearly $500,000 award to an ex-Special Forces colonel from Alexandria who lost a job at the Library of Congress a few years ago after reveling that he was undergoing a sex change.

David Schroer had already accepted an offer to become the Congressional Research Service’s terrorism specialist when he revealed plans to begin the new post as Diane Schroer. Library officials swiftly rescinded their offer. Schroer teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a sex discrimination lawsuit in 2005. A federal judge in Washington awarded Schroer $491,190 earlier this year. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice let the deadline pass for appealing the decision.

The economy might be in the dumps but it’s turning into a stellar year for consumer scams …  and government plans to combat them.

First, this just came in from one of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Yahoo groups: Beware of the telephone shysters posing as sales reps for the FBI. No, silly! Not the real Federal Bureau of Investigation. This one's an alleged alarm company peddling “free” security systems. The pitch starts off saying "you live in a high crime statistics area" and offers a free home alarm system in exchange for letting the company put an FBI sign on your lawn. It’s the latest twist in alarm system scams.

AFTER THE JUMP: More on D.C. confidence schemes and Obama's plans to take down abusive consumer lenders.

Read More "Scam City! Grifters – and Consumer Protection – Are on the Rise, Officials Say" »

Racial profiling that became widespread during the Bush days is still with us, according a new report co-authored by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Despite U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s willingness to talk about race in America and his pledge to end racial profiling, his Department of Justice hasn’t done much to dismantle Bush-era guidelines on national security; Those guidelines not only promote racial profiling by the Federal Bureau of Investigation but create justification for state and local law enforcement agents to do it too, the ACLU charges.

"Racial profiling remains a widespread and pervasive problem throughout the U.S., impacting the lives of millions of people in the African American, Asian, Latino, South Asian, Arab and Muslim communities," Chandra Bhatnagar, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program and the main author of the report said in a press release. "The U.S. government must take urgent, direct action to rid the nation of the scourge of racial and ethnic profiling and bring this country into conformity with both the Constitution and international human rights obligations."

The ACLU made the charges in a report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. To read the press release or the entire report, click here.

The Washington Post has a story today saying the H1N1 virus, AKA Swine Flu, is off to a memorable summer. Hospital emergency rooms and doctor’s offices report hundreds of cases across Maryland, Virginia and the District.  It’s a particularly bad sign considering there are usually no or few flu cases here this time of year.

“It’s like snow in the summer,” Gaurov Dayal, chief medical officer at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, told the Post.

Put that news together with this AP story and we’ve got a pretty freaky scenario. In a nutshell: AP reports that the government is gearing up for a massive immunization effort but there are likely to be some serious and mysterious side effects. In 1976, the last time Swine Flu was on the rise, U.S. officials vaccinated 40 million people.  At least 500 came down with “a paralyzing condition called Guillain-Barre Syndrome. It's still unknown what caused the condition,” according to AP. This time, the government plans to roll out 600 million flu shots, enough to vaccinate everyone in the country twice.

Sunday's Washington Post has two stories about Cpl. Steven Jackson, the Prince George’s County police officer accused of beating and then fatally shooting Manuel de Jesus Espina. The incident last August caused uproar and exposed the mistrust between county police and Langley Park’s large Hispanic community.

A Metro section-front story reports how Espina’s son, Manuel de Jesus Espina Jacome, who watched his father die, stood up at a community meeting last week and asked county police officials: “What are you doing with assassin police officers?”

It’s not the first time Jackson’s version of an arrest didn’t jibe with other facts.

Read More "Sunday Post Raises Questions about Police Officer Involved in 2008 Shooting Death of Langley Park Latino" »

The House of Representatives just passed cap and trade legislation to combat global warming.

The final tally - webcast live on C-SPAN - was 219 to 212, largely along party lines, though more than three-dozen Democrats defected to vote against the legislation. 

The coal industry is having a tough week. Yesterday, the environmental and human toll of mountaintop removal coal mining was the subject of a Senate hearing. Today, the DC government announced a $2,500 fine to anyone using coal tar in pavement projects. 

Staring Jul. 1, DC will no longer issue construction permits for roadway and driveway builds involving coal tar. It will also be illegal to sell the stuff. Coal tar has been used as a pavement sealer for many years but comes with some nasty environmental side effects. The District Department of the Environment says the ban seeks to prevent toxic chemicals from being carried along with rainwater into the Anacostia and Potomac rivers and Chesapeake Bay.

Have you heard of mountaintop removal coal mining? The companies who do it prefer the more value neutral “mountaintop mining.” But the “removal” part is very descriptive.  The practice involves blowing off the tops of mountains to get at the coal underneath. Leftover rubble is dumped into the mountain valleys, burying hundreds of streams, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

This goes on mostly in Appalachia, so you may be wondering what it has to do with the District. While D.C. doesn’t have any coalmines or coal-fired power plants, the city relies on electricity from coal produced in other states, according to American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a trade association.

In my less than comprehensive Internet search, I have failed to unearth, so to speak, the exact amount of D.C.’s electricity that is fueled by mountaintop removal coal. (Does anyone know? Please share.) Suffice it to say, however, that if we go on this way S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford is going to have to come up with a different excuse next time he rendezvous with his Argentine paramour because the Appalachian Trail will be an even less viable excuse.

This brings me to my point: Activists fighting to end mountaintop removal and miners looking to keep the practice alive are set to face off on the Hill any minute now. The Senate Environment and Public Work Committee’s Subcommittee on Water and Wildlife is holding a hearing this afternoon that environmentalists and Appalachian activists hope will mark the beginning of the end of mountaintop removal.  Both sides have descended on D.C. by the busload. According to my sources, the first skirmish was over seating in the hearing room. But you don’t have to leave the comfort of your Internet connection because all the action will be webcast, live blogged and twittered.

The Washington Post has a tiny brief on the back page of today's Metro section reporting that the Metropolitan Police Department has made an arrest in Monday night's fatal shooting on Quebec Place N.W. and another in Colombia Heights last month. 

Police charged Troy Renard Thomas, 18, of the 3000 block of Third Street N.W. , with first-degree premeditated murder while armed of Ryan Randy Trotman.

Arrested in the Columbia Heights case was Robert Larry Brock, 28, of Beltsville in the shooting of Marcus Robertson on May 15. Brock was also charged with first-degree premeditated murder while armed.

The story, reported by Theola Labbé-DeBose, makes no mention that the two homicides, while apparently unrelated, are both allegedly tied to gang beefs going on in different neighborhoods.

Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham told his constituents last month that Brock was targeted for the shooting in "gang beefs that have been ongoing since the murders in Dec/Jan.  Another young adult, Paul Jones, was shot and killed by LaFonte Carlton this past January on the 1300 block of Columbia.  Carlton is now facing two murder charges," Graham reported in a May 16 post to the MPD-3D Listserv.

Ward 4 Councilmember Muriel Bowser, meanwhile, has said police are investigating Trotman's killing and another gun-related incident later that night as gang-related.

Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Branch has identified Ryan Randy Trotman as one of the victims of Monday night’s shooting on Quebec Place N.W. 

Trotman, 28, of the 7400 block of 7th Street, N.W., later died of his injuries. The name of the other victim, a woman who was shot in the leg, is being withheld because she witnessed the crime.

But a quick call the police didn't net anything new about whether the shooting and another incident a few blocks away the same night were part of a beef between rival gangs in the Petworth-Park View area.

“There are no updates” Officer Quintin Peterson in the police department’s Office of Public Affairs said this afternoon.