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Matthew Jaffe, ABC - AIG, the recipient of approximately $180 billion in government bailout aid, paid out over $454 million in bonuses company-wide in 2008, according to documents that the company submitted to Congress. The embattled insurance company, which ignited a heated controversy in March for dishing out $165 million in retention payments to employees in its troubled Financial Products division, revealed the bonuses in response to written questions from Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

The $454 million number is now the third different figure that AIG has disclosed for its 2008 bonuses, with each number far larger than the previous one.

On March 18, AIG CEO Edward Liddy told Cummings at the conclusion of a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing that AIG had paid out around $9 million in corporate bonuses in 2008.

"How much in bonuses -- not retention payments -- have you paid to AIG employees in 2008 and what was the range of bonuses paid?" Cummings asked Liddy.

"I'll provide you the information. I think it might have been in the range of $9 million," Liddy replied.

However, just two days later, Politico reported that AIG had revealed that they paid out $120 million to over 6,000 employees, a number confirmed at the time by an AIG spokesman.

Washington Post - The average American takes more than 12 prescription drugs annually, with more than 3.8 billion prescriptions purchased each year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The most commonly cited estimates from Environmental Protection Agency researchers say that about 19 million tons of active pharmaceutical ingredients are dumped into the nation's waste stream every year.

The EPA has identified small quantities of more than 100 pharmaceuticals and personal-care products in samples of the nation's drinking water. Among the drugs detected are antibiotics, steroids, hormones and antidepressants. Last year, [it was] reported that trace amounts of drugs had been found in the water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas; water piped to more than a milllion people in the Washington area had tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

The EPA does not require testing for drugs in drinking water and has not set safety limits on allowable levels. While the minute quantities now being detected appear not to pose an immediate health risk, according to federal authorities, "there is still uncertainty about their potential effects on public health and aquatic life" over the long term, the EPA's water chief, Benjamin Grumbles, told a Senate committee last year. But the impact of long-term exposure of drugs on humans as well as on other species is less clear. Hormone-disrupting pharmaceuticals, for example, are one possible cause of a high incidence of "intersex" fish in the Potomac River basin: male smallmouth bass producing eggs, females exhibiting male characteristics.

Until recently, federal guidelines recommended that surpluses of highly toxic medications be flushed down the toilet; the same advice applied to drugs with a high potential for abuse or "diversion" -- the industry's word for what happens, for example, when kids help themselves to the OxyContin or Percocet in their parents' medicine cabinet. For other drugs, consumers have been directed to adulterate the medication by mixing it with an unpalatable substance -- such as cat litter or coffee grounds -- and put it out with the household trash.

But this spring, concerns about pharmaceuticals in the water supply led the Office of National Drug Control Policy to amend its advisory, telling consumers to avoid flushing unless the label or patient information specifies that method of disposal. The new guidelines still describe the cat-litter method of putting drugs in the trash, but they also encourage consumers to make use of community drug take-back programs.

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