WASHINGTON -- Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, a national environmental voice who served on the commission that studied the Three Mile Island accident more than 20 years ago, on Tuesday endorsed Yucca Mountain in Nevada as "safe and appropriate" to bury nuclear waste.

People join the American Automobile Association because they think it's a nice way to get Triptiks, traveler's checks and emergency towing, but what most members don't know is that AAA is a lobbyist for more roads, more pollution, and more gas guzzling vehicles. AAA weighs in on highway funding, suburban sprawl, mass transit, car design and safety, air pollution, and global warming. Almost without exception, critics say, it advocates policies that damage the environment and endanger health.

PR Seminar, a secretive spinoff of the National Association of Manufacturers, held its 50th annual meeting on June 6-9 of this year. "You have entered a very elite circle, you are the cream of the crop of the PR world," one of its members said in 1979. Not a word of the proceedings is supposed to escape although the O'Dwyer Co. has covered the event with varying degrees of completeness since 1970.