"A 10-knot limit off the West Coast could prevent deaths, advocates tells the U.S. Department of Commerce. Shippers oppose the limits."

"Floodwaters around the South Dakota capital of Pierre are rising and they're about to get much higher. The dams along the Missouri River can't hold back a massive surge of water spurred by record rains in Montana."

"North China is dying. A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill."

"Philadelphia got the green light Wednesday for a $2 billion storm-water plan that will transform the way the city deals with rain. The 25-year plan, which has been hailed as a national model, envisions green roofs on office buildings, porous pavement on city streets and parking lots, and plants and trees with tubs of gravel below ground to hold water and stall runoff in a storm."

"Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water."

"Libya’s enormous aquatic reserves could potentially become a new weapon of choice if government forces opt to starve coastal cities that heavily rely on free flowing freshwater."

"The massive amount of nutrient-heavy river water pouring out of spillways and through the mouths of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers will likely trigger a record-setting Gulf of Mexico dead zone, an area of low-to-no oxygen water that forms annually off Louisiana’s coast."

"Since the first plea for help came over a Keys radio station, hundreds of volunteers have worked around the clock to save pilot whales that mysteriously stranded themselves in shallow waters."

"An old compact may not be enough to keep the Tongue River from running dry."

"Radiation has contaminated the underground pipes, water tanks, and plumbing that provide drinking water for much of Central Texas and the famed Texas Hill Country, according to concerned city officials in the region who have tested the pipes with Geiger counters."

"For the second time in six years, the Washington, D.C.-based conservation group American Rivers today put the Susquehanna at the top of its annual 'Endangered Rivers' list, citing rapidly growing and 'poorly regulated' natural gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking.'"

"The Obama administration is ordering an ambitious cleanup of the Chicago River, a dramatic step toward improving an urban waterway treated for more than a century as little more than an industrialized sewage canal."

"The flooding Mississippi River is done watching and waiting. And anyone who doubts that the river has become T.S. Eliot's personification of 'a strong brown god' need only walk up the slope of the levee and peer over the top."

"During an audit last year, federal authorities found an industrial plant had flushed pollutants into Columbia’s sewer system without making sure the contaminants were at legal levels."
 

"A proposal to build a large water tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is incomplete, confused and plagued by a number of scientific gaps despite years of study, according to a National Research Council report."