"Hundreds of people in a southern Illinois town were ordered to evacuate Tuesday as water rolled over the top of a dam, just one perilous result of severe weather that raged through the Midwest overnight with relentless rain and tornadoes and hit the Chicago area especially hard."

"Coastal residents are conflicted over the planned location of a facility that advocates say will help launch Maine's offshore wind industry."

"When a wildfire started in the mountains of Fresno County late last month, much of California was on the cusp of a heat wave that would go on to smash records both for its intensity and duration. Over the next week and a half, as the Basin fire swelled to more than 14,000 acres and temperatures in the area reached 112 degrees, at least nine firefighters were treated for heat-related illness. Four were taken to local hospitals, three of them airlifted from the fire line."

"Only days after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the federal government’s program placing human observers on commercial fishing boats, a federal watchdog said NOAA Fisheries should do a better job monitoring the industry."

"The United States and Canada have reached an agreement in principle on modernizing a 60-year-old pact on Columbia River flood control and power generation, and work on draft amendments will begin in the coming weeks, they said on Thursday."

"When Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers headed to the country’s first “international climate change conference” earlier this year in the eastern city of Jalalabad, few foreign guests turned up."

"Standing water lies beneath the home Sonny Curley shares with his parents and three children on the Quinault reservation a few steps from the Pacific Ocean in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The back deck is rotting, and black mold speckles the walls inside, leaving the 46-year-old fisherman feeling drained if he spends too much time in the house."