"With public officials across the nation under fire for downplaying the health risks posed by lead water pipes, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration is moving to start testing tap water in the homes of children poisoned by the brain-damaging metal."

"A federal judge in New Orleans has granted final approval to an estimated $20 billion settlement, resolving years of litigation over the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico."

"As Southern California continues to battle the nation’s worst smog, most members of a powerful regional panel that enforces air pollution regulations can breathe relatively easily. Nine of the 13 members of the South Coast Air Quality Management District live close to the ocean in Los Angeles or Orange counties, where ozone, the hallmark pollutant of summer smog, exceeds federal health standards fewer than 10 days a year."

"A worsening financial crisis for the nation’s biggest coal companies is sparking concerns that U.S. taxpayers could be stuck with hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in cleanup costs across a landscape of shuttered mines stretching from Appalachia to the northern Plains."

"A California judge ruled Wednesday that the Port of Los Angeles and a national railroad company failed to adequately assess the environmental impacts of a $500-million freight yard they want to build next to low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods."

"A half dozen coal-fired power plants in Georgia face tougher federal rules that could force them to spend millions of dollars, or even shut down some, to reduce heavy metal pollutants in the state’s rivers and ground water."

"Ohio's environmental regulators are proposing an overhaul of how the state and its cities deal with lead in drinking water, including speeding up notifications when lead is found at the tap."

"MEXICO CITY — Metropolitan authorities on Wednesday temporarily ordered all cars to remain idle one day a week in response to this notoriously smoggy capital's worst air-quality crisis in over a decade."

"Study also finds companies fracked into underground sources of water and at much shallower depths than previously known, close to drinking water wells."