"When rancher Clint McRae first saw the swirling green and white ponds of arsenic, boron, mercury and lead-containing sludge 10 miles from his property, it was in a photography show at the Montana statehouse. He first thought they were abstract art, but quickly realized some were aerial photos of the ash slurry left over from burning coal at southeastern Montana’s Colstrip Steam Electric Station."

"Below some of the world’s most expensive real estate, in the heart of Silicon Valley, pipes and pumps suck thousands of gallons of contaminated water every hour from vast underground toxic pools."

"The city of St. Louis has been working to reduce lead poisoning since the health department introduced a lead program in the 1940s. Since that time great strides have been made. But the danger of exposure to lead still exists in the city, and screenings reveal more than a thousand cases of elevated blood lead levels each year."

"Paris enjoyed a rare reprieve from traffic jams Monday as a draconian clampdown on cars, aimed at banishing stubborn levels of smog, took effect."

"DE KALB, Miss. — Looming like a spaceship over pine and sweet-gum forest, the high-tech power plant under construction in rural Kemper County is a $5 billion wager on an energy future that includes coal."

Duke Energy lobbyists asked the GOP-controlled North Carolina legislator for a legal loophole protecting it from having to clean up coal-ash pollution, after environmentalists sued to force clean-up. The legislature obliged, and GOP Gpovernor Pat McCrory signed it.

"Duke Energy, the giant utility whose spill of toxic waste into a North Carolina river last month is under federal investigation, released wastewater last week from a second site upriver of Raleigh that state regulators said could be illegal."

"Four years after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, BP is being welcomed back to seek new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico."

Eighteen coal facilities in Ohio are operating with expired pollution-discharge permits under an agency where allegations of coal-industry influence arose during a personnel flap last year, an Associated Press review has found.

"LOS ANGELES -- Elevated levels of lead have been found in the soil of homes and a preschool near a battery recycling plant in Vernon, south of downtown Los Angeles, prompting officials to issue health warnings and order more testing in adjacent neighborhoods."