"One Year After Helene: People who lost their homes turned to FEMA for aid. Some are still slogging through red tape. Wealthier Getting More: We found that in some North Carolina counties, homeowners with the highest incomes received two to three times as much FEMA housing assistance as lower-income ones."

"Slogging through a thick slop of mud and rock, Brian Hill passed the roof that Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters had just ripped off someone’s barn and dumped into his yard. Then he peered into the unrecognizable chaos inside what had been his family’s dream home.

"NAACP leaders cite energy, water usage and a lack of transparency around the project as causes for concern."

"Residents of Indianapolis’ Martindale Brightwood neighborhood are confronting stubbornly high rates of hypertension, and public health experts point to lead exposure as a likely contributor."

"JBS, the world's largest meat company, has indirectly bought cattle raised illegally on indigenous land in Brazil, according to a Greenpeace investigation released on Thursday."

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s acting administrator, David Richardson, is often inaccessible, several current and former officials say, raising concerns within the agency."

"It’s been seven years since Germany’s Bayer bought US agrochemical giant Monsanto, inheriting not only the company’s vast portfolio of seeds and pesticide products, but also more than 100,000 lawsuits alleging Monsanto’s popular Roundup herbicide causes cancer. Bayer, which has so far paid out billions of dollars in settlements and jury verdicts to cancer victims, has been working – so far in vain – to put an end to the litigation and to block any future such cases."

"Pooja Tilvawala knows it’s a gamble to use more than $46,000 of her own savings to help young people get to the United Nations climate summit in Brazil. But she thinks it’s a necessary one."

"No U.S. city has more toxic lead pipes pumping water into people’s homes. And millions of federal and city dollars earmarked to replace them remain unused, a city official said Monday, at the same time that the city is struggling to keep up with deadlines to warn people of the risks."

"A Chinese mining company is denying that its toxic waste spill, one of this year’s worst environmental disasters, had a “significant impact” on the environment or local communities."

"The Trump administration is ending a decades-long effort to track food security at a time when many Americans are struggling to get proper nutrition or enough to eat."