"A civil defense official says that about 10 million gallons of mining acid leaked into a river that supplies water to tens of thousands of people."

"PITTSBURGH — Where 600 flights used to take off and land every day here at Pittsburgh International Airport, there are now about 300. Partway down Terminal B, the moving sidewalk that used to lead to a dozen gates now stops abruptly at a plain gray wall."

"SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — High in the Sierras, biologists are struggling to find ways to protect some of the world’s oldest and most storied trees from drought, forest fires and climate change."

"Energy companies are fracking for oil and gas at far shallower depths than widely believed, sometimes through underground sources of drinking water, according to research released Tuesday by Stanford University scientists."

"Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may be contributing to a dramatic dive in the region's oyster harvest. Prices are up and the harvest is down, ever since the 2010 BP oil spill, but the exact cause remains unclear.""

The protest by an 83-year-old nun is the least of the problems at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Unsafe, obsolete, and insecure, it is a nuclear disaster waiting to happen. The Y-12 Security Complex is the poster child for much of what ails the decaying weapons complex across the U.S. Although Y-12 has not produced weapons for some 25 years, its annual budgets have increased by nearly 50 percent since 1997, to more than $1 billion a year.

"Seventy miles off Ocean City, scientists aboard the federal research vessel Henry B. Bigelow are exploring a lush underwater landscape that until recently few would have imagined — colorful corals clinging to the rocky slopes of deep-sea canyons."

"Los Angeles is showing its age, and city officials don’t have plans for financing the facelift."

"Residents from a modest southeast Houston neighborhood pointed Sunday toward a lagoon of algae-covered water with a pungent chemical smell that filled the parking lot of an abandoned cleaning facility for chemical trucks. Only some weeds and a cyclone fence separate the facility from homes and a charter school."