"The cost of America's quiet billion dollar disaster in the Upper Midwest keeps rising as floodwaters decline."

"Protesters hope to persuade President Obama not to approve the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline that would run from Canada to Texas. But the State Department already says its safe, and supporters point to thousands of new jobs."

"As Miami prepares to dredge its port to accommodate supersize freighters, environmentalists are making a last-ditch effort to protect threatened coral reefs and acres of sea grass that they say would be destroyed by the expansion."

"The editor of the journal Remote Sensing resigned [Friday], saying in an editorial that his journal never should have published a controversial paper in July that challenged the reliability of climate models used to forecast global warming. The paper, by Roy Spencer and William Braswell of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, proposed that climate researchers have likely made a fundamental error by overestimating the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse-gas pollution."

"Lee has been downgraded to a tropical depression. All coastal tropical storm warnings have been discontinued. At 10 p.m., the center of tropical depression Lee was located near latitude 31.0 north, longitude 91.4 west, about 55 miles west-southwest of McComb, Miss."

Follow Tropical Depression Lee on the New Orleans Times-Picayune Hurricance Page. [24]

[25]

"BRATTLEBORO, Vt. -- A week after Tropical Storm Irene washed out scores of roads across southern and central Vermont, state officials on Saturday worked to restore more routes and worried about forecasts for more heavy rain."

"President Barack Obama put a stop on Friday to new rules that would limit smog pollution, unexpectedly reversing course on a key policy measure after businesses said it would kill jobs and cost them billions of dollars."