"Congress' debt deal leaves climate advocates grappling with a decade of potentially declining environmental budgets and narrowing hopes of attaching a tax on greenhouse gas emissions to pay down the deficit."

"Federal officials said on Tuesday that they were investigating an apparent link between ground turkey meat and a nationwide outbreak of salmonella illness that has so far killed one person in California and sickened at least 76 more people in 26 states."

The intertwined problems of climate change, drought, desertification, failed states, terrorism, and insurgency are causing a human catastrophe in the Horn of Africa.

"Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal, labeled 'one of the most contaminated bodies of water in the nation,' isn't just a filthy Superfund site. To urbanites, it's a little piece of the outdoors."

With the Japanese government apparently failing in the task of protecting the public from radiation after the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear station, ordinary Japanese citizens are buying dosimeters -- and making startling discoveries.

"It's official: July was a scorcher. High temperatures in communities across the USA broke or tied records 2,676 times, almost double the number (1,444) of a year ago, the National Weather Service reports."

"U.S. researchers have discovered a genetic mutation unique to African Americans that could help explain why blacks are so susceptible to asthma."

"More than 15 years after a fertilizer bomb was used to blow up a government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, the federal government is proposing to regulate the sale and transfer of the chemical ammonium nitrate."

The former Rocky Flats federal nuclear plant was supposedly cleaned up before it was repurposed as a National Wildlife Refuge. But lack of money and invasive plants may keep plutonium worries alive.

"The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is concerned that hydraulic fracturing of natural-gas wells near its dams — such as the one at Joe Pool Lake in southwestern Dallas County — could threaten dam safety."