National (U.S.)

"Activist Bill McKibben launches a climate road show, drumming up a little rage for an audience in search of a little leadership."

Fracking has brought economic boom times to some parts of the U.S. As the price of natural gas sinks, the question arises: what will happen when the boom is over?

President Obama, GOP contender Mitt Romney, and the U.S. news media moderators pointedly refused to mention climate change once during the series of four presidential debates.

"San Onofre is among the facilities to be studied in the $2-million pilot program conducted by the National Academy of Sciences."

"Scientists say the U.S. biological defense system relied on kits that were far less able to help detect lethal germs than officials thought."

"The Department of Energy has confirmed that its oldest double-shell tank is actively leaking radioactive and hazardous chemical waste from its inner shell."

"Solyndra, the solar panel maker that failed despite a $528 million federal loan, on Monday won court approval for its plan to repay creditors and end its politically charged bankruptcy, after a judge overruled objections by the U.S. government."

"NEW YORK -- Dozens of wells drilled this year across rural Ohio are quietly pumping out the answer to the U.S. energy industry's most loaded question: Is the Utica shale formation, touted as a potentially $500 billion frontier, a boom or a bust? Yet the answer is likely to remain concealed for some time."

The Texas-based energy company TXU was, under the Bush administration, supposed to be the cutting edge of a coal resurgence. The 2007 leveraged buyout of TXU is widely regarded to be one of the worst deals in private equity history. But the firms that led it -- KKR, TPG, and Goldman Sachs -- made money with big fees even as the company tumbled toward financial ruin.

"A year before people began dying of meningitis caused by a tainted drug from a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts, the Food and Drug Administration worried that compounders across the country might be selling another substandard drug, one possibly made with unapproved Chinese ingredients."