"NEW ORLEANS — BP is placing full-page advertisements in three of the nation’s largest newspapers on Wednesday as the company mounts an aggressive campaign to challenge what could be billions of dollars in settlement payouts to businesses after its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico."

"While residents of Medicine Hat anxiously wait for swelling river waters to recede, flooding in Calgary has left the city’s economy in shambles."

"A trio of wind-driven wildfires roared unchecked across 76,000 acres of national forest in southwest Colorado on Monday and firefighters held the line against flames threatening the mountain town of South Fork."

"For 27 years, forests around Chernobyl have been absorbing radioactive elements. A fire would send them skyward again – a growing concern as summers grow longer, hotter and drier."

"In 2006, the EPA’s Chicago office told Midwestern fertilizer dealers it found problems with nearly all their safety plans for poisonous anhydrous ammonia. Fix them, the EPA wrote the dealers, or face possible fines."

"By century's end, rising sea levels will turn the nation's urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin."

"Several wildfires raged unchecked across drought-parched Colorado on Thursday, one threatening oil and gas wells close to the Utah border and another about 300 miles to the southeast chased a group of Boy Scouts from their camp near New Mexico."

"Downtown Calgary could look like a bit of a ghost town today, with entire neighbourhoods shut down and office workers told to stay home due to massive flooding."

"Federal prosecutors unveiled new criminal indictments on Wednesday against a former BP Plc executive and a former BP engineer charged with obstructing investigations into the April 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill."

"COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- As the West battles one catastrophic wildfire after another, the federal government is spending less and less on its main program for preventing blazes in the first place."