via BBC News Fears are growing among US residents living along the Mississippi River as rising flood waters threaten communities in states from Illinois to Louisiana. Police officers went door-to-door in Memphis, Tennessee urging residents to leave nearly 1,000 homes near the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Sections of the Mississippi Delta also began to […]

  via CNN Emergency crews early Sunday sifted through the wreckage left behind by a wave of tornadoes that swept across Iowa before midnight. One of the twisters caused enough damage to prompt Iowa Gov. Terry E. Branstad to issue a disaster proclamation in Monona County, according to a statement released by the governor’s office. […]

The blown-out well at the heart of the worst oil spill in U.S. history has been cemented shut and is “effectively dead,” the federal government’s point man for the disaster said Sunday. “Additional regulatory steps will be undertaken but we can now state, definitively, that the Macondo well poses no continuing threat to the Gulf […]

From the NY Times: KAMPALA, Uganda — On the grounds of Uganda’s biggest AIDS clinic, Dinavance Kamukama sits under a tree and weeps. Her disease is probably quite advanced: her kidneys are failing and she is so weak she can barely walk. Leaving her young daughter with family, she rode a bus four hours to […]