People & Population

"Richard Besser led the United States' top public-health agency as swine flu broke out on its doorstep. And his communication shaped the early days of a pandemic, finds Brendan Maher."

"More than four years after Hurricane Katrina, the single-story brick rancher in Pontchartrain Park where Lisa Perez Jackson grew up stands empty. ...The storm's toll on Jackson's childhood house and on New Orleans, particularly the Ninth Ward where she was raised, has intensified her quest for what's known as environmental justice."

"Mahe Noor left her village in southern Bangladesh after Cyclone Sidr flattened her family's home and small market in 2007. Jobless and homeless, she and her husband, Nizam Hawladar, moved to this crowded megalopolis, hoping that they might soon return home. Two years later, they are still here."

"In Lima, Peru, more than 1.3 million people have no access to drinking water. The citizens without it are in the poorest areas, where water trucked in can cost nine times as much as it does in richer areas. So, citizens have had to either make do without running water, or, with the help of a German NGO, make dew into drinking water."

"Representatives of 400 federally recognized tribal nations from across the United States gathered at the Department of the Interior [Nov. 5] at the invitation of President Barack Obama for a conference the President called ... 'the largest and most widely attended gathering of tribal leaders in our history.'" The meeting included discussion of environmental and land rights issues.

"Leaders from the 564 federally recognized tribes will meet with Obama and numerous Cabinet secretaries at [Thursday's] White House Tribal Nations Conference. They will discuss broken treaty obligations and tribal sovereignty, along with issues of economic development and natural resources, public safety, housing, education and health."

"Conservation officers in Cape Breton were still hunting Wednesday for one of the coyotes that took the life of a young Toronto musician who was on an East Coast tour."

Hikers using GPS beacons are calling rescuers to get them out of situations they should never have gotten into -- and overtaxing rescuers with nuisance requests.

Nigeria may start harnessing the natural gas flared off from its oil fields to produce electric power for the impoverished communities whose protests and violence have often hampered production.