NEW YORK -- A projected image of baby bats swaddled in blankets earned a collective "awww" from the audience. It apparently came as a welcome reprieve from videos that featured bats being butchered for food and defecating into a popular drink, and stories of how bats may spread lethal disease.

Environmental advocates are mounting pressure against the U.S. State Department over a Keystone XL review process they say is "plagued by conflicts of interest."

"Imagine if the surgeon general was replaced with a tobacco executive," Robin Mann, past president and board member of the Sierra Club, said during a...

Former TransCanada Corp. employee Evan Vokes' impassioned testimony before a Canadian Senate committee last week painted "a very, very bleak picture of the pipeline industry in Canada, and probably by extension, the States," according to Sen. Betty Unger.

Vokes' allegations on Thursday against TransCanada, the Canadian company leading the controversial...

Heat waves offer no dramatic images of flying debris or surging seawater. Yet each year torrid temperatures take more lives in the U.S. than tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and lightning combined.

The silent killer also discriminates, as low-income communities of color often start with poorer underlying health than other...

Suffocating smoke blew into the streets and schools of Cashmere, Wash., in September -- the billowing byproduct of wildfires blazing in forests surrounding the town and a harbinger of what experts say is a public health threat that increases with climate change.

"Everyone was in third period," ninth-grader Hugo Pina...

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) did not live to see his efforts to safeguard children from toxic chemicals fully realized. But in response to his passing on Monday, at the age of 89, environmental health advocates are praising his progress and his lasting legacy.

"He was a genuine public...

After winning just one game the previous year, the Glenwood City Hilltoppers football team reveled in taking home the Wisconsin Division 7 state championship last season.

And in typical small-town fashion, the whole community rallied behind them, recalled Chris Schone, whose son quarterbacked the junior varsity squad....

BELFAIR, Wash. -- Other than a skunky aroma, the waiting room at the Cannabis Care Foundation in Belfair, Wash., resembles your typical pharmacy. Chairs line walls next to stacks of magazines -- in this case, issues of Rolling Stone -- and a steady stream of patients step up to the...

Chris Whitley had already survived three tornadoes and had worked at the scene of dozens more before arriving in Joplin, Mo.

"It was unlike anything I'd ever seen," the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency spokesman recalled of the devastation left by the deadly twister that struck the town two years ago...

Climate change chatter ran rampant after an unusually violent string of twisters in 2011, including a Joplin, Mo., storm that killed 158 people. After tornadoes took at least 24 lives in Moore, Okla., on Monday, headlines -- like this one -- are once again raising the...

Genieve Long recalled the fear of waking to her 5-year-old son "wheezing and struggling to breathe" a few days after an oil spill hit her town of Mayflower, Ark.

Long, a mother of four, is just one of many Mayflower parents worried about their kids' health, despite repeated...

Doug Parr wasn't shy with his description of TransCanada's tactics, including those the pipeline company employed on Monday in an attempt to bar people in Oklahoma from disrupting progress on the company's proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

"Corporate shenanigans," he called them.

"They're trying to gag and prevent...

The stacks stand some 60 yards tall, yet the "heavy smoke and soot" they spew still fills the streets and playgrounds of Port Arthur, Texas, a local resident and activist recently warned.

"You can't see through it," said Hilton Kelley, who speaks out against the plumes of smoke that cloak...

In March 1912, one lucky wildcatter struck black gold in Drumright, Okla.

One hundred and one years later, Wheeler No. 1 is still pumping -- and north-central Oklahoma remains "deeply engrained in oil," said Gwen Ingram, a local artist and yoga instructor.

Ingram worries that this culture...

Raymond Ladouceur remembers when he could dip a cup into the Athabasca River for a drink. He remembers when the trout and muskrats were plentiful -- and when his community was healthy.

Despite recent heart surgery, Ladouceur, 72, still fishes and traps, as he has his whole life at Big...

Joe Oliver, Canada's minister of natural resources, is not shy about his support for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. And just like the increasingly vocal pipeline critics, Oliver said the facts support his position.

"You gotta start with the numbers," Oliver told The Huffington Post at Canada's...

When Evan Vokes stepped to the microphone during a public hearing on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline on Thursday afternoon, one might have guessed he supported the plan to send Canadian tar sands oil to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Like most of the pipeline supporters at the hearing,...

Debra White Plume and Marie Brush Breaker Randall stood in the middle of Highway 44, alongside more than 70 other members of the Oglala Lakota Nation. For hours, they didn't budge -- much to the chagrin of some tractor-trailer drivers bound for the tar sands region...

It's one of the heart-wrenching images now etched into our minds: A Boston Marathon runner blown off his feet by a bomb blast -- one of two explosions on Monday that killed three people and injured more than 170 others.

"Shock waves just hit my whole body and...

Before it ruptured last month, spilling 5,000 barrels of noxious black oil into a suburban Arkansas community, Jerry Hightower had never heard of ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline. He was also unaware that the same pipeline carried Canadian tar sands crude close to his family's East Texas farm.

Hightower...