National (U.S.)

"Debby, now a tropical storm, roared ashore Monday along the Big Bend coast of Florida, killing at least four people, flooding streets, and causing widespread power outages as the storm roared toward Georgia and South Carolina, where it's expected to bring catastrophic flooding this week."

"After wildland firefighter Ben McLane fought California’s deadliest fire, he started second-guessing his line of work. The November 2018 Camp Fire near Paradise had killed 85 and leveled 18,000 homes. McLane was used to hiking steep terrain and digging endless fire breaks. He was accustomed to the spectacle of entire hillsides of pine and fir aflame. He wasn’t used to this scale of devastation — or feeling he’d worked in vain. Meanwhile, he rarely saw his family, and couldn’t fathom affording a house. Was firefighting worth it?"

"When Hurricane Idalia struck Florida last summer, a tree fell straight through a trailer occupied by a migrant-farmworker family in Hamilton County. They couldn’t afford to move, even temporarily, so the family of six just picked up the things they could salvage and continued to live around the rotting tree."

"ABC News’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott has reportedly faced threats to her life after her piercing interview of Donald Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists convention left the former president fuming."

"Brian Harrington entered the Illinois Department of Corrections system in 2007 at age 14, sentenced to 25 years in prison. ... He remembers the toilet water being brown—and sometimes the drinking water, too. He recalls the tap water’s sewer smell and the black specks swirling, then settling, in his cup."

"Due largely to lagging prevention efforts in the Midwest, the low-oxygen area of the Gulf of Mexico is larger than expected this year, prompting fish and shrimp to flee nearly 4 million acres of habitat and killing off bottom-dwelling species."

"The center of Hurricane Debby is expected to reach the Big Bend coast of Florida early Monday bringing potential record-setting rains, catastrophic flooding and life-threatening storm surge as it moves slowly across the northern part of the state before stalling over the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina."

"Peter Dykstra – newsman, provocateur, friend and former publisher of EHN – passed away Wednesday."

"Sea lions are stranding themselves on a long stretch of the California coast and showing signs that they may have been poisoned by a bloom of harmful algae, experts said Thursday."