MIAMI—Greg Allgood will do almost anything to draw attention to the huge number of poor people – more than 1 billion – whose only drinking water is loaded with bacteria and viruses and who are often sick, sometimes so sick they die.

MIAMI — Whatever happened to the 2009 hurricane season? It never amounted to much. And that was kind of a surprise.

MIAMI—For nearly 10 years, Greg Allgood has been working on the problem of clean drinking water for one of the biggest corporations in America – Procter & Gamble, the maker of Tide detergent, Crest toothpaste and Pampers, the disposable diapers.

NEW DELHI—Bhola Nishad spends his days on a dusty bluff overlooking the Yamuna River. Like so many Indians, Mr. Nishad regards the river as a holy place. It is also his place of business.

MIAMI—This is the story of a tree and what it means to the water supply and to the global environment. It is an ancient story but it is also a story as modern as the latest hardship in Haiti and El Salvador and parts of Africa and Asia.

BUENOS AIRES—At its broad mouth on the edge of Buenos Aires, the Riachuelo River looks more like a lake than a river. The water seems to be barely moving. It is dirty and smelly. And it may be more like a sludge pit than a lake, a sludge pit festooned with floating islands of plastic [...]

MIAMI— Here is the problem: at least 1 billion people in the world do not have clean drinking water readily at hand—nearly one-seventh of all the people on earth. These people often burn up a lot of the work day simply lugging water. Kids get pushed into carrying the family’s water and lose time at [...]

WASHINGTON—Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries on earth, is a tough place to get a drink of water you can trust.

SAINT LEO, Fla.—Human rights and water. For years people have been arguing over the topic. Access to clean drinking water is a basic human right. Or it is not. Or, it may be a human right, but recognizing it as such would impose requirements that some governments reject.

MIAMI – To hear Tom Lauria tell it, he and his people in the bottled water business were just fed up.

BUENOS AIRES— Here is a whopper of a water dispute between two countries that have only barely tolerated each other in the best of times: Argentina, one of the largest countries in South America, and Uruguay, one of the smallest.

WASHINGTON—Dirty water is killing kids–lots of kids. The magnitude of the deaths is staggering, perhaps 5,000 a day, 1.8 million a year – more deaths annually than the combined total from malaria, measles and HIV/AIDS.

MIAMI—You don’t hear much about the nation of Kiribati.

MIAMI – All over the country, rivers, lakes and coastal waters are being hammered by outbreaks of algae that suck oxygen out of the water and smother vital river and sea grasses. Wildlife suffers and sometimes drinking water is contaminated. It is rare that the fouled drinking water seriously harms anyone. But rashes [...]

BOSTON – Back in 1988, George Bush the elder took a theatrical boat ride around Boston Harbor and proclaimed it “the filthiest harbor in America.” It was mainly a stunt to undermine his opponent for the Presidency, Michael S. Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts and therefore, one might argue, the guardian of the harbor. [...]