Moments before her ex-fiance fatally shot her in the parking lot of the hospital where she worked, a Chicago doctor called 911 to report that she had spotted the man and feared for her life.

Scientists estimate the age of black gums in an old-growth forest surrounded by Bear Swamp in Cumberland County, N.J., ranges from 400 to 500 years, making it among the oldest trees in the oldest forest of its kind in the Northeast. But sea-level rise fueled by warmer oceans and sinking land is pushing saltwater ever closer to the trees, with the potential to kill them in the not-so-distant future.

Just as scientists are starting to understand the life forms and landscape of the ocean, they are also coming to grips with the threat of mass extinctions, speakers said at a marine biodiversity forum last week. The forum, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, featured French scientific leaders and their American counterparts from the San Diego area. They addressed the marine issues raised in an international report on global biodiversity released earlier this month, arguing that conservation is just as important as stabilizing the climate. According to the report, 30 percent of reef-forming corals are threatened, 33 percent of fisheries are over-fished, 33 percent of marine mammals are threatened, and 55 percent of the ocean is subject to industrial fishing. That has profound implications for coastal communities such as San Diego, which depend on the ocean for food, tourism, recreation and biotechnology.

In the last 22 years, three wildfires have swept across Southern California, rendering the landscape dull and unnatural as the fires — so close in both space and time, and exacerbated by climate change and drought — have pushed the notoriously tough native flora beyond its limits.

The city of Malibu and the county of Los Angeles will begin examining the response to and recovery from the Woolsey fire, the fast-moving and most destructive wildfire in recent Southern California history. Citing the "new era of threat from wildfires," the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last month to convene a panel to review the cause of the Woolsey fire, the deployment of firefighters, evacuation procedures and the communication among first responders, police and municipalities.

Frustrated residents of a Denver suburb say state law is forcing them to participate in a major oil and gas drilling project against their wishes, so they launched legal challenges with potentially significant consequences for the industry. Backed by a federal judge, they have a chance this week to ask state regulators to block multiple wells planned within about 1,300 feet (400 meters) of homes in the city of Broomfield. The dispute is a microcosm of a broader battle in Colorado, where burgeoning subdivisions overlap with rich oil and gas fields, bringing drilling rigs and homes uncomfortably close.

Michigan's attorney general in 2016 promised to investigate "without fear or favor" the scandal over Flint's lead-tainted drinking water and pledged that state regulators would be locked up for fudging data and misleading the public. Yet three years later, no one is behind bars. Instead, seven of 15 defendants have pleaded no contest to misdemeanors, some as minor as disrupting a public meeting. Their records eventually will be scrubbed clean.

Humans may have caused all most all of the mid-sized earthquakes to hit the Los Angeles Basin in the 1900s — and that could be a good thing for the region.

Following the state's largest illegal dumping bust and subsequent grand jury report, a group of state senators from Long Island introduced legislation Wednesday to make it easier to prosecute and punish anyone suspected of illegally dumping hazardous and toxic materials.