The Story

Michael Brown, owner of a plastic company, has been looking for new recycling solutions, especially since he saw how plastics pollute the ocean.

Robin Young lives and works in Orange Beach, Alabama…one of the prettiest places on earth, she says.  But after the BP oil spill in the Gulf, things quickly turned dark.Also: The Southern Foodways Alliance, a group that studies and documents Southern cuisine, recently gave a lifetime achievement award to a food writer in Atlanta. But Christiane Lauterbach is not from the low country or the bayou. She was raised on the smells and tastes of Paris.

This spring the weather has brought destruction from all directions. In this country, hundreds of tornadoes have touched down - the worst coming in clusters. Evelyn Homan Duncan is 84. She says as the tornadoes tore through the South last week, all she could think about was the day her town of Tupelo, Miss. was struck by a shrieking wind in 1936.

Deborah Troutman laid off her husband.