The portions at Mother's are huge: great, skinny mounds of buttered grits, piles of crispy bacon, and big slabs of ham with sweetly caramelized skin.

NPR: New Orleans Set for 'Bittersweet' Mardi Gras

The older grave mounds, like her mother's, were covered with moss.

NPR: E.L. Doctorow on Sherman and 'The March'

Vast mounds of rubbish fester on the city's streets where the truly destitute sift for scraps of aluminium or plastic to sell in a hand-to-mouth struggle to survive.

BBC: Aleppo's winter of discontent

"It's a beautiful place to live and to basically have mud mounds all over the place is going to ruin it, " he said.

BBC: Water pipeline approved between Dorset and Wiltshire

Yet as the special report on the waste business in this week's issue argues, there are grounds for optimism amid the mounds of rubbish.

ECONOMIST: The waste industry

Back in the Arbelias home, Nashatt Arbelias sifts through mounds of clothes dumped on their bed, trying to take stock of what's left, what's missing and what's destroyed.

NPR: A Christian Village in Lebanon

In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, piles of bricks and mounds of weed-ridden soil at a halted project attest to Wal-Mart's hurdles and frustrated plans.

WSJ: Wal-Mart Hits Obstacle to Growth in India

Drax will get 10% of its fuel from British sources like these and there's a high-walled maze at the power station of blocks of chopped miscanthus next to high mounds of shredded willow.

BBC: Biomass may hinder climate fight