Disasters

"On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman struck down the Obama administration's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. A review of Judge Feldman's 2009 Financial Disclosure Report shows that Feldman is significantly invested in BP, which is on the hook for the Deepwater Horizon disaster."

"BP PLC and other big oil companies based their plans for responding to a big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on U.S. government projections that gave very low odds of oil hitting shore, even in the case of a spill much larger than the current one."

"Meet BP's Bob Dudley, the human relief well."

A Seaside, Florida, restauranteur whose business and fishing have been harmed by the BP spill has organized a global protest against more offshoe drilling.

"BP PLC has applied 272,000 gallons of dispersants to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico in the four weeks since U.S. EPA directed the company to stop using the chemicals, except "in rare cases" when other approaches to fighting the ongoing oil leak proved unworkable, according to government records."

After a change in counting methods, the number of Gulf spill response worker illnesses has more than tripled.

"A congressional stampede to pass  oil spill legislation gathered momentum Thursday as a Senate committee voted to impose tougher penalties on water polluters, and lawmakers unveiled a comprehensive bill to strengthen environmental and safety rules on offshore drilling."

"More than two months after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Pensacola awoke Wednesday to the largest onslaught of black crude on Florida's coast, as more than nine miles of white shoreline and beaches were soaked with syrupy oil."

"Federal immigration officials have been visiting command centers on the Gulf Coast to check the immigration status of response workers hired by BP and its contractors to clean up the immense oil spill."

One major BP drilling project, three miles off the coast of Alaska, has been exempted from the Obama administration's moratorium on offshore drilling. Regulators are calling it "onshore" because it is built on an artificial island.