The August 24, 2010 Webinar for journalists offered tips for better coverage of the Gulf oil spill and related issues. You can replay it online.
USFWS officers and DHS agents are not allowing independent academic researchers to study damage from the BP oil spill to natural resources from public lands and waters, saying they are justified by the "Natural Resource Damage Assessment" process under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and "national security," respectively.
Obama administration officials are publicly refusing to disclose data backing up an August 4 report announcing that some three-fourths of the BP oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico was "gone.".
"Another BP employee is refusing to testify in the investigation into the cause of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, invoking his Fifth Amendment right to not produce testimony that could incriminate him."
"Two weeks after BP's Macondo well blew out in the Gulf of Mexico, the federal government's Minerals Management Service finalized a regulation intended to control the undersea pressures that threaten deepwater drilling operations. MMS did not write the rule. As it had dozens of times before, the agency adopted language provided by the oil industry's trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, and incorporated it into the Federal Register."
"A Manhattan-sized plume of oil spewed deep into the Gulf of Mexico by BP's broken Macondo well has been consumed by a newly discovered fast-eating species of microbes, scientists reported on Tuesday."
"While it is too early to gauge the long-term environmental or economic effects of the release of 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf, it now appears that the direst predictions about the moratorium will not be borne out."
"BP Plc's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may be exacerbating a natural phenomenon that causes fish, crabs, eels and shrimp to swarm the shoreline to escape oxygen-depleted sea waters."
Before the BP oil spill disaster, Louisiana wetlands were facing an even bigger disaster of long-term subsidence and erosion. Now the increased awareness stemming from the oil spill may help save them.
The New Orleans-area citizens' group Louisiana Bucket Brigade has been conducting a survey of the Gulf oil spill's possible health effects that may pave the way for larger and more scientific federal studies yet to be started.
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