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By Chris Hedges
Truthdig

From Colorado to New York, natural gas drilling is putting drinking water at risk.

By Jeff Deasy
AlterNet

The ordinary tap water available to 12 million residents in the New York Metropolitan area has been reliably clean and flavorful since 1842, when an aqueduct was built to bring pristine water from upstate to the city. For years the prideful city's water is a consistent winner in blind taste tests. Easy to take for granted, it comes as a shock to learn it is now endangered by natural gas drilling.

Louisiana State Cabinet Member Tells Federal Gov't of "Devastating" Cuts for Thousands with Incomplete Claim Files

AP

BP has decided to reduce payments to tens of thousands of people whose claim files are incomplete, the secretary of Louisiana's Department of Children and Family Services said.

"This action is irresponsible and in complete contrast to BP's repeated promise that they will 'make things right,'" the secretary, Kristy Nichols, wrote in a letter sent Friday to federal oil spill claims administrator Kenneth Feinberg.

Editorial
New York Times

No industry enjoys the array of tax breaks and subsidies that the oil and gas industry does. No industry needs them less. For all the damage it has caused, the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may provide the political momentum to end this special treatment.

By Jacob Wheeler
Apollo News Service

Chattanooga, TN - Twenty years ago, under popular mayor Gene Roberts, Chattanooga launched an effort to rejuvenate its deteriorating downtown. In 1992, the city opened what at the time was the world’s largest freshwater aquarium. That same year, the Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA) opened an electric transit vehicle (ETV) shuttle service with the aim of bringing people – and businesses – back downtown.

By Jacob Wheeler
Apollo News Service

United Streetcar, a union company in Portland, Ore., and wholly owned subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works, has built the first American-made streetcar in over half a century. United Streetcar already has a deal in place to build thirteen of its streetcars for the cities of Portland and Tucson, Ariz.

SEC & MMS: A Tale of Two Failures

By Eliot Spitzer and William Black
New Deal 2.0

How many disasters will it take to overhaul the regulatory agencies?

Pols Guzzle Oil MoneyEven as more tar balls wash up, Congress is on pace to break its record on oil industry contributions. Why no one can stop the most uncappable cash spill in politics.

By Samuel P. Jacobs
Daily Beast

By Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story

Any relief payment plan established in the wake of the worst environmental accident ever was bound to have its flaws, but this goes to a whole new level of wrong.

According to Gulf resident Kindra Arnesen, who turned whistleblower and full-time activist when she saw how many people were put out of work by the spill, BP will deduct money from individual payments on claims for lost income if the claimant refuses to work in assisting the spill response.

Reading from a letter she'd received from BP, Arnesen quoted the company's line:

A new rule aims to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide around and downwind of old coal-fired power plants east of the Mississippi, in keeping with an Obama campaign promise.

By Michael Hawthorne
Chicago Tribune

In a move that portends cleaner air in communities east of the Mississippi River, the Obama administration cracked down Tuesday on smog- and soot-forming pollution from coal-fired power plants in 31 states and the District of Columbia.

By Renee Schoof
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed a new federal plan to reduce the pollution from electric power plants that wafts hundreds of miles across state lines.

The new rule would require pollution reductions in 31 states and the District of Columbia — most of the Eastern half of the U.S., from Texas and Minnesota to the coast.

To make the cuts, power plants would be required to install new equipment or use lower-sulfur fuels.

By NEIL KING JR. And KEITH JOHNSON
Wall Street Journal

Less than four months after President Barack Obama took office, his new administration received a forceful warning about the dangers of offshore oil drilling.

The alarm was rung by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which found that the government was unprepared for a major spill at sea, relying on an "irrational" environmental analysis of the risks of offshore drilling.

By Kimberly Kindy
Washington Post

In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day.

The disparity between what BP promised in its March 24 filing with federal regulators and the amount of oil recovered since the April 20 explosion underscores what some officials and environmental groups call a misleading numbers game that has led to widespread confusion about the extent of the spill and the progress of the recovery.

By Dan Froomkin
Huffington Post

A group of independent scientists, frustrated and dumbfounded by the continued lack of the most basic data about the 77-day-old BP oil disaster, has put together a crash project intended to definitively measure how much oil has spilled and where and how it is spreading throughout the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Aging, abandoned wells in the Gulf possibly leaking but never inspected

By JEFF DONN and MITCH WEISS
AP

More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one — not industry, not government — is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.

By Ken Ward Jr.
The Charleston Gazette

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Another Massey Energy miner was killed on the job Thursday, this one at the troubled coal operator's White Buck Coal Co. subsidiary in Greenbrier County.

Federal officials said the worker was an electrician and was run over by an underground mine shuttle car in an accident that occurred at about 8:30 a.m. at White Buck's Pocahontas Mine near Leivasy.

Further details were not available, and the name of the miner had not been released Thursday night.

Agence France-Presse

The cost of helping the US Gulf Coast rebound from the ruinous Gulf of Mexico oil spill could run into the trillions of dollars, a US lawmaker said Thursday after a briefing from top government officials.

"It will take billions of dollars -- even trillions," Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee told reporters, citing "a presentation by the president's team on the BP oil spill" early in the day.

Testimony of Kevin B. Zeese, Executive Director, Prosperity Agenda
June 30, 2010

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States is accepting help from 12 countries and international organizations in dealing with the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The State Department said in a statement Tuesday that the U.S. is working out the particulars of the help that's been accepted.

The identities of all 12 countries and international organizations were not immediately announced. One country was cited in the State Department statement -- Japan, which is providing two high-speed skimmers and fire containment boom.