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MIAMI (Reuters) - Guantanamo war crimes prosecutions of five prisoners charged with plotting the September 11 hijacked planes attacks will be delayed by two months because of lost files caused by Pentagon computer problems, U.S. military officials said on Wednesday. A weeklong pretrial hearing had been set to begin on Monday in the death penalty case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and four alleged co-conspirators. The judge overseeing the case postponed the hearing until June 17 at the request of defense lawyers who said three to four weeks' worth of their confidential work files had...

Clean-up efforts were continuing Thursday near White River, Ont., where more than 63,000 litres of oil were spilled from a freight train after 22 cars came off the rails. Canadian Pacific Rail revised its estimate of how much oil was leaked. Initial reports on Wednesday said about 600 litres of oil had leaked from the tank cars. "The source of the now-discovered release of product from the second car was initially hidden as it was buried under snow. The product then migrated a short distance under the snow," said CP spokesperson Ed Greenburg. "The additional spill was detected and the...

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and a pipeline leaking on somebody else’s front yard can be a godsend, too. The environmentalists who were waging a losing war against the proposed Keystone pipeline woke up to the news of a small pipeline leak in Arkansas and thought it was Christmas morning. If environmentalists were the praying kind, they would say the Arkansas leak was an answer to their prayers. They think it ends the debate over the Keystone pipeline. One green lobbyist says “this should be the nail in the coffin of the Keystone pipeline.” They’re eager to...

Has anyone heard any more on this? I haven't found much written on it, not even on the Cornwall Alliance site.

NEW YORK - Exxon Mobil was working to clean up thousands of barrels of oil in Mayflower, Arkansas, after a pipeline carrying heavy Canadian crude ruptured, a major spill likely to stoke debate over transporting Canada’s oil to the United States. Exxon shut the Pegasus pipeline, which can carry more than 90,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil from Pakota, Illinois, to Nederland, Texas, after the leak was discovered on Friday afternoon, the company said in a statement. Exxon, hit with a $1.7 million fine by regulators this week over a 2011 spill in the Yellowstone River, said a...

But Team Obama has sent a team of lawyers to be ready to sue President Obama defended his administration's response to the Gulf Oil Spill by visiting the area Sunday (5-2-10). It was unclear whether the visit was more in response to developments in the Gulf and along the coast or to the growing media criticism and complaints from local officials about how little they think the Federal government is doing to prevent damage from the spill. The Washington Times filed this report Sunday and Administration officials defended Obama's actions on the Sunday talk shows. Nonetheless, criticism mounted as a...

Would this remain a local DC story if the accused had been staff director of an important committee in a Republican controlled Senate? >>>>A former senior congressional aide was indicted this week in D.C. Superior Court on charges that he sexually assaulted two women after drugging them with a sedative that he allegedly put in their drinks. Donny Ray Williams Jr., 36, who served as staff director for a Senate subcommittee and worked in the offices of several members of Congress, gave at least one woman Ambien and assaulted her while she was unconscious, according to court papers. Williams was...

Check this video out - The timeline of the oil spill and what BO did throughout to fix it. It was put together very well. This should be running now!

An investigator for the Interior Department’s Inspector General claims the White House hindered an investigation into a report on the BP oil spill by blocking access to a key official and email records, the New Orleans Times-Picayune is reporting. The investigator was trying to determine whether the White House intentionally edited the report to create the false impression that outside experts supported the administration's call for a moratorium on offshore drilling. The White House had said the editing was a mistake, and the Inspector General’s final report concluded it was. But the investigator, in a series of emails obtained by...

(NewsCore) - Eyeless shrimp, fish with oozing sores and other mutant creatures found in the Gulf of Mexico are raising concerns over lingering effects of the BP oil spill. On April 20, 2010, an explosion aboard the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 people and spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels into the Gulf, in the worst offshore oil spill in US history. Two years later, scientists and commercial fishers alike are finding shrimp, crab and fish that they believe have been deformed by the chemicals unleashed in the spill, according to an extensive report by Al Jazeera English.

A report released on Tuesday by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute concludes that the economic damage caused by potential spills from the Keystone XL pipeline could far outweigh the benefits of jobs created by the project. The institute, which advocates the creation of union jobs in renewable energy and analyzes sustainability issues, said that more than a million people work in agricultural or tourism jobs in the six states along Keystone XL’s route and that the economic costs could be considerable if a major spill occurred. The risks of an economically damaging accident are higher than those for conventional crude,...

Nearly two years after the worst accidental offshore oil spill in the history of the energy industry, some of the biggest companies in the world are busy pointing their legal fingers at one another in court over who has to pay what in claims, damages and fines over the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A federal judge this week ruled that BP is still obligated to a clause in its contract with Transocean that would protect the rig owner from damages related to the spill. That means BP still has to shell out money to settle claims filed by those...

Throughout the months-long 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists expressed surprise at the development and relatively speedy disappearance of giant plumes of subsea oil and gas that jetted from the wellhead and refused to surface. A new study explains how bacteria degraded the plumes so efficiently: A succession of hydrocarbon-noshing species mushroomed because their movable feasts were repeatedly replenished. Only about 15 percent of the BP gusher floated up to form giant surface slicks, a second new study finds. Natural gas constituents and dissolvable chemicals amounting to twice that mass remained near the seafloor, creating the...

Today, I’m going to say some nice things about BP and some not so nice things about the lawyers who are suing BP. Please don’t spill your coffee. As horrific as the Deepwater Horizon accident was in April 2010 — killing 11 rig employees, while pouring millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — BP has performed quite admirably in its aftermath. It has spared no expense in cleaning up the oil. It has set aside $1 billion to restore the environment and coastal ecosystem. It underwrote an advertising campaign to lure tourists back to the Gulf...

Dr. Ann Maest is a managing scientist at Straus Consulting, and she’s the go to expert on all things groundwater. In the press release announcing her reappointment to the National Academy of Sciences, they mention that she is focused on the environmental effects of mining and petroleum extraction and production, and, more recently, on the effects of climate change on water quality. Maest is in high demand as an expert for those looking to stop oil and mineral exploration. She’s also heavily used by the federal government, even though after new details about her past work are coming to light...

Reporting from Taft, Calif.— Anywhere else, linking an aromatic cup of coffee and a gooey glob of oil would quickly kill a restaurant. Not so in Taft, Calif., the Taft Crude Coffee House is a popular stop for hot coffee or iced mocha. And in an era when oil spills tend to be environmental disasters, people here are happy to provide directions to the Lakeview Gusher, even though it spewed more than 9 million barrels of oil, nearly twice the amount spilled in 2010 from the Deepwater Horizon, the ill-fated British Petroleum rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Over 18...

LONDON—Anadarko Petroleum Co. agreed to pay BP PLC $4 billion to settle all claims between the two companies arising from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a development that reduced uncertainty about the British oil giant's ultimate liability for last year's disaster. Anadarko also will drop its allegations of gross negligence against the oil giant, a move which could increase the pressure on contractors Halliburton Co. and Transocean Ltd. to come to terms with BP. Legal observers say Anadarko's move was seen as likely after a final report by U.S. investigators last month into the causes of the Deepwater Horizon...

Energy Policy: Deep-water drilling will resume in the Florida Strait when a giant, semi-submersible oil rig en route from Singapore arrives later this fall. The bad news is it will not be American. While U.S. oil and energy prices "necessarily skyrocket," as President Obama once said they would under energy policies that have imposed a de facto ban on offshore drilling, a massive Chinese-built semi-submersible oil rig is on its way from Singapore to a drilling position off northwest Cuba perhaps as little as 50 miles from Key West, Fla. The long-predicted move could come as early as November, as...

The “good” news for wildlife around the Arctic Circle is that BP, renowned despoiler of the Gulf of Mexico, will not be coming. BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred as the Macondo blowout), which surged for three months, has won a place in the Guinness book of records as the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. The bad news is that U.S. oil international Exxon Mobil has sealed an Arctic oil exploration deal with Russia’s state-owned oil firm Rosneft, following an agreement signed on 29 August in the presence of Russian Prime...

More than a year after the largest oil spill in history, perhaps the dominant lingering question about the Deepwater Horizon spill is, "What happened to the oil?" Now, in the first published study to explain the role of microbes in breaking down the oil slick on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers have come up with answers that represent both surprisingly good news and a head-scratching mystery. In research scheduled to be published in the Aug. 2 online edition of Environmental Research Letters, the WHOI team studied samples from the surface oil slick...