US Congress Fails To Pass A Single Oil Spill Law

In the year since the worst environmental disaster in the nation's history, Congress hasn't adopted any major laws on oil and gas drilling -- despite introducing more than 150 bills to improve the safety and oversight of offshore drilling and holding more than 60 hearings to discuss the spill's causes and consequences with regulators, oil company officials, grieving relatives and Gulf-area fishermen.

"Nothing has happened," said Jones, who’s son Gordon died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion , speaking by phone from his law office in Baton Rouge. "When oil was still gushing out of the Gulf, everybody wanted to do everything right, to do whatever they could to keep that from happening again. But that was then. Now, everybody is back to drilling more, making more money and not worrying about safety. That attitude is what cost the lives of 11 men and caused the biggest environmental disaster in our history," he said.

Jones traces the inaction to political gridlock and to the nation’s fading attention span. He claims that as soon as the gushing undersea well was capped and the nonstop TV coverage slowed to a trickle in July, he no longer commanded the same attention.

Full article on Huffington Post

US Feds forbid scientists probing Gulf dolphin deaths from speaking to media

Last month dolphin corpses began washing up on the Gulf Coast in alarming numbers. Well, more dead dolphins continue to be found, bringing the total this year up to 114 -- 100 more than the average number of dead dolphins that washed ashore during the first three months of any year between 2002 and 2007.

So, naturally, there are quite a few people interested in what might cause such dramatic increases in marine mammal mortality. But Mississippi's WLOX reported recently that government testing on the animals has been slow to commence, and Reuters reported over the weekend that a gag order has been put into place forbidding wildlife biologists at the National Marine Fisheries Service to talk to the media about their findings.

Reports Reuters:

The gag order was contained in an agency letter informing outside scientists that its review of the dolphin die-off, classified as an "unusual mortality event (UME)," had been folded into a federal criminal investigation launched last summer into the oil spill.

"Because of the seriousness of the legal case, no data or findings may be released, presented or discussed outside the UME investigative team without prior approval," the letter, obtained by Reuters, stated.

The  Lookout - Yahoo! News

Counting corpses underestimates Deepwater Horizon whale toll  - The Great Beyond

Rare Penguins Blackened by Remote Oil Spill

Oil patches cover a northern rockhopper penguin on March 23, a week after a cargo vessel slammed into Nightingale Island in the South Atlantic, initiating a roughly 1,500-ton of fuel-oil spill, according to the U.K.-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The island, part of the British territory of Tristan da Cunha (see map), is home to 200,000 northern rockhopper penguins, half the world's population. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the bird as endangered, due to its mysteriously rapid decline in the past three decades.

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