Former energy lobbyist and GOP presidential non-candidate Gov. Haley Barbour (MS) at a House hearing Thursday blamed the devastation of the Gulf oil spill not on BP, but on the news media for showing a "chocolate pelican."
"BP succeeded in sinking the oil from its blown well out of sight — and keeping much of it away from beaches and marshes last year — by dousing the crude with nearly 2 million gallons of toxic chemicals. But the impact on the ecosystem as a whole may have been more damaging than the oil alone."
"The Energy Department ignored the law by shutting down a controversial Nevada nuclear waste site because of opposition within the state, Republican and Democratic lawmakers complained at a hearing on Wednesday."
"House appropriators [Thursday] cleared a $30.6 billion spending bill for the Energy Department and Army Corps of Engineers that could see a floor vote before August."
"Floodwaters around the South Dakota capital of Pierre are rising and they're about to get much higher. The dams along the Missouri River can't hold back a massive surge of water spurred by record rains in Montana."
"Union Pacific and the Environmental Protection Agency are ending their decade-long dispute over lead contamination in Omaha with a settlement that reduces the railroad's share of the cost to $25 million instead of the more than $200 million originally sought."
Reversing course, the Obama administration's Interior Department scuttled a policy that it had touted barely five months before as reversing the wilderness policies of President Bush.
"An oil and gas trade group has taken the rare step of challenging a U.S. EPA information request, saying the agency is seeking too much data as it revisits a George W. Bush-era analysis of refineries' cancer-causing emissions."
"Just in time for cookout season, some unsettling news arrives for guacamole and salsa lovers: Federal testing turned up a wide array of unapproved pesticides on the herb cilantro — to an extent that surprises and concerns government scientists."
"The Supreme Court decided [Tuesday] not to take up the question of whether U.S. EPA followed the correct procedure in effectively banning a pesticide that had been in use for years."
Advertisement 
