I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
In the wake of the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and others in Congress are asking why warnings by federal regulators about such accidents didn’t prevent this spill. Now the regulatory agency, the Minerals Management Service, is under fire, the New York Times reports.
“…The agency warned oil companies in 2000 and again in June 2009, after yet more problems emerged with a blowout preventer, reminding them that they needed to have ‘a reliable backup system in place. But the agency never tried to draft regulations that would detail the requirements for the backup systems,” the Times reports.
Here’s more:
Numerous congressional and internal investigations have called the oversight agency badly mismanaged and at times corrupt,” the Times reports. “It has been rocked with regular scandals, including disclosures in 2008 that agency officials took bribes and engaged in drug use and sex with oil industry officials. And its own scientists have said that senior agency officials in recent years revised staff reports to eliminate environmental concerns that might have complicated oil-company drilling applications for offshore sites in waters near Alaska.
Many of those problems happened during the Bush administration, but Rep. Issa is reluctant to lay blame on Bush–or Obama:
“Problems at M.M.S. did not originate in this administration or its predecessor,” said Representative Darrell E. Issa of California, the senior Republican of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. “There is a bureaucracy and dysfunctional culture that has to be held accountable.”
