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.
Four draft reports released Wednesday by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling say the Obama administration was not prepared for a spill the size of the one in the Gulf, which spewed 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean. They detail the many stops and starts of the Unified Command, which was set up to organize response efforts. And they suggest that the administration sought desperately to keep the oil spill from becoming for Obama what Hurricane Katrina was for George Bush.
BP says it will offer oil spill victims a sum equal to or better than the compensation a protracted legal battle would yield. But to get that money, a claimant must prove “proximate cause,” or a connection between the spill and the damages they have suffered. The definition of proximate cause that the independent administrator settles on — various Gulf states define proximate cause differently — will have a major impact on who receives compensation and who does not, experts say.
The U.S. House voted yesterday to give subpoena power to the commission that is investigating the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Although President Barack Obama created the group last month, he could not give it the power to compel…
Despite initial hopes in the green movement that the spill would spur a move away from the country’s reliance on oil, the disaster has had the opposite effect. An expansion of offshore drilling was supposed to be one of the key compromises that would bring oil-state Democrats and moderate Republicans on board with a climate bill. Now, with the country’s appetite for offshore rigs vastly diminished, the compromise has collapsed.
Rep. Ben Ray Luján and dozens of other members of Congress sent a letter to Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, calling on the company to halt a $10 billion dividend payment to stockholders. Luján and the other members of…
You think the Deepwater Horizon spill is bad? You don’t know the half of it. BP’s June 2009 regional oil spill response plan for the Gulf of Mexico describes an “expected worst case scenario” that would dwarf the current disaster,…
U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., visited the Gulf Coast yesterday to survey the damage done by an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He also praised the work New Mexico’s labs are doing to help.
Former Sandia Laboratory…
