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While officials claim most of the oil from America's worst-ever spill has disappeared, fishermen hired by BP are still finding tar balls—and being instructed to hide their discoveries. Two weeks ago, as federal officials prepared to declare that some three-quarters of the estimated 5 million barrels of oil released into the Gulf over three months had disappeared, Mark Williams, a fishing boat captain hired by BP to help with the spill cleanup, encountered tar balls as large as three inches wide floating off the Florida coast. Reporting his findings to his supervisor, a private consulting company hired by BP, the...

Just one month before its April 20 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP claimed it could skim 491,721 barrels of oil a day in the event of a major oil spill. So now that it's not merely a thought exercise, how much has it skimmed each day? 900 barrels. That's less than 0.2% of its estimate.

NEW ORLEANS — The giant Taiwanese oil skimmer known as 'A Whale' is getting another chance to prove its value in the Gulf of Mexico. But the leader of the federal response, Thad Allen, doubts the effectiveness of the "A Whale." The ship is supposed to suck up to 21 million gallons of oily water per day. Allen said Thursday it seems more useful in a huge pool of oil than in thousands of smaller slicks. Bob Grantham, spokesman for TMT Shipping, says the U.S. Coast Guard has approved another week of testing. Grantham says the vessel has already made...

*snip* The mud is thick, black and lifeless. And it stinks. Dead stumps - what used to be thick green mangrove swamps - protrude out from the mud as far as your eyes see. It looks like a scene captured by a camera attached to an unmanned spacecraft that has just landed on a lifeless planet in another galaxy. Nothing is growing here, and I can’t imagine anything growing here in a very long time. *snip* "We went through that here. Nobody wanted our fish, they said, ‘your fish are contaminated because of the oil.’" Of the 6,000 fishermen who...

University of South Florida coastal geologists (left to right) Stoddard Pickrel, Katie Brutsché, and Jun Cheng dig into a beach near Pensacola Beach, Florida (map), on Thursday. It didn't take long for the scientists to strike black gold. During a series of digs, oil patties and tarballs were found just beneath beaches dirtied by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The discoveries suggest that toxic oil lies hidden under even "clean" patches of beaches along the U.S. Gulf Coast—and that oil-spill cleanup crews are only scratching the surface. Because the buried oil is both harder to clean and slower to...

(NaturalNews) Normally I would open this article by explaining this is the story the mainstream media won't dare report. Except in this case, they are reporting it. It's right on CNN, on the Anderson Cooper "360" report. What happened is that Lance Rosenfield, a photographer working for ProPublica (http://www.propublica.org), was standing on a public road, taking photos of a BP refinery in full public view. After taking his photos, he was tailed by local law enforcement officials to a gas station, where they demanded to look at the photos he had just taken. A private BP security goon then showed...

On June 21st, these men flew over the closed Gulf airspace and have video of heavy oil far out into the Gulf, including sharks and dolphin pods swimming in oil. That video and the narrator's interview on CNN is included.

When the heck is the media going to wake up, and start putting pressure on the O'admin and his enviro Nazi EPA and Lisa Jackson? Just as the the Costner centrifuges, and their newly finished barge have faced delays, obstruction, and limitations with EPA regulations over bilge water discharge, the converted Taiwanese tanker, "A Whale", faces the same dilemma. The Taiwanese-flagged former tanker named the A Whale is the length of 3 ½ football fields and stands 10 stories high. It just emerged from an extensive retrofitting to prepare it specifically for the gulf, where officials hope it will be...

Hi everyone - I know we discussed this several times. Still, I found it hard to stomach reading the details of the story. Not because I am vain; but because I am a biologist, and because it is so utterly sad that a country known for its generous help to those in need, itself refuses expert help; help that could have averted a catastrophe still going on as we speak. Thank you for your attention.

GULFPORT, Miss. — A morning flight over the Mississippi Sound showed long, wide ribbons of orange-colored oil for as far as the eye could see and acres of both heavy and light sheen moving into the Sound between the barrier islands. What was missing was any sign of skimming operations from Horn Island to Pass Christian. U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor got off the flight angry. "It’s criminal what’s going on out there," Taylor said minutes later. "This doesn’t have to happen.” A scientist onboard, Mike Carron with the Northern Gulf Institute, said with this scenario,

BP Plc was struggling to seal cracks in its Macondo well as far back as February, more than two months before an explosion killed 11 and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It took 10 days to plug the first cracks, according to reports BP filed with the Minerals Management Service that were later delivered to congressional investigators. Cracks in the surrounding rock continued to complicate the drilling operation during the ensuing weeks. Left unsealed, they can allow explosive natural gas to rush up the shaft. “Once they realized they had oil down there, all the decisions they made...

The night he locked up the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama predicted that generations hence, people would look back on the historic day as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." At the time, his words reeked of hubris. Today, they look positively delusional. President Obama can't stop the oil leak in the Gulf, but he can and should be held accountable for the inept government response to cleaning it up and mitigating its worst effects on the shoreline. And you can bet that if George W. Bush were in...

Mr. Charlie has seen the up and downs over the years in the oil patch off Louisiana's coast, but this could be the toughest slump of all. Earlier this week, the steel rig stationed on the Atchafalaya River graduated what could be one of its last classes of workers prepping for the rigors of offshore life. President Barack Obama's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf has sent shudders across the coast's offshore oil industry — where no one knows just how extensive or long-lasting the damage to jobs may be.

Live from the Oval Office! It's Barack Obama and the State of the Sham Wow, Gulf Oil Spill edition!Starring TOTUS as Barack Obama! Featuring: Robert Gibbs in a special YouTube after the speech infomercial.

President Barack Obama said Friday that some members of Congress should share the blame for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: “I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government...

The BP oil spill is undeniably turning into President Obama's very own Hurricane Katrina. The big difference here is that many Katrina victims, largely dependent on the government welfare system to begin with, sat by and waited as the government failed to act. However, the victims of this tragedy, instead of hopelessly awaiting for the government to act, have taken it upon themselves to try and clean this mess up.